The London Mercury

Books of the Month

Poetry

Georgian Poetry, 1918–1919 Edited by E. M. the Poetry Bookshop 6s. Net

The new collection of Georgian Poetry contains specimens of the work of nineteen poets, fourteen of whom have appeared in one or more of the previous volumes of the series, while five are represented for the first time. The fourteen are Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr. Gordon Bottomley, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. John Drinkwater, Mr. John Freeman, Mr. W. W. Gibson, Mr. Robert Graves, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. Harold Monro, Mr. Robert Nichols, Mr. Siegfried Sassoon, Mr. J. C. Squire, and Mr. W. J. Turner. The five are Mr. Francis Brett Young, Mr. Thomas Moult, Mr. J. D. C. Pellow, Mr. Edward Shanks, and Mrs. Fredegond Shove. On account of their editorial connection with the London Mercury, the contributions of Mr. Squire and Mr. Shanks will not receive further mention in this notice.

“I hope,” observes E. M. in his preface, “that [the present volume] may be thought to show that what for want of a better word is called Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry.” Certainly many critics have supposed that war was the prime generator of what they admit to be a new movement in poetry. But the anthologist’s hope is justified, on a priori grounds at least, by the fact that the movement began, however tentatively, before the late war. The first collection of Georgian Poetry appeared in 1912, when the title expressed an act of faith, based on an act of divination, which has since been confirmed. A comparison of the four members of the series suggests that what, for want of a better word, has received this name, is still in a state of slow development towards a certain community of spirit and attitude, which does not however connote any uniformity of style. In the third volume the nebula appeared to be taking shape, and in the fourth the process has advanced a stage. E. M. may be issuing the fourteenth before that shape can be accurately defined and described. The curve has not been drawn far enough for us to say what course it will trace; but there is already enough of it to look like a curve and not merely like a wavy line.

That remote first volume, which was of course a symptom and a rallying-point or the new tendencies, not their origin, seems now to have been somewhat chaotic and lacking in direction. It included such older poets as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Sturge Moore, and Sir Ronald Ross; and some of those who appear to-day the most characteristic had not then shown themselves. At that time the most powerful tendency seemed to be leading towards the realism, sometimes informed with a conscious brutality, of Mr. Masefield, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Abercrombie. In 1919 this sort is fully represented only by Mr. Abercrombie’s Witchcraft: New Style, a poem principally in dialogue which is realistic in method, if its conception has a fairy-tale brutality about it. Such lines as the following are in a familiar style:

A little brisk grey slattern of a woman,
Pattering along in her loose-heel’d clogs,
Push’t the brass-barr’d door of a public-house;
The spring went hard against her; hand and knee
Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar
Hullabaloo of talking men burst out,
A pouring babble of inflamed palaver.

In spite of their vividness and exactitude, they make us think of a good passage of prose slightly spoiled. Mr. Gibson has not continued in the vein, and is confined here to a few momentary impressions, mostly in the sonnet form.

But if we dismiss this tendency from those we imply when we speak of “Georgian,” poetry, if we admit too that Mr. W. H. Davies is often not characteristic but a poet who might have appeared at almost any time (as, in another way, is Mr. John Drinkwater), what are we to take for our definition? If we are ever to devise one, we must somehow reconcile and bring under one heading a bundle of qualities, which seem to have but little in common when they are separately described. Yet that there is some common term, some central motive, is suggested by the fact that the pieces in this book which may be thought to be on a lower level than the rest, those by Mr. Moult and Mrs. Shove, are yet not wholly out of place. These writers have been touched in some degree by the spirit of the time, which manifests itself with more power and originality in poets so diverse as Mr. de la Mare, Mr. Sassoon, and Mr. Turner. But it is likely that for some time we shall have to content ourselves with such vague recognitions of spirit, without attempting to be more precise in definition.

We must at all events include Mr. Monro’s curious and good poem, Man Carrying Bale, which by its title gives a faint suggestion of some sorts of modern painting, and is actuated by the same desire, to flash suddenly a light on a familiar thing from an unfamiliar angle:

The tough hand closes gently on the load,
  Out of the mind, a voice
Calls “Lift!” and the arms, remembering well their work,
  Lengthen and pause for help.
Then a slow ripple flows from head to foot
While all the muscles call to one another:
  “Lift!” and the bulging bale
  Floats like a butterfly in June.

With this may be associated Mr. Davies’ remarkable piece, A Child’s Pet:

When I sailed out of Baltimore
  With twice a thousand head of sheep,
They would not eat, they would not drink,
  But bleated o’er the deep.

Inside the pens we crawled each day,
  To sort the living from the dead;
And when we reached the Mersey’s mouth,
  Had lost five hundred head.

Yet every night and day one sheep,
  That had no fear of man or sea,
Stuck through the bars its pleading face,
  And it was stroked by me.

And to the sheep-man standing near,
  “You see,” I said, “this one tame sheep:
It seems a child has lost her pet,
  And cried herself to sleep.”

So every time we passed it by,
 Sailing to England’s slaughter-house,
Eight ragged sheep-men—tramps and thieves—
  Would stroke that sheep’s black nose.

Yet of how different a quality is the whole admirable selection of eight poems from Mr. de la Mare, to illustrate which we quote the exquisite Fare Well:

When I lie where shades of darkness
  Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
  When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
  Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
  Perishing be?

Oh, when this my dust surrenders,
  Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,
May those loved and loving faces
  Please other men.
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
  Still the Traveller’s Joy entwine.
And as happy children gather
  Posies once mine.

Look thy last on all things lovely,
  Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
  Till to delight.
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
  Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
  In other days.

We come again upon another manner in the poems of Mr. Robert Nichols. Here an inadequate passage from a long and very lovely piece called The Sprig of Lime will serve to suggest his qualities:

Sweet lime that often at the height of noon
Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs
Tasselled with blossoms more innumerable
Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil
Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyr.
As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once
Ye used, your sunniest emanations
Towards the window where a woman kneels—
She who within that room in childish hours
Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch’d noon
Behind the sultry blind, now full, now flat,
Drinking anew of every odorous breath,
Supremely happy in her ignorance
Of Time that hastens hourly and of death
Who need not haste.

These poems are not realism, but passages of reality imaginatively seized and transfigured by passion; and the same description may be applied to a number of pieces in this book as different from these as these are from one another. If we attempt to map out the whole achievement and promise which the book represents, we must refer to the originality and beauty of rhythm displayed by Mr. John Freeman in such a poem as The Alde, which begins:

How near I walked to Love,
How long, I cannot tell;
I was like the Alde that flows
Quietly through green level lands,
So quietly, it knows
Their shape, their greenness, and their shadows well;
And then undreamingly for miles it goes
And silently, beside the sea.

We must refer also to Mr. W. J. Turner’s noble and largely conceived, if a little chaotic, poem Death; and to Mr. Sassoon’s extraordinarily economical and finished pictures of impressions at the front and in England. There is moreover Mr. Brett Young’s graceful and delicate talent.

If we say that in all these it is possible to perceive reality imaginatively seized and transfigured by passion, even if we add a general curiosity to penetrate behind the appearances of things to their substance, we say no more than we ought to say of any poetry which we are disposed to praise. Perhaps if we could say much more we should distinguish the literature with which we are dealing as one which has forsaken the proper traditions of the art for qualities of a merely temporary interest. It is not necessarily the business of new poets to discover new objects for poetry; it is their business to bring to bear on the old objects their own new personalities and whatever has accrued both to the language and to general human experience. We are of opinion that the “Georgian” poets are doing this; and though to give them that title still requires something of an act of faith, it is one much easier to make than it was seven years ago.

The survival of the word as the name of a period is, of course, not yet assured. Many of these writers are still extremely young. Some of them will develop in ways which cannot yet be foreseen. Mr. Nichols and Mr. Turner, both of them capable of grandiose conceptions and engaged in making a style to sustain them, will very likely attempt the drama, where an empty throne is waiting. Mr. de la Mare, who is probably the oldest of the distinctively Georgian writers, grows every year deeper and solider, and it is impossible to say what will become of him. Mr. Robert Graves is producing a body of work almost every line of which is as sweet and sound as a nut, and is an influence against the obscurity from which a good many of his contemporaries suffer. The author of A Ballad of Nursery Rhyme, which begins:

Strawberries that in gardens grow
 Are plump and juicy fine
But sweeter far as wise men know
  Spring from the woodland vine.

No need for bowl or silver spoon,
  Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June,
  Beside the trickling stream,

may perhaps have done a service by writing these lines at the same time as Mr. Turner was writing such a fine but involved stanza as this from Death:

That sound rings down the years—I hear it yet—
All earthly life’s a winding funeral—
  And though I never wept,
  But into the dark coach stept,
Dreaming by night to answer the blood’s sweet call,
  She who stood there, high-breasted, with small, wise lips,
And gave me wine to drink and bread to eat,
  Has not more steadfast feet,
But fades from my arms as fade from mariners’ eyes
  The sea’s most beauteous ships.

And others no doubt will appear who are now no more thought of than were Mr. Nichols or Mr. Graves or Mr. Turner in 1912.

At least this movement—we do not use the word in the sense of “organised movement” or “school”—has had the luck of early recognition and careful fostering. There are faults to be found with this as with the three earlier volumes of the series, but, in a world which has produced no faultless anthology, we ought not to expect the first to be a collection of contemporary verse. No one will be able to look through the book without objections rising to his lips. Every reader will want this or that poet omitted, this or that included. There are few readers of anthologies who do not find, on mature consideration, that they could have done the work better themselves, and this would be just if, in fact, anthologists worked only for themselves. But to E. M. we must assign the credit of having carried through an exceedingly difficult task with as few mistakes as could be thought possible. He has the extra distinction of having foreseen seven years ago the beginning of a “liveliness” which has justified him by enduring until at this moment it shows no signs of recession. He would be no doubt the last person to claim the invention, or even the discovery, of the “Georgian” movement. But he might reasonably claim, and, if he does not, the honour must be thrust upon him, to have provided it with a means of growing naturally and without undue extravagance.

New Poems. By Iolo Aneurin Williams. Methuen. 3s. 6d. Net

Mr. Williams’ first book of poems, published four years ago, was a quite little book, noticeable for some polished little songs with a Caroline or Queen Anne air. His tastes have remained the same; his capacity for writing has developed; he paints miniatures, and his ingenuity expends itself on the elaboration and variation of the frames. The frontier between success and non-success is narrow in this kind of work; a slight flaw ruins all, and Mr. Williams does not always escape collapse. But Alice and Song are of a neatness and completeness which would do credit to the best of the Queen Anne practitioners. The Country Songs is a fragment of what may become a really excellent celebration of our folk-songs, and Rocks and Astronomy, though still with something of the song in them, let delicate plummets into deeper waters. The image of the rock, doomed to decay, yet

The lizard’s immortal friend,
And deathless to the flower,

is happy Astronomy we quote in full:

Jupiter may be that or this
  Of stars that shine in heaven,
Neptune a mere hypothesis,
  And Saturn one of seven.

