NOVELS

It seemed that out of the battle I escapedDown some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and staredWith piteous recognition in fixed eyes,Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;Yet no blood reached here from the upper ground,And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan."Strange, friend," I said. "Here is no cause to mourn.""None," said the other. "Save the undone years,The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,Was my life also."

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

What negroid holiday makes freeWith such priapic revelry?What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?What gods like wooden stalagmites?What reeking steam of kidney pie?What blasts of Bantu melody?Ragtime ... but when the wearied bandSwoons to a waltz, I take her hand,And there we sit in blissful calm,Quietly sweating palm to palm.

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

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

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)The Saints smiled gravely and they said "He's come—(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

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

And must the Senator from IllinoisBe this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?This brazen gutter idol, reared to powerUpon a leering pyramid of lies?

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

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

The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,In his country grave of peaceful fame,Must feel exiled from life and glow,If he thinks of this man with his warrior claim,Who looketh on London as if 'twere his ownAs he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,Sailing the sky, with one arm and one eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I've not done anything to make a speech about," said Sir Limpidus, after a moment's hesitation.His triumph as a statesman was not one of doing. It was the natural consequence of being what he was. If it came to doing, he had fought a duel in his youth, and in Albania had assisted to burn down a village. Those incidents in his career were not fit subjects for a speech to schoolboys; and besides them in the way of doing there was nothing but pursuit of women and field sports. So it was with a smile over the double meaning of the words that he repeated: "I've done nothing to make a speech about."The headmaster, following his distinguished guest, happened to overhear this mild disclaimer, and he laughed aloud, calling his colleagues round him to enjoy the classic joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract ideas—figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

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

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

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

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

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

This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away by the suspicion and abuse of the world.I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity. If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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