NOVELS

What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!

to the other of

I saw Eternity the other night,

it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.

We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are, however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were highly educated and passionatelydrawn to music. Turning over these old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes, one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved the way for our doomâ€”the triumph of the business sense." That is as may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy, might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second) is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse, the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable. Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrinemusthave a noticeable cÃ¦sura; and it must surely have been a moment of aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert'sElegy:

Doth the sun now his light with yours renew?Have waves the curling of your hair?Did you restore unto the sky and airThe red and white and blue?Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your deathThat sweetest breath?

These things, however, matter little.

We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr. Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be cleared up.

This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr. Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr. Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence here of poetswho are not known to have written anything of any merit and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.

However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made hisMicahso peculiarly rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton'sBallad of St. Barbarahas glorious lines, and the spirit is the spirit ofThe White Horse, but ballads should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr. Chesterton'sElegy in a Country Churchyard:

The men that worked for EnglandThey have their graves at home,And bees and birds of EnglandAbout the cross can roam.But they that fought for England,Following a fallen star,Alas, alas, for EnglandThey have their graves afar!And they that rule in EnglandIn stately conclave met,Alas, alas, for England,They have no graves as yet!

The men that worked for EnglandThey have their graves at home,And bees and birds of EnglandAbout the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,Following a fallen star,Alas, alas, for EnglandThey have their graves afar!

And they that rule in EnglandIn stately conclave met,Alas, alas, for England,They have no graves as yet!

The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in Mr. John Drinkwater'sMalediction. Mr. Gibson contributes a series of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr. Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good, if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible as they look. The editor'sFruitageis too much like the more pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but hisSiestagives a hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon, Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whosePoems of Conformity, difficult but sinewy, should be better known than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr. F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It concludes:

For here and hence I sailAlone beyond the pale,Where square and circle coincide,And the parallels collide,And perfect pyramids flower.

Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any useful purpose.

Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce; there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and thefumisterieof Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair. It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is, in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents. But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.

It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:

Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its distancesâ€”where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mistâ€”held all her early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire. She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.â€”I'm so glad you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.â€”So am I, said Miriam.â€”Isn't that a jolly picture.â€”Yes. It's an awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.â€”What's O'Hara doing in the kitchen?â€”Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie from the scullery.â€”Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's nearly midnight.

This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth, Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that thisishow the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact, do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at that. We attempt to do no more.We do, however, think it worth while to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels" are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect; some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course, appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.

That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whoseValmouthis worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random specimen is necessary:

Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who, brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about."Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river.""What's she standing there for?""Nothing.""... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?""Oh, don't, David.""Then answer me quick.""When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the glorious tropics.""'Od! You're a simple one, you are!""Me?""Aye, you.""Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough quite without.""'Od."

Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:

"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who, brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.

"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."

"What's she standing there for?"

"Nothing."

"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"

"Oh, don't, David."

"Then answer me quick."

"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the glorious tropics."

"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"

"Me?"

"Aye, you."

"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough quite without."

"'Od."

Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense. But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers, deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and boring or displeasing the great majority.

These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton'sFull Circle. Neither of them tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of theArabian Nightstold stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it: there is an introduction, a complication, and a dÃ©nouement. It is, however, the story that we miss whenwe look back on the book. Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make in ordinary lifeâ€”they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative; except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes as slight as those ofThe Spoils of PoyntonorWhat Maisie Knew. But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs. Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree, the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.