They will not make the dark less bright,
  For names I do not know;
Nameless the stars across the night
  In nameless beauty go.

Over my head their vault is bent—
  A mirror and a screen—
An ever fresh prefigurement
  Of glory past the seen.

It is an unambitious and uneven but very pleasant little book.

The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Heinemann. 3s. 6d. Net

This volume contains fifty-two poems selected from Mr. Sassoon’s previous volumes, and twelve new ones. The former are far too well known to need description at this date; but we think that even in these, and still more in the new poems, there is ground for the conjecture that those who think of Mr. Sassoon primarily as a savage realist and satirist are likely in the future to be surprised. It was a genuine and profound sensibility, tenderness, and a cheated passion for beauty that produced his war poetry; not an innate predilection for violence, vituperation, or caricature. Now the storm has gone over he seems to be becoming more and more a poet of nature. The transition is perhaps symbolised in the most beautiful of the new poems here printed. It is called Everyone Sang, and concludes the book, so full of blood and corpses, rats, evil smells, and all the turmoil and débris of war:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears and horror
Drifted away.... O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

The book contains much that, however sincere, can only be described as journalism in excelsis, but it is all inextricably mixed with genuine poetry, and the collection as a whole, we suspect, will have a permanent interest and value. Better than from a hundred histories posterity will get from these poems a picture of how men felt and looked in that world of

Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

Their merits are never more clearly displayed than when they are compared to the poems of the imitators who have sprung up like mushrooms since Mr. Sassoon began publishing. These have taken his brutal words, his more obvious attitudes, and the senile and complacent objects of his satire; but in the copies the life is lacking.

Argonaut and Juggernaut. By Osbert Sitwell. Chatto & Windus 5s. Net

At first sight this book looks like a revolutionary manifesto. Its title is vehement and original, and its paper “jacket” is decorated with the photograph of a negro head surmounted with a towering and tapering wickerwork structure. It has no bearing on the contents, and we can only assume that the author put it there because he liked it or to arrest attention. Attention having been arrested, expectation is disappointed. It is true that Mr. Sitwell often writes in vers libres, and that he opens with a challenge and hearty proclamation in the key of

Let us prune the tree of language
Of its dead fruit.
Let us melt up the clichés
Into molten metal;
Fashion weapons that will scald and flay
Let us curb this eternal humour
And become witty.
Let us dig up the dragon’s teeth
From this fertile soil;
Swiftly,
Before they fructify.

And that, at a later stage, he observes that

The world itself
Dances
To make us dance
In cosmic frenzy.

But his frenzies have a very calculated air; he has not got rid of those clichés, and that wit does not emerge. He cannot really play the revolutionary with gusto, so, as Queen Victoria said, “We are not amused”: and when he lapses into more ordinary forms and more connected statements he is revealed as an ordinary immature writer of verses. He has some gift of observation which he will waste unless he treats it more conscientiously, but observation will not make a poet.

Carmina Rapta. By Griffyth Fairfax. Elkin Mathews. 3s. 6d. and 2s. 6d. Net

Mr. Fairfax’s volume consists of “Verse translations from the French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, with a few Arabic, Japanese, and Armenian renderings from French prose versions.” Mezzofanti and the monk Calepino, in another sphere, must be alarmed for their linguistic laurels. Some of Mr. Fairfax’s translations are neat; but we hope those from the Armenian—our Armenian wants rubbing up—are nearer the spirit of the originals than are some of those from European languages. He is at his neatest in some brief poems from the Spanish. His versions of Hérédia and Baudelaire are especially lifeless; and he inflicts an additional injury upon the latter by attributing the famous Don Juan in Hell to Hérédia.

The Clown of Paradise. By Dormer Creston. Heath Cranton. 3s. Net

We notice this volume merely in order to record a neologism which we commend to the notice of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary. It is found in this passage:

My tearful soul did slip into those silver pools,
And, bathing in that stillness,
Was oned with God.

In the Court of Sir Henry Duke, we may continue, people are twoed.

Novels

Cousin Philip. By Mrs. Humphry Ward. Collins. 6s. Net

Saint’s Progress. By John Galsworthy. Heinemann. 7s. 6d. Net

If All These Young Men. by Romer Wilson. Methuen. 7s. Net

Madeleine. By Hope Mirrlees. Collins. 6s. Net

Legend. By Clemence Dane. Heinemann. 6s. Net

The Mask. By John Cournos. Methuen. 6s. Net

It seems probable that a long time must elapse before the novel escapes altogether from the spell of the war; and the reasons why this should be so are fairly obvious. It is not only that the novelists, like all of us, have received in their minds an indelible impress of that great event. We must recognise that the last five years have made a gulf between us and preceding time only comparable to a long interval of history. The manners and habits of 1913 are not connected in an imperceptibly changing fabric with our own. They are already a matter of archæological interest, and definitely to place the action of a novel in that year requires a course of archæological research—say among old numbers of Punch. In 1919 the war is still so vivid a thread in the web of our minds that we are constantly influenced by it, constantly referring to it, in our actions, our conversations, and our thoughts. When we meet a character, whether in a novel or a drawing-room, it is still our instinct to enquire where he has been, what he has been doing since August, 1914, and the present moment. This is natural indeed; but its tendency in the novel is to produce ephemeral work. The tidal wave may have subsided, but it has left the mental waters exceedingly muddy.

Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novel, Cousin Philip, is an excellent example of the work which this state of affairs elicits from even the most serious authors. It is a study, careful and detailed, of the sort of young woman who has emerged from the war. Helena Pitstone, aged nineteen, arrives at the house of her guardian, Lord Buntingford. She looks like Romney’s Lady Hamilton; but “the beautiful head was set off by a khaki close cap, carrying a badge, and the khaki uniform, tunic, short skirt, and leggings, might have been specially designed to show the health and symmetry of the girl’s young form”—all this though she has been demobilised. She naturally begins her stay with Lord Buntingford by quarrelling with him over one of her men friends, whom he refuses to allow her to invite to his house. This gentleman had run away with the wife of a friend, not for any base motive—“He didn’t mean anything horrid,” says Helena—but “for a lark,” and to show her husband that she was not to be bullied. In the end Helena marries a politician, who says to her, “Are you mine—are you mine at last?—you wild thing!”—a remark which has been made by other lovers in other novels. In between these two points lies Mrs. Humphry Ward’s study of the girl of the period, in order to make which, it may be supposed, she wrote this novel. An idea of its quality and usefulness may be gained from the following specimen of Helena’s conversation:

“The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip’s balmy, and cut up quite rough when I spoke to him about it.”

“Done it what?” said Mrs. Friend faintly.

“Balmy. Don’t you know that expression?” Helena, on the floor, with her hands under her knees, watched her companion’s looks with a grin. “It’s our language now, you know—English—the language of us young people. The old ones have got to learn it as we speak it.”

Mrs. Ward would no doubt be shocked by a writer who delivered his, or her, views on the French people with an obvious ignorance of the French language. She would despise the affectation of an author who used Latin tags incorrectly. But it is only fair to say that her views on the younger generation are rendered slightly ridiculous by her obvious ignorance of its idioms. She would perhaps have been better employed in a detailed picture of the manners of 1913, a period to which she doubtless looks back as to a lost paradise of decorous behaviour.

Mr. Galsworthy’s Saint’s Progress suffers less from insufficient documentation. His heroine Noel, with her short hair, is the daughter of a clergyman, and follows the course gloomily foretold for so many young girls during the war-period to the predestined end of bearing a war-baby. She and her sister Gratian are forced by the pressure of events to think and act for themselves. Gratian, safely married to a doctor, delivers herself as follows:

“Dad,” said Gratian suddenly, “we can only find out for ourselves, even if we do singe our wings in doing it. We’ve been reading James’s Pragmatism. George says the only chapter that’s important is missing—the one on ethics, to show that what we do is not wrong till it’s proved wrong by the result. I suppose he was afraid to deliver that lecture.”

But, while Mr. Galsworthy is much superior to Mrs. Ward in the accuracy of his information, he can hardly be said to be superior to her in the justice and clearness of his presentation. The traits of his persons are correctly observed and generalised, but they are not shown through the medium of living individuals. We feel of Noel that many girls of such a disposition found themselves in such circumstances and behaved thus; and so far, regarded as a sociological study, the book is deserving of praise. But what we never feel is that the individual girl, Noel, ever existed; and by the deficiency it is condemned as a novel. This book will be a serious disappointment to those who imagined from Five Tales that Mr. Galsworthy had recovered the original freshness of his talent and was about to begin a new and a sincerer period.

But perhaps the desire to depict, and to comment on, phenomena so fresh and living in the mind as these, which has been fatal to experienced craftsmen of the order of Mrs. Ward and Mr. Galsworthy, is one which will ruin any novel in which it is attempted. Miss Romer Wilson has not the experience of either; but as her first book, Martin Schuler, demonstrated, she has really extraordinary natural gifts. These gifts are still obvious in her second book, which is nevertheless disappointing and all but a complete failure. It describes a circle of non-combatants during the last year of the war, young people, of whom Mrs. Ward has hardly heard, who sway between cynical disgust with the world around them and cynical disgust with their own natures. No man, it has been wisely said, is uninteresting, and these persons, regarded from a sane and tolerantly humorous point of view, might have been the theme for a good book. But since the thoughts, or actions, the manners through which they manifest themselves not being genuine or spontaneous, are important neither for good nor evil, the method of treating them seriously results in making them appear thin and tedious. Affectations, except in the rare event of their producing serious consequences, are a topic only for satire; and here the loves of Josephine and Sebastian, of James Blanchard and Susan and Amaryllis, are expressed purely by affectations, which overlie and conceal whatever genuine feelings these persons may have possessed. This type has had in recent years a curious attraction for young novelists, who have as a result produced many books which are not worthy of attention. But the author of Martin Schuler must sin deeply before we can refuse to read any book of hers, however unwillingly we may persevere in it. And even here her special qualities are altogether beyond mistake. She can still, even in this dreary and pointless tale of people we should prefer not to meet, astonish us with vivid and enchanting fragments of pictorial beauty. A couple of these passages, which are all that redeems the book from dullness, may be given as specimens:

... At the turn of the night it began to rain, and at daybreak the whole country was grey with driving rain, which spluttered against the bedroom window and beat upon the thatch. The noisy sparrows under the eaves shook themselves angrily and fluttered up and down in the garden after worms. The tom cat, who had been out all night, gathered himself up on the doorstep and brooded there with one eye on the sparrows, waiting for the door to be opened. The draught under the door made his paws cold, so he blew himself out and crouched down with his paws folded up underneath him. He was angry and tired, and his fur was covered with minute drops of water that in places had penetrated to his skin, but he sat there patiently dosing and dreaming for two hours until half-past eight, when the bolts were drawn. At the sound of the bolts being shot back he at once stood up and mewed, and the door was hardly opened before he ran into the kitchen, where a stick fire roared in the grate and a frying-pan gave out an odour of frying fat.

