NOVELS

Let us prune the tree of languageOf its dead fruit.Let us melt up the clichésInto molten metal;Fashion weapons that will scald and flayLet us curb this eternal humourAnd become witty.Let us dig up the dragon's teethFrom this fertile soil;Swiftly,Before they fructify.

And that, at a later stage, he observes that

The world itselfDancesTo make us danceIn 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.

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 famousDon Juan in Hellto Hérédia.

We notice this volume merely in order to record a neologism which we commend to the notice of the editors of theOxford 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.

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 ofPunch. 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'sourlanguage now, you know—English—the language of us young people. The old ones have got to learn it as we speak it."

"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'sourlanguage 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'sSaint's Progresssuffers 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'sPragmatism. 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 fromFive Talesthat 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 ofMartin Schulermust 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 enchantingfragments 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.

... 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 andgalanteriewhich revolved round Mademoiselle de Scudéry and was depicted by her inLe 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, itbites. 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'sLegendtouches 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'sThe Mask, which is perhaps the most satisfactory of all these books, though it is not so dazzling and exciting asLegend, 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.

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 businessIs general woe. No nobler corse hath everImpressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it![Flourish of trumpets.]This was the noblest of the Florentines.His character was flawless, and the worldHeld not his parallel. O bear him henceWith 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 fromThe Duchess of MalfiorThe Broken Heart?

The two stories that remain are more elaborate. InEnoch Soameswe 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 thatMaltby and Braxtonis 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 MayfairandA 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 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 hisLifein 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 theChurch 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.

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 defectsSouth Sea Foamis 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.

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.

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 hislist. 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 interestingobiter 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'sInto Battlehe 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'sThe Buglersomething 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."

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.

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 reviewerex cathedrais 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.

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 thewhole 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.

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 beautifulValley 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 YorkTimessays this or that, theSpectatorsays 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.

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!) theGentleman'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.

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 toher 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'sSong of the Shirt, another wasThe 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.

Dr. Marshall's well-knownPrinciples of Economicswas 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 Tradeis 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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