Mrs. Beatrice Seymour's novel is also distinguished by one remarkable incident. It is, we are informed, a first work, and as such it deserves praise for its smoothness and competence. But in nine parts out of ten it seems to be the attempt of a quite clever writer to sum up in short space what Mr. Bennett did in the three volumes of the Clayhanger series, and what Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not yet finished doing in the four volumes of the Sylvia and Michael series. It describes, that is to say, the separate childhood and youth of a young man and young woman and then their union, which in this case is illicit and which is terminated by the war. Much of it is a great deal too up-to-date to have any depth. Hilary Sargent is a painter, calls Helena Morden "Deirdre" as soon as he sees her, and, one day when they were together on the Downs, "he read to her things she knew and things she didn't from de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gould, Hodgson, and (most appropriately) Hilaire Belloc. And there was Flecker and Brooke and Frances Cornford and Lady Margaret Sackville; and Dora Sigerson whom Helena loved." No wonder that, as the reader easily foresees, they lost the last train home; they had confused their minds with too many styles, and had far too many books to carry. This kind of modernity is too superficial and too easy of achievement: it is presenting the reader with false coin. For the rest the book has the slickness and the clicking regularity which, though they are by no means common in novelists, cannot be of great interest, except to the subscribers to circulating libraries who are wont to ask for a novel which will enable them to support the tedium of the week-end. But in one chapter Mrs. Seymour surprisingly faces and masters a real and a painful situationâ€”that of a shallowgirl who, having rejoiced that her husband at the front enables her to be in the fashion, collapses under the news that he has been made hideous by injuries received in the trenches. This is a thing which has undoubtedly happened; it is unspeakably agonising to contemplate; and, so far as we know, no novelist has hitherto attempted it. But there is no reason why it should not be used for purposes of art if the novelist has the requisite skill and tact and, above all, the requisite courage. Mrs. Seymour looks the basilisk in the eyes and reduces it to her service. The conversation between Helena and Pamela Sandâ€”it occupies less than eight pagesâ€”in which the whole affair is begun and ended, projects violently out of the book, makes the rest of it look rather emptier than it really is, and testifies unmistakably to the genuine powers which Mrs. Seymour has not elsewhere employed. One scene does not make a novel, much less a novelist; but one such scene as this in a first book persuades us to look hopefully to Mrs. Seymour's future.

In the title-story of this volume the injured wife of Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov calls suddenly at the house of Pasha, a chorus-girl, with whom he is accustomed to spend his time, and Kolpakov, who is there, goes into hiding. He has been ruined by his extravagances and is on the point of being arrested for embezzlement. His wife demands the return of the gifts he has lavished on Pasha, in order that the missing sum may be made up and dishonour averted, but Pasha has had no gifts from him. The wife refuses to believe it, repeats her demand, and then, without altering her attitude of contemptuous hatred, implores and entreats. Pasha at last gives her the presents she has received from more generous admirers. She declares these are not enough and asks for more, and Pasha gives her everything she has. When his wife has gone, Kolpakov comes out of his retirement and, expressing his angry remorse that she should have had to kneel to a "low creature," pushes the girl aside and leaves her. Then

Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.

This synopsis suggests, more accurately than any analysis we could attempt in the space at our disposal, why we should welcome the eighth volume of Mrs. Constance Garnett's admirable rendering of the tales of Tchehov into English. An extended study might discover many traits in this author which would be worthy of observation. There is, for example, the peculiar acuteness of his sense of smell. "The air was full of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors." ... "As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber" ... a house "was half dark and mysterious and smelt of mushrooms"â€”these are sentences taken at random from two or three stories in the present volume. A minute examination would reveal other characteristics by which a formal criticism could distinguish Tchehov from other writers of the short story. But it is doubtful whether any study could come nearer to defining the nature of his genius than by naming the qualities which are immediately obvious inThe Chorus Girl. He has precision, economy, detachment, and, for all his gloom and squalor, charm also. He stoops as it were from an ineffable height, picks up a situation, describes it in the smallest possible number of words, and lets it fall back into the welter of human lives. It is not likely that any English author will imitate him, nor would it be desirable, but his qualities, if they cannot be learnt, can at least be used to correct excesses. And, apart from that, these eight volumes are a monument of narrative and (for with Mrs. Garnett's translation one can say so much) of style.

It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction. For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There remains nothing but belles-lettres.

And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he, not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:

But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London to-dayâ€”Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her. I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth, Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most perfect dream." ...

... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her. I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth, Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most perfect dream." ...

Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr. Arlen shall have done this.

Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile. No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal, literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr. Moore's suggestion thatRobinson Crusoeought to be rewritten, "has rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper published in herCritical Studies)that once a book was given to the public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas of Isaac AlbÃ©niz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons: Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr. Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints." Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.

The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.

The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which, despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.

Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines? If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for the Italian destitute.

Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection with the cottage silkworm industry. Thecavalleri(as the peasants call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family working for them from morning till night.

Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one such household:

"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned exactly 224 lire, which is all but Â£9."

As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst of Nature's graciousness and beautyAmong Italian Peasantsis not without value.