... The people came out of the house door, mysterious in the fading light like a procession of Boccaccio’s women and a clerk of the Decameron seen through the romantic distance of seven hundred years. They lit the candles in the dark garden-room and sat down as if waiting for somebody to begin a story. Overhead the blue sky gleamed through the gathering darkness, and in the west a rosy glow spread up behind the delicate aspens and maples and acacias of the little plantation above the yew garden. Up in the mazy blue sky the transparent half moon and a few bright planets gleamed beneath the outermost heavens, where faint white constellations began to appear as the darkness quickly gathered upon the earth.

We do not quote these descriptive passages as proving Miss Wilson’s aptitude for the novelist’s multifarious task. They represent only one of the many gifts of which she must dispose; and they are themselves in several details open to criticism. They do moreover represent almost everything in this book which can be distinguished for commendation. They suggest, however, that Miss Wilson possesses one of the most important gifts of the novelists, namely, a sense of the scene; and it remains for time to show whether she can imagine persons and a situation worthy of her background.

It is a relief to recede from the tangled epoch, which has spoilt and hindered all these writers, into the seventeenth century in France. Miss Mirrlees has written, not a wholly satisfactory or very agreeable, but a very strange book, one far removed from the historical romance of commerce. She has combined what appears to be a close knowledge of her period, of the time of the Jansenists, the Précieuses, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with a desire to study a curious case of mental pathology. Madeleine, her heroine, is a provincial girl who removes to Paris with her family and is consumed by an intense longing to enter that fantastic circle of elegance and galanterie which revolved round Mademoiselle de Scudéry and was depicted by her in Le Grand Cyrus. But her awkward shyness forbade that this longing should ever be satisfied; and when she sought to pacify it by the familiar device of the “endless story,” she exacerbated it into madness. This is a brief and inadequate account of a most unusual composition, but it will serve to show how Miss Mirrlees has loaded the historical novel with a heavier freight than that ornamental craft is accustomed to carry. But she has not developed either the psychology or the descriptive detail at the expense of the other. She dissects Madeleine’s mind with almost morbid closeness and makes of it a terrifying spectacle, but at the same time she has contrived to make her setting in time and place convincing. Her picture of mind and manners may or may not be strictly accurate; but it is certainly not conventional, it is original, it bites. There are certain crudities apparent both in the style and in the construction of the book, as well as in the choice and development of subject; but it will be very interesting to see the next production of a mind so unusual.

Miss Clemence Dane’s Legend touches Miss Mirrlees’ work fleetingly at one point. It too describes a literary “circle,” dominated by women, of the sort which draws weaker characters into it and causes them to deteriorate. But it interests not so much as a study of this particular phenomenon as in that it is an extraordinary attempt, the only one among these books, to carry on the history of the novel, to give that form a new task, to enlarge its range and its adaptabilities. It consists of one long conversation; and the principal character, Madala Grey, makes no appearance, unless the regrettable introduction of her ghost towards the end be counted as such. Madala is a woman-novelist who has contracted what seems to her friends an inexplicable marriage with a dull country doctor. She is in child-bed; and her circle meets to await news, hears of her death, and discusses her. Their views, all mistaken, are reported by the one person present who had never seen her and who deduces the true and simple explanation—that she was actually in love with her husband. This is, it may be objected, merely jumping through a series of hoops; and in a sense the objection has its justification. For, when the story should reach its climax, when Madala herself begins to emerge from the mists of misjudgment and misinterpretation, she is revealed as being only a lay figure. This does not mean that Miss Dane’s singular device in the end misses its aim. On the contrary she accomplishes what she set out to do with perfect precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that she has locked in a very complicated cabinet, and thence extracted again by very subtle means, not a living woman but a doll. Hence her book is not the masterpiece it might have been. But we are almost brought to overlook this fact by the amazing skill with which she manages her invention; and her jumping through hoops, whether it be regarded as an unrelated exhibition of agility or as an experiment in a new method of progress, deserves all attention even though it leads only to disappointment at the end. Miss Dane’s first novel, Regiment of Women, was much praised not long ago; her second, First the Blade, did not receive so much notice. This reveals in her originality, daring and ingenuity which could hardly have been predicted from her earlier work; and there is no doubt that it will be widely discussed, since it is in fact rare for any really remarkable display of these qualities to miss its reward. But Miss Dane has yet some distance to advance if she is to do more than win fame as a conjuror or open up paths for other novelists. For an artist capable of so distinguished a conception her style is strangely flat and undistinguished; and the introduction of some very bad and banal passages from the works of Madala Grey is a curious lapse of tact.

Mr. John Cournos’s The Mask, which is perhaps the most satisfactory of all these books, though it is not so dazzling and exciting as Legend, is one which has very little to say to the development of the novel. We generally reckon it impertinent to see in any book not avowed as such the autobiography of the author; but in this story of a Jewish boy in Russia and America, without knowing anything of Mr. Cournos, we are forced to make the inference. Its tone and flavour are those of autobiography; and its softened reminiscences of things not always pleasant give it its peculiar charm. It reveals, at all events, more than most novels, a temperament; and this temperament, whatever turn the story may take, is always agreeable and gracious. Vanya Gombarov, the little boy, was brought up in Russia by a stepfather, who wasted all his money in mechanical researches and was obliged to emigrate with his family to America. Here Vanya added to the family income by selling papers, and in other ways, and saw many horrible things. The family experienced many misfortunes; and at the end Mr. Cournos abruptly leaves it moving from one house to another. We have here no pyrotechnics of construction; nor does such a book offer any opportunities for them to the author. But he is able to show himself an artist in the softening veil which his narrative throws over his incidents without in any way distorting them.

Belles-Lettres and Criticism

Seven Men. by Max Beerbohm. Heinemann. 7s. Net

It is a common ground of complaint against Mr. Max Beerbohm that he publishes too little. But the very fastidiousness which makes him, compared with the word-fountains of our time, so notable an example of limitation of output is what makes the work he does print so surpassingly good. Economy is a word freely used and much abused. It is sometimes applied to writers whose only claim to it is that they use short sentences or that they omit everything except inessentials. But Mr. Beerbohm deserves more than any artist of our time the epithet “economical.” Always, and increasingly so with the passage of time, he has taken pains to print no sentence and no word that does not help his effect; and the five stories in this book, even were their other merits less than they are, might serve as models of simple and exact expression, the cunning accumulation of telling detail, the complete avoidance of detail which does not tell.

Of the five stories one, James Pethel, is a study of the gambling temperament localised in an attractive but terrifying man, and one, A. V. Laider, is an astonishingly clever fantasia on the theme of lying. The other, and more ambitious, three are studies, we might almost call them historical studies, of literature, literary men, and “the literary life.” They all relate to that remote period, now faded and therefore a little charming, “the nineties”; they give us types of writers, second or third or tenth rate, whose reputations die, but who are interesting enough to be celebrated as types, if not as individuals. Savonarola Brown—the obscure man who spent his life on an unfinished tragedy on the best blank-verse models—is the most slightly sketched of them; but here what the portrait lacks—perhaps that shadowy figure offered no more lines for the pencil to seize—is more than made up for by the best parody that even Mr. Beerbohm has written. Remove the burlesque, the comic stage directions, the juxtapositions of Lucrezia Borgia, St. Francis, Andrea del Sarto and Pippa (who “passes” in her own inimitable way), and the more extravagant convolutions of the plot, and you will see that Mr. Beerbohm could quite easily have manufactured a play better than most modern poetic dramas, and written in verse at once so fluent and so reminiscent of the best masters as to command the respect of the reviewers, and possibly a production (for a few nights) by some manager ambitious to show that he desired to reunite Literature and the Stage. At times we forget that we are reading a burlesque:

Pope. Of this anon.
        [Stands over body of Gaoler.]
Our present business
Is general woe. No nobler corse hath ever
Impressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it!
          [Flourish of trumpets.]
This was the noblest of the Florentines.
His character was flawless, and the world
Held not his parallel. O bear him hence
With all such honours as our State can offer.
He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
As doth befit so militant a nature.
Prepare these obsequies.
         [Papal Officers lift body of Gaoler.]

Did Mr. Beerbohm write this? Or was it Brown, fresh from The Duchess of Malfi or The Broken Heart?

The two stories that remain are more elaborate. In Enoch Soames we are given the picture of the kind of sepulchral, costive, dedicated, fame-gluttonous minor poet who has haunted the by-ways of literature in all ages; we are given, as well, a realistic picture of what those by-ways were twenty years ago, and a plot (which races between the future and the past) the intricacies of which are followed with equal ingenuity and imperturbability. But there can be little dispute that Maltby and Braxton is the great achievement of the volume. These two were rivals who had a brief vogue in the nineties; the very scent of the time comes back with the titles of their masterpieces, Ariel in Mayfair and A Faun in the Cotswolds. Maltby in a weak moment cheated Braxton out of a week-end at the Duchess of Hertfordshire’s, and when the hapless Maltby got to Keeb Hall Braxton’s ghost haunted him, driving him into perpetual solecisms and misadventures. There is the background: the gossiping coteries of London, the fleeting fashions of literature, the first vogue of the bicycle, the dabbling great dames, the house-parties, soirées, dinners, church-goings. And in front of it the most comic of tragedies, the most tragic of comedies is played. The story is written with such skill that the cruelty is never quite cruel, the laughter never quite flippant, the extravagances always anchored to reality: at the end, in spite not only of the caricature but of the “tallest” fiction about a ghost that we remember, we feel that we have been reading a plain statement of fact. And this is what, at bottom, the story is: it is more realistic than any naturalist novel: it is the work of one who, for all his fantastic invention and wit, has a prodigiously keen pair of eyes and a profound understanding of human nature. We hope, by the way, that Mr. Beerbohm’s passage about literary fauns will finally expel these overworked creatures from our midst.

Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages With an Essay. By Logan Pearsall Smith. Milford. 6s. Net

Donne’s reputation as a poet, very high for some time after his death, sank almost to nothingness for two centuries. In the last thirty years he has, by virtue partly of his occasional splendours of passion, imagery, and even music, partly of a modernity in him which is attuned to the spirit of our own time, regained his old position. Much has been written of him; Mr. Gosse has written his Life in two volumes, Professor Grierson has edited him in one of the most exhaustive and scholarly of the Oxford editions of poets; he has exercised a traceable influence on men now writing. But the revival has been confined to his poems. His prose, contained in three huge folios and several small pamphlets, has remained unread; and it is significant that until a few years ago he who wished to possess (for none thought of perusing) the Dean’s sermons was likelier to find them at a theological bookseller’s than in one of those shops which cater for the collector of fine literature. The neglect was doubly explicable. Not only were Donne’s Sermons sermons, and therefore liable to fall into the disregard into which the sermons of South and Tillotson, and even those of Jeremy Taylor, have fallen, but they were sermons so voluminous as to be terrifying to the most insatiable reader, and (for the most part) so involved, so stuffed with scholasticism, theological hair-splitting, debate about texts and about commentaries on texts, that a first attempt at perusal might have made the bravest quail. But the few who have dared the darkness of the great mine have never been disappointed; all over it, sparkling magnificently to the explorer’s touch, are great jewels of imagination cut with the craft of a master of language.

Mr. Pearsall Smith, performing for his readers the labour they would have shirked, has gone through the whole of Donne’s Sermons and extracted a hundred-and-fifty passages, short and long, illustrating his character and his genius. Not quite the whole of the ground is covered; the editor has chosen nothing of which the principal claim to distinction was that it conveyed, with great justice or great force, a doctrine of the Church or an edifying lesson. He has made his anthology as a poet and a student of character would make it; and the result is a volume of passages which exhibit that strange vehement man of genius more clearly than could any biography, and which substantiates his claim to be considered as being, at his best, a writer of English prose that has never been surpassed for music and richness. His greatest passages—and this holds good of all English prose—are those in which he is contemplating large elemental things. A roll like the roll of the prophetic books comes into his voice when he speaks of the majesty of God, the powers of Death and of Evil, the passage of time, the justice that waits for sin, and the decay that will overtake beauty; when he stands in the attitudes and assumes the voice of adoration, of accusation, or of grief. But even in his dialectics the restless intellectual in him was continually striking out sparks of wit; the insatiable observer in him was noting small things, sticks, straws, and insects, puddles and ponds; the insuppressible poet pouring out images copious enough to furnish out a hundred minor men. This is a long-needed book, done with competence and exquisite taste. His greatest, loveliest things are as good as Sir Thomas Browne’s; his grandest are grander than Jeremy Taylor’s. There is probably no sentence in our language so long as that in which he depicted Eternal Damnation, yet it swells and swells, never breaking its back, always borne up by the mighty mind of his spirit. Hell is deprivation of God. “That God,” begins this great passage,

that God should let my soule fall out of his hand, into a bottomlesse pit, and roll an unremoveable stone upon it, and leave it to that which it finds there (and it shall finde that there, which it never imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soule, never have more to doe with it. That of that providence of God, that studies the life of every weed, and worme, and ant, and spider, and toad, and viper, there should never, never any beame flow out upon me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darknesse, will not looke upon me now, when, though a miserable, and a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and contribute something to his story, even in my damnation....

so it proceeds in tremendous crescendo describing, or failing to describe, what it must mean “to fall out of the hands of the living God... a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination”; and this is but the sublimest of many sublime utterances in these sermons of the greatest of the Church’s poets. We commend Mr. Pearsall Smith’s book, and shall return to it and its subject at length in an early number.

South Sea Foam. By a. Safroni-Middleton. Methuen. 6s. Net

The sub-title of this book, “The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas,” gives the clue to a quality in Mr. Safroni-Middleton that might repel a fastidious reader. He is a little too effusive, a little too self-conscious in his adventurousness. But the reader who is repelled early will miss something; for with all its defects South Sea Foam is a full and exciting and often beautiful book. Mr. Middleton has not the technique of the artist; he does not write well. But he has the artist’s sensibility, and his writing is at its most vivid when the greatest demands are made upon it. “My greatest literary effort in the following pages,” he says, “has been to keep to the truth of the whole matter, even though such frankness should leave me, at the end of this volume, with a blackened name.” He need not be anxious about his name; but if this book is all true he has had adventures as wild and strange as any man alive. His book is a medley of Polynesian legends, and the most extraordinary events on the ocean and among the islands; storms, moonlight dances, abductions of “dusky maidens” from chiefs’ palaces, orgies in saloons, chases and shots, canoes, sharks, and love-songs: a great flood of brightly-coloured reminiscence tumbled out in language which is never quite “right” but always picturesque. At any page one is liable to come across some passage that thrills or deeply touches; and occasionally there is an episode narrated so well that criticism is silent. Such an episode is that of the old dog Moses, which falls overboard on a murky night. He barks amid the waves to guide the boat; but there comes a scream that means a shark and no more is heard. Next night the old bearded sailor-men sit on their chests in the fo’c’sle puffing out smoke, drinking rum in silence, brooding over the dog: and no scene could be more vividly painted. The last adventure (in a castaway boat with a brown girl), which we should call incredible were it not for Mr. Middleton’s assurance, is the loveliest and most terrible of all. We think that anyone who reads this book once will make a habit of reading it.

Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination: A Lecture. By Walter de la Mare. Sidgwick & Jackson. 2s. 6d. Net

The lecture here printed was delivered before Rugby School on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial there to Rupert Brooke. Mr. de la Mare, as he recalls, was chosen to go to America as Mrs. Brooke’s representative to receive the first presentation of the Howland Memorial Prize, the posthumous award of which to Brooke was an act of international courtesy and generosity, too little noticed in this country at the time. It was fitting that Mr. de la Mare should be again associated with the dead poet; and in this short paper he outlines his character and his achievement with as much affection as discernment. Brooke, he is insistent to make plain, was a happy man, a vigorous, healthy creature, who found the world teeming with food for his multifarious appetites. It is with this fact in mind that all his poems, not omitting those which are “disquieting to read at meals,” must be judged. He desired truth at all costs; and “if, unlike Methuselah, he did not live long enough to see life whole, he at least confronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcerting stare.” “The theme of his poetry,” says Mr. de la Mare, “is the life of the mind, the senses, the feelings, life here and now, however impatient he may be with life’s limitations. Its longing is for a state of consciousness wherein this kind of life shall be possible without exhaustion, disillusionment, or reaction.” This essay is short, but it is full both of wise judgments and beautiful sayings. It conveys a sense not only of the value of Brooke’s poetry but also of the charm of his personality. More, much more, will be written about him; and we shall have his character carefully examined and defined, both by those who knew him and those who did not. But this brief study, at once an exposition and a ceremonial and moving eulogy, will retain its place in the literature collecting around his name.

Some Soldier Poets. By T. Sturge Moore. Grant Richards. 7s. 6d. Net

This volume contains short essays on the poems of Julian Grenfell, Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, R. E. Vernède, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Edward Thomas, F. W. Harvey, Richard Aldington, and Alan Seeger: with a paper on “The Best Poetry” at the end. A casual student of the list of contents might make several hasty criticisms. He might suppose that he was going to find here a series of short lives, manufactured because of an accidental connection between them. He might be fortified in this suspicion by the fact that one or two poets are in the list who have no claim to rank with the others. But he need only begin to read the book to remember that Mr. Sturge Moore is a poet, a sound critic, and a writer incapable of hackwork. There is one obvious defect; he has omitted a few poets (Edward Wyndham Tennant is an example) who had better claim to admission than some in his list. But there is little else that can be urged against him. Mr. Sturge Moore wastes no space over biography. He takes, seriatim, the books of these young poets and confronts them in a generous but not an undiscriminating mood, asking himself what is their spirit, what their technical qualities and defects and which are their best poems. These essays are not (even when their subjects are unworthy of effort) facile journalism; they are considered criticism written in the prose of a poet, prose rich with novel and beautiful images and embodying the results of profound reflection upon life and art.

Mr. Sturge Moore’s essay on Brooke is too brief to be a final estimate; the main fault of all his essays is that they are not long enough to include sufficient quotations; otherwise they would certainly be of permanent value. But it is a penetrating essay, full of interesting obiter dicta, such as the statement that “the fallacy of impressionism” has tainted modern æsthetic thought, and the more disputable statement that “failure in love and war is much more inspiring to the poet than success; when the real world has rejected a man he feels freer in the Muses’ house; he no longer has any interests that conflict with theirs.” Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle he describes (and we think he is right) as the best poem of the war. Of three poets commonly linked together, he says that “Those who shall gaze back a century hence may discern rather in Nichols than in Sassoon or Graves the poet’s mind that is independent of time and approaches all human circumstance with the kinsman’s joy and pain,” though he admits that the race has only just begun, and another runner may outstrip the others. He is admirable on Sorley, whom many think the greatest loss to literature of all who fell in the war, and he has found—and no one before has, we believe, so celebrated this poem—in Mr. Harvey’s The Bugler something like an isolated great poem. The one chapter which we find relatively inadequate is that which deals with Edward Thomas. “Every time I read them I like them better,” he says; and he quotes in full Thomas’s superb welcome to death; but the reader misses here all the rest of the poet’s most beautiful poems and passages. They are even yet not known as they should be; we wait for a collected volume to reveal to most English readers how profuse, in his last two years, Thomas was of exquisite poems crowded with characteristic English landscape, and often profoundly moving by their sincere expression of universal emotions. He died resigned, and fulfilled at last. In Mr. Moore’s words, “Our house was not well ordered; he should not have had to write hastily for his own and his children’s bread; we have lost the chance of using him to the best advantage; yet he leaves us more than we deserved, something that will be treasured by posterity for ever. As his body fell, its cloak melted off the soul and we caught a glimpse which confounded our poor recollections of the man, and words of his still tolling round our ears make us aware that for him this dark casualty had a different meaning.”

A Book of R. L. S. by George Brown. Methuen. 7s. 6d. Net

This work is really a Stevenson Encyclopædia reminiscent of that colossal Browning Cyclopædia which still goes into new editions. Mr. Brown arranges, in alphabetical order, the names of Stevenson’s books, characters, friends, critics, dwelling-places, etc. We have tested him with several questions and not found him to fail. He gives more than the facts he might be expected to give; for example, when a book is under notice he enters the latest prices paid for its first edition in the sale-room. He also lightens his pages with compact but pungent comments. For instance, he describes Mr. Swinnerton’s able but hostile study of Stevenson as “the kind of study which it can be imagined Dr. Clifford would write of Ignatius Loyola.” A good book of its kind and one that should be bought by everyone who has a Collected Stevenson. The illustrations do not greatly add to its charms.