The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time, and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down those trees. Taken at some lengthâ€”indeed, taken in seriesâ€”he becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, calledKitty Fairhall, which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas himself is likely to apprehend.

Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles, the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr. Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about himâ€”Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulkingâ€”flicker like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago, one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language, I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his handâ€”give us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted sights" do but sting the mind.

Of course he tells usâ€”he can't help itâ€”some interesting things. One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That must have been in the Wealdâ€”but we did not know that feature of Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again, he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ... to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand." Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr. Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.

Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred historysub specie temporishodierni. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is "the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's meditations over the Holy City:

I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate, feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching, when we should have been preparing for defence against the German Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the Inner City?

Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives:

A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said, in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?â€”grecque ou latine?" ... My answer was "La Croix Rouge."

If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red" mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.

Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought, and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York, to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain he takes the line that by words we are saved:

The tie of language is all-powerfulâ€”for language is the food formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone.

It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the Peloponnesian War.

We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire, that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:

In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as ifhis days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said, ... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches." The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips, then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."

And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier occasionally commits acts of violence.

This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essayOne's Own Company: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he cannot avoid being bored by others."

In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it. But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole essay is precious in the last degree.

"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in the arms of sleep."

"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a declining, there was no power to tell."

This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air, observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entirerobe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought; but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which strain is the more severeâ€”the student's for meaning or the author's for effect.

Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:

One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen, with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and gazing at him: "Oh, mon maÃ®tre, que je t'aime!"

Although the accounts of old Breton customsâ€”the glimpse at the Folgoat pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottagesâ€”are all full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.

Thomas Coutts, virtual founder of the Bank of his name as it now is, was born in 1735, and, according to the standards of Scotland, well born, having, that is, wise, reputable forbears, relatives with place-names of their ownâ€”Stuarts of Allanbank and the likeâ€”and a coat-of-arms. "Instead of which," as the old story has it, at the age of twenty-eight he married his mother's nursemaid, and loved and served her faithfully until, after some fifty years' partnership, she wandered out of her mind and then out of his world. By that time his three daughters by her had married, one an Earl of Guilford, one a Marquis of Bute, and one Sir Francis Burdett. By that time also Coutts was one of the most considerable bankers in London, and one of the richest men in England. It might now be thought that his adventures in life were overâ€”but not at all. At seventy years of age he stepped once more into thePays du Tendre, and took into his protectionâ€”which in his case, it really appears, had no secondary meaningâ€”Miss Harriot Mellon, alow comedy actress of abundant charm, humble birth, little education, and excellent disposition. She was then twenty-eight. He fell headlong in love with her and head over heels. He endowed her with stock and other movables to the amount of Â£500 a year, and when, at the age of eighty, he made her his second wife he settled the whole of that endowment upon herself. At his death, Mr. Coleridge tells us, her private fortune could not have been less than Â£200,000. Notwithstanding the estrangement and unconcealed disgust of "the ladies," as he always called his daughters, she made him perfectly happy for nine years; and when, at eighty-nine, he died, very reasonably, he left her practically everything he possessed.

That in outline is the life-history of Thomas Coutts as Mr. Ernest Coleridge pleasantly and ably narrates it in two portly volumes. The book offers a view of eighteenth-century manners which is not often, and seldom so well, illustrated. Coutts must have been, and he was, a notable man of affairs; but he was a good deal better than that. He knew, of course, everybody who was anybody. He was the friend and correspondent of Lord Bute, the favourite of Lord Chatham, of William Pitt. He lent,mero motu ejus, Â£10,000 to Charles Fox without security of any kind. He lent large sums to the Duchess of Devonshire, and forwent the interest until such time as her son was pleased to pay it; for her husband never would. He lectured that great and gay lady upon her follies with perfect freedom and no result. All the royal rips, sons of George III., banked with him, or, in other words, borrowed from him; and they dined with him too. Edward Duke of Kent, the only one of them who was not a rip, made a friend of him as well as a convenience. It is interesting to remark how Coutts deals with these disreputable magnates. He is respectful of their degree in so far as he is shopkeeper and they customers; but outside the bank-parlour he stands on level terms. His children are to commence with their children; his wife's table is as good as their tables. Servant-girl or not, his wife, Mrs. Coutts, is the equal of their wives. There is nothing of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in his letters, although, as a trader, he continually has his eye upon business, and is never above doing himself a good turn. Mr. Coleridge is to be congratulated upon having presented so engaging a picture of the sound, cautious, and upright Scots merchant, who kept his head and his balance through the convulsions of the American and French wars, and cultivated the domestic virtues in the same social set as Old Q. and the Duchess of Gordon.

But, except for that sappy core of romance which twice betrayed itself in act and once in word, Tom Coutts was a dry stick. While his views of political affairs were sound and uncommonly independent, his expression of them was not interesting. He was by inheritance a Tory, yet he was staunch upon the American war. "The idea," he wrote in 1775 to Lord Stair, "of reducing such a continent to obedience (especially after letting them have so much time to unite) appears to me, so far as I am capable of judging, to be absolutely impossible." So, too, he opposed the war with revolutionary France. "The war made against their growth seems to me to be exactly the way to encourage instead of destroying them. There is no instance of opposition by force of arms subduing opinions! which by such manners have always grown stronger and more inveterate." One might be reading the present Dean of St. Paul's. The same faculty of seeing things as they really were allowed him to have no good opinion of Pitt's Reform proposals of 1784, and gave him as early as 1785 a plan of dealing with Irish disaffection which was in fact adopted in 1800, to our cost. "As to Ireland, I apprehend it is an aristocracy of about thirty nobles, etc., who command two hundred votes in the Lower House, and that these thirty may be bought and a union accomplished more easily than that heap of nonsense called the Irish propositions." Theywerebought.

Mr. Coleridge prints a recently discovered bundle of his love-letters to Harriot Mellon, from which, if one could feel love-letters to be fair game, it would be tempting, and easy, to make extracts. They are striking by their extraordinary difference from hisother familiar correspondence. Coutts becomes emotional, profuse, sentimental, and occasionally ridiculous. Few love-letters, however, will stand the test of examination in cold blood. It can be said of his at least that there is nothing in them which is not intended to honour the recipient. To Coutts his Harriot was a pattern of womanly virtue. It is Mr. Coleridge's opinion, as it is our own, that she deserved it. That she made him happy is obvious; that she returned him a grateful love let this, which was written by herself five years after her wedding-day, bear witness:

"I never lose my spirits." My blessed Tom said these words to me in a dream. After he had kissed me and laid his dear head on my bosom, I felt his tears on my cheekâ€”I was so happy, but so melancholy happy. He looked so well, tranquil and divine.... I see him at this moment, upright, beautiful and composed, as in his long and immaculate life. He looks just as I first saw his dear, blessed face upwards of twenty years ago.

That is both tenderly and prettily said. Tom Coutts, in his marriage as in other things, knew what he was about.

"La Turquie est le pays classique du massacres," it has been truly said.... "Son historie se rÃ©sume Ã ceci: pillages, meurtres, vols, concussionsâ€”sur toutes les Ã©chillesâ€”rÃ©voltes, insurrections, rÃ©percussions, guerres Ã©trangÃ¨res, guerres civiles, rÃ©volutions, contre-rÃ©volutions, sÃ©ditions, mutineries." All these things are the theme of Mr. Allen's interesting and well-written sketch of the Turkish power, from the rise of Osman in the thirteenth century down to the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913. Mr. Allen does not, however, confine himself to a mere record of horrors. He contrives throughout his book to draw in a few lines the characters of the chief actors in the drama, and, especially in the later chapters, to expose the policies, European and Turkish, which have created and complicated the long nightmare of the Near East. Many of our troubles of the last forty years are attributed by him to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the triumph of Lord Beaconsfield's policy. It was a treaty concluded, he says, "in a spirit of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics, and in open contempt of the right of civilised peoples to determine their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded between rival Imperialist States." A few years later the "grim raw races" in the Balkans were again in a savage ferment, and we could enjoy "the spectacle of the heads of the civilised world, in their palaces in the capitals of Europe, setting those same 'grim raw races' to kill." Mr. Allen in his narrative of this later period does not spare his criticism of the diabolic diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna, of the brilliant cunning of their agents in Turkeyâ€”and notably Baron Marschal von Bieberstein.

In this little volume, one of a series calledMessages of the Saints, Mr. Pollard has re-told the ever-fascinating story of St. Catherine, Siena's fourteenth-century saint. "In the present sketch," says the author, "there is nothing original, save possibly its point of view and (I believe) the chapter on St. Catherine's book."