History and Biography

Fifty Years of Europe, 1870–1919. By C. D. Hazen. Bell. 14s. Net

Professor Hazen ends his survey of the last fifty years of European history with the words: “The evil that men do lives after them.” The remark is not original, but it is none the less historically true and melancholy. Upon page 414 of this book it refers to Wilhelm Hohenzollern, but as the final note struck in a text-book of European history it has a wider significance. After reading Professor Hazen one is tempted to ponder the question whether the good men do is interred with the bones of history, and only the evil done by them lives after them and their time. Here is the story of fifty years in 414 pages, and indisputably the story is concerned far more with the evil that men have done than with the good. What is the reason of this? The question is extraordinarily difficult to answer, and, though the reviewer ex cathedra is officially supposed not to admit anything but infallibility, we confess to be at a loss for a prompt and unhesitating answer. The cause may be subjective rather than objective: the historians may look at history from a wrong angle, so that the shadows are exaggerated or intensified. On the other hand, it may really be, as Shakespeare seemed to think, that the effects of evil are actually more permanent than those of good. And there is a third alternative which the philosophical historian and the historical philosopher cannot dismiss out of hand: history is the tale of men’s communal actions, and it may be that man is so incompletely a political animal that his communal actions are more often evil than good.

We cannot answer these questions, but they rise naturally from a consideration of Professor Hazen’s volume. The first question which a reviewer has to put to himself is “What is the object of this book?” The object of Professor Hazen’s is obvious: it is a text-book, a rapid survey of a period of history which, as he rightly says, possesses “a unity that is quite exceptional among the so-called ‘periods’ of history.” As a text-book it has great merits; it is accurate and brief, it runs with great rapidity through all the more important facts of its “period,” and the author’s opinions and prejudices are severely repressed. It has some obvious faults: the author seems to us ill-advised to have added his last chapter in the form and size adopted by him. This chapter deals with the actual events of the world war, and occupies nearly a quarter of the entire book. This throws the whole of his book out of shape. The war in itself had, of course, enormous importance, but the details of its progress are of little importance in a survey like this. In the previous pages we have been whirled from the Balkan question to the Irish, from the Irish question to the rise of Japan, from the rise of Japan to the Russian internal struggle, and many of these immense complicated problems have necessarily been dismissed in a few pages. There is no room in a book on this scale for a description of the campaigns of the war, and Professor Hazen’s volume loses rather than gains by his attempt to deal with them. But as a text-book it has merits above the average. One great merit is inherent in it—it looks at history not from a national but a European or world angle. We are inclined to believe that for use in schools no histories of “France,” “England,” or other individual countries should be tolerated, that all history should be either of Europe, Asia, of some continent or era, or of the world. And then, perhaps, historians might be able to deal a little more with the good that men do communally than with the evil.

THE TANK CORPS. By Major Clough Williams-Ellis, M.C., and A. Williams-Ellis. With an Introduction by Major-General H. J. Elles, C.B., D.S.O. Country Life. 10s. 6d. net.

This is, if not an official, at least a semi-official history of the Tank Corps; and if the other arms of our fighting forces get histories as good they will be fortunate. It contains the whole story of the machine and of those who manned it—invention, manufacture, organisation, training, use—from the nebulous beginnings in the minds of the various gentlemen whose claims to paternity are now being disputed to the last battle of 1918. The information has an air of final authority: official reports are backed with copious personal narrative. There is no attempt at fine writing; the book is a long series of short paragraphs containing essential facts. Yet, when occasion demands, the authors’ terse sentences are far more vivid and more full of emotion than are the elaborate pages of the professional battle-painters. This is never more noticeable than in their chapter on the “Battle of Cambrai,” where the fortunes of the whole Tank experiment were at stake. Nothing is elaborated, yet we see very vividly the whole panorama of those days of intense surreptitious preparation, and the final overwhelming advance against the enemy, whose suspicions had been aroused too late. The authors finally dispose of the story that the General’s last order to his Tanks told them to “do their damnedest.” “That spurious fosterling he hated the more the more he perceived its popularity.” The authentic Order is given: a brief restrained document ending “5. I propose leading the attack of the Centre Division.” This he did, in the “Hilda,” which reached the outposts line in the van of the battle, General Elles standing with his head through the hatch picking up targets for the gunners. The “Hilda’s” flag was several times hit, but not brought down. It was at this battle that sixteen Tanks were knocked out by one gun, served single-handed by a German officer, who died at his post. The story of the Tanks that crossed a canal on the back of another does not seem to be verified. The authors’ conclusion is that “in the phase at which military science has arrived, and at which it will probably remain for a generation, a superior force of Tanks can always top the scales of the military balance of power.” The illustrations are many and well chosen. We recommend the book, both as a work of reference and as a book to read.

Abraham Lincoln: The Practical Mystic. By Francis Grierson. With an Introduction by John Drinkwater. John Lane. 5s. Net

Mr. Grierson states that Abraham Lincoln was “the greatest practical mystic the world has known for nineteen hundred years,” thus unnecessarily challenging comparisons with Saint Teresa and others. His book, both as an effort to sustain this thesis and as a book to read, is something of a disappointment. Some of his earlier works—notably the beautiful Valley of Shadows—are closely thought and admirably written; the best have never had in full the credit they deserve. But the present volume is little more than a small scrap-book of other people’s impressions and anecdotes of Lincoln, sprinkled with Mr. Grierson’s not very profound comments and assertions to the effect that we are now at the end of a dispensation, and are emerging into “the mystical dawn of a new day.” That Lincoln was a very great and a very good man we know, and that he lived in the light of conscience. Of such we can never be told too much, and the book might well serve as an introduction to more elaborate biographies. But we cannot say that Mr. Grierson adds anything to our knowledge. He tells us of Lincoln’s sense of duty, his dedication to the service of his kind, his premonitions. “One of the most memorable mystical demonstrations ever recorded in any epoch occurred in the little town of Salem, Illinois, in August, 1837, when Lincoln was only twenty-three years of age,” and “some of his deepest thoughts on the mysteries of life and death were never voiced by this man, who never spoke unless he deemed it imperative to speak.” The New York Times says this or that, the Spectator says so-and-so; Lincoln was a “unique” manifestation of the Supreme Mind, like Moses. “The American people were at that time practical, democratic seers, without whom the greatest practical mystic could not have existed.” These passages are not cheering. There is an introduction by Mr. John Drinkwater, who says something and says it clearly.

Men and Manners in Parliament. By Sir Henry Lucy. Fisher Unwin. 10s. 6d. Net

Sir Henry Lucy’s reprint of his notes on the Disraeli Parliament of 1874 will find a place in that world-museum where a bottle containing the Bruce’s spider stands next on the shelf to the original kettle which inflamed the young imagination of George Stephenson. They were published serially in (how distant it all seems!) the Gentleman’s Magazine, and a set of bound volumes of that venerable periodical found its way (by the steam-packet, no doubt) to the young republic of the United States. There in the beautiful new-world calm of the Chancellor Green Library, at Princeton, the old printed words in their quaint black-letters met the young eye of Woodrow Wilson, a smart student of his seniors, Chatham, Burke, and Brougham, of the more recent writings of Lord Macaulay, then recently dead, and of the positively burning message of the still more topical Mr. Bagehot. But it was Sir Henry Lucy, not yet dubbed a Knight, who produced, if we may believe the official biographer—and Sir Henry does—an “influence... on his broadening thought.” The debt was very gracefully acknowledged by the President long afterwards in a letter which pays tribute to “the interest you stirred many years ago in the action of public affairs in Great Britain.” He added that he would always think of Sir Henry as one of his instructors.

The whole story is one more example of the ineradicable romanticism of the New World which led Henry James to the belief that great leaders in England conversed intelligently (if not always quite intelligibly) and drew Whistler to dramatise the Thames. One sees the American undergraduate hanging spellbound over Sir Henry Lucy’s parliamentary notes, and rising from the table with bright eyes and burning cheeks to mutter, as he walked out among the chipmunks and prairie foxes, “I too will hold assemblies in the grip of my eloquence like the Right Honourable George Sclater-Booth; in me Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen shall have his transatlantic counterpart.” And one is inclined to wonder, as one rambles through the pages of what the President, remembering his constitutional obligations to the American language, described as “The Syndicated London Letter,” which of these amiable pages of political gossip it was that finally tilted the young Wilson on to that inclined plane which led to Washington and the Galerie des Glaces. Was it the picture of Mr. Disraeli on the Treasury Bench, impassive, arms folded, forelock well in evidence, or the more vivacious scenes in which Mr. Bright, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Lowe chased one another across the Mid-Victorian stage? No one except Mr. Wilson can say. But the anecdote lends point to the reissue of Sir Henry’s notes, which always possess a high interest for political historians, apart from the addition which the story makes to their intrinsic value.

The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy Nevill. By Ralph Nevill. Methuen. 18s. Net

This is a most disappointing book. Of Lady Dorothy’s charm and intelligence we have had evidence in the two volumes published in her lifetime, and edited by Mr. Nevill. She certainly deserved a biography which should preserve for posterity a true portrait of one who typified what was best and most likeable in a state of society that became historical even in her lifetime. Unfortunately, Mr. Nevill has been content to give us merely gleanings of his mother’s notebooks and post-bag. He makes no effort at all at formal biography, keeps no sequence, and betrays no sense of proportion. The writing of the book is slack and formless, as, for instance, in such sentences as the following:

No one probably knew more about the inner social history of her time than Lady Cork; a very clever woman, who long after she had ceased to be able to leave her couch, owing to her numerous visitors, kept herself excellently posted as to everything of interest which was on foot. At the time of the Druce case, being a confirmed invalid, her evidence, which would have completely put any claimant out of court, was taken on commission.

The book is full of writing as careless as this, and is, in consequence, very trying to read. All one can do is to search through the volume for amusing stories of the world Lady Dorothy Nevill adorned, and to make some guess at the character of the woman who could number among her friends Lord Clanricarde, Father Dolling, Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Lytton, and Mr. John Burns.

The second task is difficult. One knows her better from that glowing portrait by Watts—which we wish Mr. Nevill had reproduced—than from any of her letters given here. She was not a good letter-writer, though better than some of her correspondents. She had both generosity and an aptitude for mischief, stout prejudices, but a lovable curiosity which prevented her being their slave. Her Toryism was of the “Young England” variety, and never stopped her from making friends where she could. Her wit seems to have been a wit of personality rather than of mind, almost a spiritual glow which is rarely apparent in the printed page. Of her family life we are told practically nothing—not even the date of Mr. Reginald Nevill’s death is given.

Many of the anecdotes in the book are old, but we have not met this before. Lady Pollington, Lady Dorothy Nevill’s sister, “adored dancing, her love of which may be realised when it is stated that the night before her only son was born she was at Lady Salisbury’s dance in Arlington Street till one-thirty and her son was born at three.” New to us also is the story of the petition presented to the United States Congress “by some zealots who entertained strong religious objections against the use of oil.” Mr. Nevill does not assign its precise date, but gives it as an instance of “mid-Victorian bigotry.”