Its point of view is that of an ardent if critical admirer of St. Catherine, and full justice is done to what after all are the qualities which made of her not only the most lovable, but perhaps the most amazing of saintly women.Amor vincit omniais the motto which springs to the mind as most fit for Catherine of Siena. In an age of cruelty she is love personified. It was love for her fellow-creatures, concern for their immortal welfare, that led her, a poor ignorant "little bit of a woman," to face with the simplicityof a child and the wisdom born of simplicity princes and popes, and force them, not to her own will, but to what she conceived to be the Will of God.

To all who have lived long enough in Siena, Catherine becomes a living personality. So real indeed that it would scarcely be surprising to meet her one evening at dusk in that long steep streetâ€”still the street of the tannersâ€”where six hundred years ago she walked with her lantern on her way to the sick and dying during the plague. In Siena one is apt to forget that St. Catherine was a figure in politics and the composer of a book about which the learned dispute. Still, on the day of her festival the townsfolk sing the "Praise of Catherine," to them merely the tanner's daughter who, greatly to the glory of their beautiful little city, somehow became a saint.

Mr. Pollard's chapter on theLibro della Divina Dottrina, the treatise said to have been dictated by St. Catherine while in a trance, is valuable because it summarises typical pronouncements of the mystic upon the various stages of the soul in its pilgrimage towards a spiritual goal.

As a revelation of the subconscious self, if for no other reason, St. Catherine's book has its own intense interest. Those who are already familiar with her story may, by the help of Mr. Pollard's pleasant sketch, refresh their memory of its details, and to those who are not it should, as he hopes, prove a stimulating introduction to the life of a wonderful woman.

Mr. Bridges deliberately adopts the attitude of thelaudator temporis acti se puero. The worst of this prose is that, just as it may attract the sympathy of men of his own generation, it inevitably repels slightly those of a younger. Nothing is more tiresome than to listen to judgments on life and manners whose chief point lies in the opening words, "Well, I tell you in 185â€”we did not," or "we did"â€”such criticism automatically provokes the retort, "Well, this isn't 185â€”," whereat your ancient growls, "I would to God it were," and youth and eld stand back to uncomfortable back, with no chance of doing any useful work.

Fortunately Mr. Bridges, although angry at the modern depreciation of things Victorian, is better than his threat. He is not too comparative, and although overfond of censure, his blame has a humorous quality which keeps it inoffensive. At times the humour is unconscious, as in Mr. Bridges' charming suggestion that the beauty of the primrose is more noticed and "more respected" because ardent Tory enthusiasm associated Peter Bell's flower with the late Lord Beaconsfield: but Mr. Bridges' essentially "pawky" quality of mindâ€”we use the word in an amiable senseâ€”crops out not infrequently as, for instance, in his grave statement that he would be "in favour of a law forbidding anyone to own more than 150 newspapers."

Mr. Bridges gives an account of his schooldays under a flogging master, which adds yet another count to the indictment against Victorian methods of education. He does not tell us much that is unfamiliar, either of Eton or Oxford, though many will be glad to have his description of the old-time Don, and the Dean Gaisford's letter to a noble father who enquired after his son's University progress:

"My Lord, Such letters give much trouble to"Your humble servant,"The Dean of Christ Church."

In the late fifties Mr. Bridges visited Canada and the United States, and he records his conviction that Senator Douglas was Lincoln's "superior as speaker and politician," a verdict which makes one wonder a little what his standards of oratory are, and how apolitician, obviously inferior in moral character, who also fails to keep his country's confidence can be called the inferior of one who wins its trust. Mr. Bridges abandoned his plan to settle in the New World, and returned to England and started farming, first in the Eastern counties and subsequently in Shropshire. In the chapters dealing with his life in rural England he sketches some village types for the reader with a genuine feeling for character. Particularly good is the final chapter, "A Survival," with its touching picture of Old Tom, "the last survivor hereabouts of the old-style agricultural labourer." Whatever one's political colour, one cannot help sympathising with Mr. Bridges and Old Tom in their lament at the decay of rural England, and at the growth of conditions which made it possible for "more and more people to wax rich in London and in the big towns, while no one can earn a living in the country." Though the latter ceased to be true during the war, one is yet uncertain how far the prosperity then enjoyed by the farmer will continue as war conditions slowly depart.

Born in London, daughter of a Scotswoman, educated in Italy, married to an Englishman, Liza Lehmann's heartâ€”and she was a woman who always let her heart rule her headâ€”was unconsciously fixed in England. Yet as we turn the pages of her autobiography there is hardly one in which we do not feel conscious that she belonged by unalterable temperament to the land ofDie GartenlaubeandFamilie Buchholz. Many English singers and audiences in the happy days before the war have felt that for all their devotion to Schumann, the domestic intimacies ofFrauenliebe und Lebenwere too intensely German for an English sense of proportion and sense of humour. Let them readThe Life of Liza Lehmannin their own tongue, and they will turn with relief to the reticence and dignity of Chamisso's lyrics. It is evident that she was a woman who never did an act, never cherished a thought, that was not a kind one. She collaborated in an opera with Mr. Laurence Housman; he considered that she had wrecked his play, she thought that he had wrecked her music; but she records the awkward incident without the least trace of ill-will, nay, without the least supposition that he or anyone else in the world could have borne ill-will to her. Liszt, Brahms, Browning, and Verdi were among her acquaintances; but she has little to tell us about them. They counted for far less in her life than Madame Clara Butt, Mr. Kennerley Rumford, Mr. Arthur Boosey, and Mr. Landon Ronald; and even these were unsubstantial shadows compared to her mother, her husband, and her sons. A large proportion of her book is taken up with newspaper criticisms and interviews, mostly American. They gave the authoress no little pleasure, and they will give the reader no little amusement; indeed, as studies of American literary style, they are most instructive. The final chapter, dealing with the death of her elder son, so shortly to be followed by her own, can hardly be touched upon in a review; it seems an intrusion to read it.

These two war books, extremely dissimilar, belong to two well-known types. Mr. Cobb is an American journalist, and he gives a lively, journalistic account of the coming and doing of the American armies in France. The other book is a detailed and somewhat bare record of the doings of the 25th Division, by Lieut.-Col. M. Kincaid-Smith. The 25th Division made a great name for itself in the war; this book shows that it was not unearned.

The story of the paravane, the remarkable anti-submarine contrivance invented by Commander Burney and used by the Allied navies and also by merchant ships during the later period of the war, is told by Mr. Cope Cornford in a popular style and with considerable enthusiasm. It is possible that he is over-enthusiastic, for in a prefatory note he tells us that some naval officers and also the Admiralty consider that he exaggerates the effects of the paravane. There is no doubt, however, as the official figures themselves show, that paravanes and "Otters" (as they were called when fitted to merchant vessels) did have an enormous success. The total tonnage of H.M. ships and merchant ships definitely saved by them comes to over a quarter of a million; and the financial saving to the British Empire is estimated at approximately Â£100,000,000. Mr. Cope Cornford has a good deal of criticismâ€”some open and more, we think, impliedâ€”to make against the Admiralty. Exactly how far it is justified we cannot say; but there are certainly a good many people with inside knowledge who assert that the Admiralty were decidedly cold about the paravane, even if they did not actually "crab" it. And the rewards and honours bestowed on the brilliant young officers who devoted themselves to the paravane and Otter services were not particularly generous.

Mr. Domville-Fife's purpose is to discuss the importance of the submarine arm in naval warfare of the future. His treatment of the subject is very balanced and his conclusions are cautious. He gives us a great deal of interesting information about the history of submarine craft (beginning as far back as 1578) and of the submarine explosive mine. In dealing with the tactics of submarines and their influence in naval strategy, he speaks as an expert; for not only has he devoted many years to their study, but during the war he was in command of anti-submarine craft and an instructor at H.M. School of Submarine Mining. The economic influence of the submarine on this country, Mr. Domville thinks, is summed up in the words of Lord Selborne in 1915: "After the war the whole question of our agricultural and economic policy of the food production at home will have to be revised in the light of our submarine experience." But what of the League of Nations? Are we not entitled to voice our views of the future of naval warfare in the light of that? Here Mr. Domville-Fife is guarded. He looks forward "steadfastly and even hopefully towards the vivid dawn of a new era." But he is not for abandoning the old motto,Si vis pacem para bellum.