The signatories to this remarkable document prayed that a stop might be put to the irreverent and irreligious proceedings of various citizens in drawing petroleum from the bosom of the earth, thus “checking the designs of the Almighty,” Who, they said, had undoubtedly stored it there with a view to the last day, “when all things shall be destroyed.”

Mr. Nevill tells us one thing about his mother which possibly reveals her character and the temper of her time more truly than anything else in the book: it seems to belong to the England of General Gordon and Lady Burton. Lady Dorothy practised illumination, presumably as taught in the once popular Owen Jones’ volume.

One of the works she executed was Hood’s Song of the Shirt, another was The Service for the Burial of the Dead, which she finished and signed in 1848, when twenty-two years of age—a curious instance of the strange mixture of seriousness and vivacity which went to form a highly original mind.

Politics and Economics

Industry and Trade. By Alfred Marshall. Macmillan. 18s. Net

Dr. Marshall’s well-known Principles of Economics was published as long ago as 1890. For many years he continued to work at the volume with which he designed to follow that, but weak health, as well as heavy professional duties and much time devoted to the public service, made his progress slow. It is only now, therefore, after an interval of nearly thirty years, that he has been able to complete the present book. And even so his scheme is not yet complete, for there is still a companion volume to come, which will deal with “influences on the conditions of man’s life and work exerted by the resources available for employment; by money and credit; by international trade; and by social endeavour.”

Industry and Trade is a monument of lucidity and carefulness. Every student of economics will read it with interest, even though it does not appear to throw much new light on the problems it discusses. Dr. Marshall traces out for us in a general way the technical evolution of industry, both in this country and elsewhere. We have an analysis of the conditions which produced in turn the industrial leadership of Britain, of France, of Germany, of the United States. We have a minute discussion of the dominant tendencies of business organisations, the expansion of the unit, the application of scientific method, the problems of joint-stock companies, of banking, of marketing. And finally the question of monopolies is examined—the American and German experience of trusts and cartels, the great movement towards aggregation, federation, and co-operation in British trade. Dr. Marshall writes throughout in a spirit of large and rather fatherly benevolence, here reproving some “anti-social practices” of trade unionism, there gently censuring abuses of power by a trust. It is admirable, of course, but there are times when his elaborate avoidance of partisanship and his cautious non-committal attitude leave the reader a little perplexed. Dr. Marshall tells us that his aim has been to present as accurate a picture as he can without advocating any particular conclusions. This is very well in a general way, but where an economic problem becomes an ethical problem a conclusion may not be an altogether bad thing. There are two chapters devoted to a consideration of “Scientific Management,” in which the author has certainly achieved an almost superhuman impartiality. He thinks, as everyone does, that there is much that is valuable in the application of efficiency methods in industry. He does not think that the worker need be unduly strained by scientific management. He is apparently doubtful about the danger of monotony that it introduces. Finally, he suggests that “though it be true that scientific management diminishes the need of the operative for resource and judgment in small matters, it may help him... to estimate the characters of those who bear large responsibilities. Unless and until he can do that, democratic control of industry will be full of hazards.” True, but some bolder critics will turn back a few pages and refer to a quotation given of some of Mr. F. W. Taylor’s principles: “All possible brain-work should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning department, leaving for the foreman and gang-bosses work strictly executive in its nature.... Each man must... adapt his methods to the many new standards and grow accustomed to receiving and obeying directions covering details large and small, which in the past have been left to his individual judgment.” Will a manipulation of human beings on these lines really make ideal “democratic controllers of industry”? Leaving the desirability or undesirability of such control out of the question it will certainly be argued that Mr. Taylor’s is not the way to get it. However, Dr. Marshall admits that American methods of scientific management will need to be somewhat modified before they can obtain a very wide acceptance in British industry. He does not discuss how they are being modified in their application in this country, where a good many experiments are actually being made.

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In general, the book presents us with a pretty bright picture of capitalist industry. There is much that needs to be altered, yet progress, we are reminded, has been great: education has spread, the standard of comfort of the working-class has risen enormously, and “both competition and combination in Anglo-Saxon countries generally have been more inclined to construction than to destruction: emulation has often given an incitement to exertion stronger than that which was derived from the desire for gain....” We are not to be led away, therefore, by large socialistic schemes of reform. Collectivism would be unfavourable to the best solution of men for the most responsible work in industry; National Guilds “look only at the surface difficulties of business” and promise to lead us into nothing but chaos.

INFLATION. By J. Shield Nicholson, M.A., Sc.D., LL.D., F.B.A. (Professor of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh). King. 3s. 6d. net.

Until the other day we all thought we were threatened with national bankruptcy, and a great many people think so still, despite the recent rapid conversion to optimism of the Government and the House of Commons. Professor Nicholson, we are sure, is not one of those who are impressed by the change. His interesting and outspoken little book may be summed up in two sentences—“The principal cause of the disorder of the body politic is the abuse of paper money,” and “Our present need is to get back to a sound monetary system and to get rid of the mirage of inflation.” He does not believe in the theory that an internal debt “makes no difference”: that it is merely a transference from one set of pockets to another. And he does not think that the burden of the debt can be removed either by a capital levy or by a continuance of inflation, which, as he gloomily observes, is a popular remedy, both with the industrial and commercial classes. If that continues, its evils will continue—high profits, high wages, higher prices, and a general scarcity. The great practical difficulty is to stop the rise in prices. It may be done partly by greater output and lower profits, partly by reduced public expenditure, but, above all, by a reduction in the volume of paper currency. For that, Professor Nicholson observes, moral courage is needed, and also hard thinking.

Irish Impressions. By G. K. Chesterton. Collins. 7s. 6d. Net

“These are the notes of a visit to Ireland during the dark days when a last effort was made to undo the blunders that had wrecked the great promise of Irish recruitment.” Mr. Chesterton, in lamenting the fact that a large section of the Irish population remained neutral in the war, blames both sides. The case against England and the British Government is familiar; but, he argues, however badly Ireland may have been treated in the past, and however the Irish situation was mishandled in the early days of the war, the Sinn Feiners are still to be blamed. They were as men who should have abstained from Marathon because of a quarrel with some archon, or refused to fight Attila because of a grievance against Ætius. All civilization was at stake; that being so, even the claims of nationality should have been, if necessary, postponed—though, in fact, they would have been actually assisted had Ireland made the plunge. Mr. Chesterton states with characteristic force the existence of a definite Irish nationality, a thing to be perceived in any Irish home. As a practical politician he believes that the extreme demand for separation can still—though time presses—be effaced if Dominion Home Rule is offered. The bargaining peasant lives in the fighting rebel; and when even the last Home Rule scheme was postponed a genuine disappointment was to be seen throughout Ireland.

This is his central case. He argues it characteristically: that is to say, his method of exposition, by means of rapid generalizations, digressions, witticisms, allusions, will fascinate those who believe there is great sagacity behind his fireworks, and irritate or bore those who habitually dislike him. In making out a case for Ireland he also makes out a case for a rural, a Catholic, and a “distributive” civilisation. Everywhere there are quotable sayings. He speaks of “the brilliant bitterness of Dublin and the stagnant optimism of Belfast.” “Modern industrial society,” he says, “is fond of problems, and therefore not at all fond of solutions.”

Arguing that on the outbreak of war England abjured her pro-Teutonist delusions, he says the Sinn Feiners fatally played with the thing they had always denounced:

That is why the Easter rising was really a black and insane blunder. It was not because it involved the Irish in a military defeat; it was because it lost the Irish a great controversial victory. The rebel deliberately let the tyrant out of a trap; out of the grinning jaws of the gigantic trap of a joke.

“Imperialism,” he observes, “is not an insanity of patriotism; it is merely an illusion of cosmopolitanism.” Such epigrams—and there is always something in them—are all over the book; but in two places, where he is talking of the war and of Kettle’s death and where he celebrates the Christian virtues of charity and humility, he reaches an eloquence almost comparable to that of the magnificent passage at the close of his Short History of England. That passage deserves to go into all anthologies of English prose henceforth compiled.

The Handmaiden of the Navy. By G. S. Doorly. Williams & Norgate. 6s. Net

There are still two books which ought to be written about the war. One is a real novel of the adventures and sufferings of the Merchant Service, and the other is a historical account of the partnership between the Navy and the Merchant Service, and that marvellous convoy organisation which unobtrusively won the war. Mr. Doorly ought to help with the latter, but we hope he will not attempt the former. These stories, collected under a cumbrous and not too accurate title, are a painstaking but disappointing attempt to deal with both. Mr. Doorly has not the literary gifts necessary to do complete justice to the human side of his subject, though he faithfully pictures the very real camaraderie which the convoy established between the naval officer and the mercantile marine. All his sailors are of the “hearty” type made familiar by “Bartimeus” and the Press. His troopships “plough their way across the leagues of ocean towards the great-little island home.” The sinking of a ship is “another foul victory for the wretched Hun.” It is a pity, because Mr. Doorly has clearly had a wide experience, and gives the fullest account we have yet seen of the intricacies and anxieties of convoy organisation and escort work, though the convoy of his stories is a primitive affair compared with the perfected form of 1918. He is technically accurate and very thorough, and does not shrink from explaining such complexities as the methods of “zigzagging,” and he has an eye for the humorous sides of submarine warfare. But his accounts of exciting moments frankly do not excite, and the merchant captain who says “‘Tut-tut,’ swallowing a lump in his throat,” does not move us as perhaps he should. Yet it is an interesting little book, and until the theme receives the treatment it deserves, we hope it will be read.

Poland and the Poles. By a. Bruce Boswell. Methuen. 12s. 6d. Net

This is a useful and interesting book. It is, as Mr. Boswell says in his Preface, a series of essays. In these essays he deals with the Polish people, their national characteristics, their country, history, literature, music, and art, their industry and commerce, and their future. Poland, which has for centuries exercised a fascination over the romantic mind, always makes good reading; and Mr. Boswell communicates his enthusiasm. He is perhaps not altogether untouched by that partisanship which seems almost inevitably to fall upon the foreigner who becomes intimately associated with any nation. The truth is that all the peoples of the earth have so many good qualities that it is impossible for anyone who is brought into contact with any one of them not to feel for it occasionally as a lover or a child. Mr. Boswell certainly feels for Poland as a lover, and his book is none the worse for that. At first, however, we thought that he was to prove one of those whose love of a particular nation engenders hate of other nations. Indeed, we hardly think that he is altogether fair to Russians, Jews, and others. But his prejudices are mild compared to those of most historians, and, despite his frank bias towards the Polish outlook, when he comes to deal with so vexed a question as that of the Ukraine he displays a praiseworthy impartiality.

Sport

SUCCESS IN ATHLETICS AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT. By F. A. M. Webster, T. J. Pryce Jenkins, and R. Vivian Mostyn. Sidgwick & Jackson, 10s. 6d. net.

Every man is more or less an athlete, and training begins in the cradle and ends with the grave—at least it should do. Unfortunately many people of our generation were brought up in the languid atmosphere of Victorianism where ill-health was tolerated, almost worshipped. In due time we went to school—if it was summer we played cricket; if winter, we played football; if spring, we ran races and jumped jumps and threw hammers; but as for any real education in physical culture or athletics we had none. Every young athlete should read Success in Athletics, for in it he will find very simple and very excellent advice as to how to train for every branch of field sport. The elements of success upon which stress is laid are as follows: First, to choose a branch of athletics suitable to the build of the individual. Second, to build up the necessary muscles by training at home and in the gymnasium long before practices are carried out on the track. Third, to study the scientific side of the particular sport chosen, so as to acquire a perfect style and to economise energy to the utmost extent.

The book begins very properly with a tribute of respect to athletes who have fallen in the war; then chapters follow on running, jumping, hurdling, and throwing weights of all descriptions; there are also chapters on diet, massage, and clothing, and an appendix on leg exercises. The book is illustrated with admirable photographs, but it is a pity that these are not placed more in accordance with the text. The chapter on “Hurdling” is among the best. The hurdler must be “tall, fairly slim, and well ‘split up,’” which being interpreted means that his height must be contained in his legs rather than in his body. He must build up the strength of his legs by special exercises, such as high kicking, the splits, and skipping; and there is yet another admirable exercise—the athlete, in a sitting position, puts himself into the attitude of a hurdler topping a hurdle, the left leg is stretched straight out, the right leg is at right angles to it, the knee is bent and the inside of the leg is resting on the ground. The exercise consists in raising the body so that only the left heel and the inner side of the right calf are resting on the ground. It is a most painful and excellent exercise.

We are glad to see that in the chapter on diet athletes are warned against an excess of meat; one good meat meal a day is all that is recommended. Meat, besides its nourishment, contains many poisonous substances which are with difficulty eliminated from the system. Many a good athlete has been wasted through inattention to this fact. The chapter on massage is to our mind inadequate.

In the last chapter the following passage occurs: “... it is felt that a new epoch of athleticism in Great Britain is about to commence—that an entirely new breed of athletes will arise or be recruited from the ranks of those who through four and a half years of war have learned the true meaning of discipline and the importance of close attention to the least little detail of instruction.” Now we all feel that something good must come after all this suffering and slaughter; the Briton has proved that he is possessed of true greatness; how can this greatness be turned to full account? Let us give up once for all this idea of record-breaking and producing freaks who can jump an inch higher than any other man or throw a hammer a foot farther. At best that is a very low ideal, and such over-specialisation produces ugliness and unhealthiness. The only kind of athlete that we want to contemplate is the all-round athlete who can run fast and far, jump high and broad, and have sufficient strength for heavy events. An instance of what we mean occurs in this book—the pictures of A. E. Flaxman show a magnificent athlete of about eleven stone; such a man would have to compete in heavy events with mountains of flesh weighing twenty stone; hence all Flaxman’s symmetry and grace and style are wasted, and the mountain wins the points for his side. This is all wrong. We should abandon the practice of selecting one athlete for one event. We should have teams composed of all-round athletes, each of whom competes in all events; these athletes will not break records, but they will be super-athletes such as a great nation should aim at producing. When we have got rid of this odious specialisation it will be time to aim still higher, and produce not only the all-round athlete but the all-round man, made up of mind, character, and muscle, all developed to the utmost extent.

Philosophy

An Invisible Kingdom. By W. S. Lilly. Chapman & Hall. 15s. Net

The late Mr. Lilly was a Roman Catholic journalist who combined attachment to his faith with adherence to a benevolent paternalism in politics. This posthumous volume, edited by Dr. William Barry, is partly concerned with political and sociological problems, though there are two essays on Memory and Sleep which do little but review current opinion on those two functions. The political essays suffer from their date. Although fond of appeals to history, Mr. Lilly discusses the affairs of the moment from the angle of the moment; there is much talk of universality, but very little application. Indeed at times one doubts if he could have seen the precise significance of his opinions. For instance, he was a determined opponent of democracy, and quotes with approval Mill’s statement that “Equal voting is in principle wrong”; and he proceeds to state a doctrine of political justice which does not differ in principle from that stated by Trotsky. Where Mr. Lilly and Trotsky would differ is, of course, on the question into whose hands political power was to be put. Also one finds it difficult to understand how a Roman Catholic can agree—as Mr. Lilly does—with Ibsen’s creed, “The minority is always right.” Here are Mr. Lilly’s words:

If there is one lesson written more legibly than another in the annals of the world it is that majorities are almost always wrong; but that is the prerogative of minorities—nay, it may even be of a minority of one. That is the verdict of history. It holds good of all ages.

Mr. Lilly might contend that he is not bound to square his opinions with St. Augustine’s Securus judicat orbis terrarum; but how can his statement be reconciled with the practice of his Church? All General Councils, which decide Catholic dogma, have come to their decisions by taking a vote and accepting the verdict of the majority. This has been so from the Council of Jerusalem to the Vatican Council. Are we to believe that only in matters ecclesiastical the minority is wrong?

Mr. Lilly was also rather apt to substitute mere statement for argument. Thus, in discussing the modern position of women, he writes:

Of course reason itself declares that on the physical and psychical inequality of the sexes, and on the willing obedience of the weaker, the happiness of both depends. It is the lesson which Shakespeare has worked out, with consummate art, in the Taming of the Shrew.

It is evident that, whatever may be thought by a modern man or woman about the equality of the sexes, no satisfactory argument can be based on the premise that women’s physical and psychical inferiority is an axiom. In his discussion on Socialism and on Trades Unions, Mr. Lilly displays the same incapacity to understand his opponent’s starting-point. He has plenty of sense and a desire for fairness which makes him quote Aquinas’ declaration on riches—that they are only lawful if they are possessed justly and used in a proper manner for the owner and others—and apply it to modern fortunes. His last essay is on Newman, and is rather inadequate, as it appears to have been written without reference to Mr. Wilfrid Ward’s life. It is too early to write about that excessively human, lovable spirit in the artificial language of the official hagiographer: there are, however, sentences which arouse interest. We do not remember seeing it stated before that, late in life, Newman “perused translations of The Critiques of the Pure and The Practical Reason, pen in hand—that was his usual way—and made some notes on them.” It would be interesting to see these notes.

Emerson and His Philosophy. By J. Arthur Hill. W. Rider. 3s. 6d. Net

This brief essay on Emerson is marked by enthusiasm, and shows evidence of a wide acquaintance with Emerson’s works, but is otherwise unremarkable. Mr. Hill gives a brief biography of his hero, and then discusses him in relation to his views on religion, science, with chapters on Emerson’s style, poetry, and criticism. His last chapter is a brief résumé of English Traits and Representative Men, treating those very readable books as if they were essays in some unknown language. Mr. Hill’s own opinions hardly inspire one with confidence in his capacity to interpret emotions.

Beautiful language, true poetry, often contains little truth and not much passion; we feel that the poetry is in the beauty of the images evoked, or in the sheer unanalysable charm of the words as sounds, or—more generally—both combined. The more “thought” there is in poetry the less poetical it is.

There is much virtue in inverted commas, and no doubt “thought” is absent from the Antigone, the Divina Commedia, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Tintern Abbey, and The Ring and the Book; but we cannot follow Mr. Hill in his contention that these poems lack truth or passion. Nor indeed can we remember any poem of which his remark would be true. Mr. Hill’s observations on Emerson’s style and his biographical portions of the essay are not quite so off the mark. Few readers will accept his very high estimate of Emerson, and he fails to remove our suspicion that the great American writer, who was never known to laugh, was at times perilously near being an ordinary prig. As to Emerson’s influence on his contemporaries and successors, it is generally underestimated. The Essays in particular are always a delight to youth, and are read with avidity by boys at the most impressionable age. A great deal of modern individualism, of modern defiance, which is often put down to the discredit of Ibsen, or Nietzsche, or Blake, is really due to Emerson. He was the first eminent man to preach disobedience as an ethical duty; his conscience was always uneasy if he caught himself conforming; and this uneasiness, which a more vigorous man in a more natural society would have recognised as an emotional mood, Emerson distorted into a kind of council of perfection. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” he proclaims exaltedly, not seeing that this sentiment has, as a generalisation, already been contradicted by his birth and his marriage, and is to be finally quashed by his death.

Science

A Treatise on Gyroscopic and Rotational Motion. By Andrew Gray, F.R.S. Macmillan. 42s. Net

It was quite time that we had in English a standard treatise on gyroscopic motion. Space is, of course, devoted to the subject in various well-known text-books on rigid dynamics, and there are one or two good little books of an elementary nature, such as Perry’s Spinning Tops and Crabtree’s Spinning Tops and Gyroscopic Motion, but hitherto the man in search of detailed information on problems concerning tops in the widest sense has had to go to Klein and Sommerfeld’s Theorie des Kreisels, if he could not find what he wanted in Sir George Greenhill’s Report. That Professor Gray should be the man to supply our want is only fitting. At the University of Glasgow, where he succeeded to the chair of Natural Philosophy left vacant by Lord Kelvin’s death, an interest in gyroscopic motion is traditional, and Professor Gray inherited a collection of apparatus for experiment in this field which he has extended by many ingenious and convenient forms of gyroscope described in the book before us. His own researches on the general dynamics of gyroscopic systems have added clearness to that branch of applied mathematics, and his son is an expert in the design and application of practical gyrostats. A judicious combination of experimental and theoretical treatment forms the great attraction of Professor Gray’s book.

The problems of gyroscopic motion range from the behaviour of the schoolboy’s top to that of this great top, the earth, and include a great number of engineering applications. The torpedo is kept in its course by a gyroscope; the gyroscopic compass, which makes no use of magnetic properties, has rendered possible the navigation of a submerged submarine; Schlich invented a gyroscopic apparatus, which has been tried successfully in small ships, for keeping a vessel from rolling in a rough sea; with Brennan’s monorail the car is kept upright by means of a gyroscopic device; and many other ingenious uses have been made of the seemingly paradoxical properties of spinning tops. The gyroscopic compass is, unfortunately, not treated in Professor Gray’s book, nor is there any account of other naval and military applications of the gyroscope, since the author, finding that the official secrecy, necessarily imposed at the time of writing, would prevent him giving anything but a fragmentary account, has preferred to reserve his discussion of these appliances to a promised second volume. Very little is said of the monorail (in fact, Brennan’s name is not mentioned), which is less explicable. Many practical applications of gyroscopic theory to such problems as the drift of projectiles, golf balls, and boomerangs (the last-named treated necessarily in a very general manner) come up for consideration, and the forgotten diabolo, child of a passing craze, is resurrected to provide an example of the effect of equality of the principal moments of inertia on the stability of rotation of a body under no forces. Most attention is, however, given to the first two subjects mentioned above—the top spinning on a flat surface, and the earth spinning through space—which are, of course, the classical problems in rotational dynamics. It need scarcely be said that Sir George Greenhill’s work is abundantly cited.

“In the present work my aim has been to refer, as far as possible, each gyrostatic problem directly to first principles, and to derive the solutions by steps which could be interpreted at every stage of the progress,” says the author in his preface, and he has followed this aim with considerable success. It is, of course, impossible to treat many of the problems of rotational dynamics without mathematical analysis of some complexity, and a knowledge of elliptic functions and such-like weapons of the applied mathematician lies, perhaps, outside the scope of the average engineer and inventor. Professor Gray, who deplores the present ignorance of inventors in the matter of gyroscopic motion, has kept the needs of this class before him, and has taken care to arrange his matter so that those who cannot always follow the mathematical exposition given can, at least, gain a clear knowledge of the results. The first chapter, which contains no mathematical symbols, forms an excellent introduction to the subject and is quite elementary, and elsewhere in the book, when practical problems, such as the drift of a projectile, are being discussed, the nature of the investigation is stated as simply as may be. Throughout the inquiry is illustrated, as far as possible, by experiment and diagram.

“Les Anglais enseignent la méchanique comme une science expérimentale; sur le continent, on l’expose toujours plus ou moins comme une science déductive et a priori. Ce sont les Anglais qui ont raison, cela va sans dire.” In these words, the late Henri Poincaré, the greatest mathematician of his generation, praised the British tradition of teaching dynamics as an experimental subject, which is so well maintained in this book. Some specialists, no doubt, will find minor omissions in their subject, but, on the whole, with the exceptions already noted, the book is very complete. It is printed with the well-known elegance in all that pertains to mathematical symbols of the firm of Robert Maclehose, and the general production is very good. We do not understand, however, why the illustrations in the first chapter are nearly all reproduced a second time further on in the book, especially as they are mostly photographs of apparatus, which do not necessitate frequent reference. And—the question that has to be asked so often with English books—why is the index so defective?

Everyday Efficiency: A Practical Guide to Efficient Living. By Forbes Lindsay. W. Rider & Son. 4s. 6d. Net

It is stated in the preface that the material of this Practical Guide to Efficient Living has been used extensively as a correspondence course, so that anyone who is thinking of paying pounds to be taught by post how to be efficient can save most of his money. All the most notable authorities on Efficiency—Ike Marvel, Buddha, Arnold Bennett, Walter Dill Scott, Prentice Mulford, Yoritomo-Tashi, and Baudelaire (to what the last-named said is added what he might have said)—are quoted, and many varieties of type and a liberal use of capital letters add to the strenuousness of the book. There is much about Ideals (“Ultimate and Other Ideals”) and much about Money, much about Character Formation and much about Vocational Efficiency. We attribute our own inefficiency largely to the fact that we cannot whistle, for this seemingly trivial accomplishment is of far-reaching use—“Whistle and wear a smile for fifteen minutes, and you will most assuredly begin to feel cheerful”; “Sing and whistle as you dress.” But, again, we have not done the essential thing, which is, we are told, to read the lessons of the Course again and again, and to devote close thought to them. Alas, we fell a victim to Waning Will, a fault early handled in the book, and although somewhat comforted to learn that it is a “common form of weakness,” we could not bring ourselves to adopt the cure, which is “When a resolution is formed, record it definitely in your file under the head of Ideals, Aspirations, Tasks, Duties, or other appropriate designation.” The appropriate designation for the reading of this book is undoubtedly Task. The author, who has also written books entitled Efficiency and The Psychology of a Sale, is a man who has evidently obeyed his own great precept, “Don’t admit any limit to your attainment and capacity.” His intense self-respect will prevent him feeling hurt on learning that a smile is the only aid to efficiency which we have derived from his book.

Anaphylaxis and Anti-Anaphylaxis. by Dr. A. Besredka. English Edition by S. Roodhouse Gloyne. Heinemann. 6s. Net

Medical research bears so directly on the well-being of every one of us that it is astonishing that more people do not take an interest in it. The existing indifference may be attributed partly to the lack of good popular books describing recent advances in an easily comprehensible way, partly to the nomenclature adopted by the medical profession, which is apt to frighten the layman into imagining that the exotic polysyllables in question can be used only for phenomena of unimaginable complexity and obscurity. Complex they always are, of course, with the complexity of all natural manifestations, but very often the main lines of the problems which have arisen, and the methods of attack, can be stated in plain language. The book before us, which deals with the profoundly interesting subject of anaphylaxis, is not avowedly written for the enlightenment of the public, yet it is in most parts accessible to anybody with a slight knowledge of medicine, and, not being a “popular” book, it has the advantage of being free from the erroneous generalisations so often introduced in presenting a branch of science to the lay reader. The subject is described as one still in the course of development, and is not given that false air of completion so dear to the populariser.

The phenomena of anaphylaxis are among the most striking in medical science, and have only recently been investigated, for although isolated cases of what we should now call anaphylaxis had been previously noted, Richet was the first to show the significance and extent of the subject in his memoir of 1902, in which he established many of the most important points. The essence of anaphylaxis is that the injection into an animal of a small quantity of one of certain substances—which in some cases are, and in others are not, poisons (with a poison the dose must, of course, be less than the fatal one)—puts the animal in a particular sensitive state, so that a very small second injection produces fatal results of a very violent and well-marked character. Some time must elapse after the first injection for the sensitive state to establish itself, and the second injection must be of exactly the same nature as the first, this latter fact constituting the so-called specificity of the anaphylactic effect. This specificity has been applied for identifying blood of a doubtful source, since an animal which has been sensitised with an injection of blood from a given species is sensitive only to blood of the same species. Further, the blood of an animal in the sensitive state can be used to render another animal sensitive, a result known as passive anaphylaxis.

The important bearing of anaphylaxis on clinical practice is obvious. With therapeutic sera accidents have been fairly common in the past, grave effects following a second injection; this is a pure anaphylactic phenomenon. Much research has been done to find out methods of preventing the anaphylactic shock, and the most important advances in the field of anti-anaphylaxis are due to Dr. Besredka. His book naturally devotes much space to this aspect of the study, and gives details of the successful technique which he has developed. He worked mainly on guinea-pigs, having obtained extreme regularity of reaction with these animals. His most important result, both from the theoretical and the practical standpoint, is that vaccination against anaphylaxis can be produced by a system of gradually increasing doses, starting with the injection of a very small amount of the substance in question. This has led to a routine for serum injection by graduated doses, which has been successful in averting serum sickness. Besredka’s interpretation of his results is against Richet’s theory that the second injection combines with a substance, the toxogenin, present in the serum as a consequence of the first injection, and so produces a poison, the apotoxin. He considers rather that the reaction of the injected substance, the antigen, with the substance already formed (which he calls sensibilisin) itself produces the fatal result by disturbing the equilibrium of certain nerve cells where the combination takes place. By graduating the doses the reaction is watered down into a series of slight shocks, so that the great shock produced by a single injection is spread over a comparatively large time, and becomes innocuous. He finds an analogy between the effect and the mixing of water and sulphuric acid. If the water is poured in quickly there is an explosive action, but if it is added gradually the combination takes place without violence. “In our opinion the anaphylactic poison does not exist.”

There are a great number of interesting experiments cited in the book which we cannot mention here. The translator has done his work well, although we do not like some of his importations from the French. It should not be impossible to find expression more English than “titre of toxicity” and “fulminating cases.” He has added an excellent chapter on “Recent Work on Anaphylaxis.” We are glad to see at last a short work in English on the subject, which is one of the most fascinating fields in modern medicine. Somebody should translate and bring up to date Richet’s excellent little book. It is a pity that the nomenclature of the subject cannot be made uniform.

THE NEW TEACHING SERIES OF PRACTICAL TEXT-BOOKS:
APPLIED BOTANY. By G. S. M. Ellis.
FOUNDATIONS OF ENGINEERING. By W. H. Spikes.
CHEMISTRY FROM THE INDUSTRIAL STANDPOINT. By P. C. L. Thorne.
Hodder & Stoughton. 4s. 6d. net each.

This new series is rather pompously announced as striving to build “up the New Humanism on the basis of the student’s immediate economic interest and environment” (which implies a considerable modification of the accepted meaning of Humanism). We translate this as meaning that it is intended to give the reader some idea of the various sciences and arts as they find application in industry and commerce. This is a worthy object, and, on the whole, the books are simple and interesting expositions of the utilitarian aspect of the sciences in question. There is, perhaps inevitably, a tendency to hurry over fundamental difficulties which will not, we think, leave an intelligent student satisfied. For instance, to say that a force is whatever changes motion, without further explanation, may well puzzle the reader, who knows that he can push against a heavy stone without producing any apparent motion. However, there is a distinct place for books of this general character, which do good work by showing to a wide audience the peaceful achievements of science and its practical aspects; they act as a counterblast to the deadening tradition of rule of thumb. The industrial chemistry is particularly comprehensive, and has an excellent set of original diagrams of industrial plant. The series is well printed and well illustrated, and, for present times, moderately priced. It deserves wide recognition.

Projective Vector Algebra. By L. Silberstein. G. Bell & Sons. 7s. 6d. Net

It is not often that a book appears describing an essential advance in pure mathematics which is intelligible to the man of moderate attainments in that science—by moderate attainments we mean such knowledge of mathematics as is picked up in one or two years at a university. Dr. Silberstein, who is well known in this country for his original work, especially in connection with the theory of relativity, has, in his Protective Vector Algebra, developed his latest researches in geometry in a form which is attractive and free from pedantic formalities, and has throughout aimed at simplicity of expression, in contrast to certain modern mathematicians who endeavour to lend importance to minor conventional problems by a bewildering display of definitions and theorems. The essential novelty of the book, from which the whole theme is developed, is the generalised definition of the addition of vectors, which does not need any construction of parallel lines, but depends solely on a straight line construction making use of the points where the vectors cut an arbitrary fixed straight line. Dr. Silberstein’s definition is a generalisation of the Euclidean one, to which it reduces if the arbitrary line just mentioned is moved away to infinity, and if the space is Euclidean. The knowledge of geometry which is demanded is little more than the usual postulates of projective geometry and Desargues’ theorem. From his definition the author proceeds to prove the associative law, and then, after dealing with the equality of non-coinitial vectors, gives many interesting uses of the generalised vector algebra. The proof of Pascal’s theorem gives a striking example of the power and simplicity of the new method, and the whole treatment of conics will delight the student of projective geometry. Altogether the book is a very original and striking contribution to a fascinating branch of mathematics.