These two books must rank among the most important documents yet produced which bear upon the antecedents and the consequences of the war in so far as British policy is involved. Lord Haldane was for many years War Minister, and during the critical period of Anglo-German relations he was also a sort of supplementary Foreign Secretary whose influence over the most important department of Foreign Affairs was very great, partly because of the weight his opinion carried with Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, and partly because of his special knowledge of Germans and Germany. His book hasa double subject as it has a double object. He outlines the main elements and the principal stages in our policyversusGermany before the war, and he sketches what was done during his administration to perfect the organisation of our Army. He defends our national policy (there are interesting sidelights thrown by his personal experiences with the Emperor and among the governing classes of Prussia) on the ground that we did the best we could when we combined an earnest effort to prevent war with a resolution to be ready for it; and in his personal apologia he argues, in effect, that in the circumstances (we must not forget that the nation as a whole, and Parliament in particular, viewed military expenditure with a very jealous eye) his rÃ©gime did the utmost that could have been expected. It is now commonly conceded, even by those who distrusted Lord Haldane's views in foreign affairs, and those who were bitterly against him because of his refusal to adopt universal military service, that he did a great work at the War Office. What he says about the efficiency of his Expeditionary Force ("If the warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared for the ring as science could make him") must be universally admitted; and with his great work in that department must be coupled the creation of the Territorial Force. On the point of compulsory service Lord Haldane defends himself by saying that in 1912 the General Staff was allowed to investigate "the question whether we could or could not raise a great army." "The outcome was embodied in a report made to me by Lord Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a strong desire for compulsory service and a large army. He reported, as the result of a prolonged and careful investigation, that, alike as regarded officers and as regarded buildings and equipment, the conclusion of the General Staff was that it would be in a high degree unwise to try, during the period of unrest on the Continent, to commence a new military system." We might have become "seriously weaker before we had a chance of becoming stronger," and an enemy might have sprung on us. "I quite agreed, and not the less because it was highly improbable that the country would have looked at anything of the sort." We imagine that the one thing which should (in the light of our subsequent experience) have been done and was not done (though lack of money would have been a severe limitation to the actual accumulation of large stores, whether of rifles or of clothing) was to prepare a scheme whereunder the material for a greatly expanded force would be easily and rapidly obtained immediately an emergency had arisen.

Lord Haldane has many interestingobiter dicta. He insists on the need (never more necessary than now) for politicians to understand the meaning of the words they use, and the nature of the main conceptions which are entertained by the nation, and those which dominate their own minds. He says that his opinion of the German people remains unchanged. "They were very much like our own people, except in one thing. This was that they were trained simply to obey, and to carry out whatever they were told by their rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial tours in Germany, to wander about incognito, and to smoke and drink beer with the peasants whenever I could get the chance. What impressed me was the little part they had in directing their own government, and the little they knew about what it was doing." Lord Haldane dates this habit of mind back to the days of Frederick the Great; but is there not something to be said for the view that it is to be traced back through the period of the religious wars into the baronial Middle Ages?

Lord Haldane's conclusion is that "the question is not one simply of the letter of a treaty, but is one of the spirit in which it is made.... The foundations of a peace that is to be enduring must, therefore, be sought in what is highest and most abiding in human nature." These sentiments are eloquently supported by Mr. Maynard Keynes, who resigned his position at the Peace Conference (where he represented the Treasury) because he felt that the negotiations were not being inspired by that spirit and by those high and abiding ideals. His argument, which is supported by very acute reasoning,is that the economic clauses of the Treaty threaten the ruin of our interlocked economic civilisation; and, with the skill of an artist, he strengthens the gloom of his tale by giving in introductory chapters a tragic setting: a concourse of statesmen, oblivious of the greatness of the issues involved, men of mechanical or cunning minds, men obstinate and narrow, ruthless and cynical, adroit and cunning, intriguing, hoodwinking, whilst their world was rolling towards the precipice. The issues he considers, the arguments he advances, are far too controversial to be entered into here: but it is a book which states one point of view far more powerfully than it has been stated anywhere else and, as such, should be read, if only to be answered. We take it that beyond the public questions which engage the author's mind there must have been a personal one (which is also, however, a public one) which must have caused him much disquiet: the question how far a civil servant, whilst the events under discussion are still in progress, is morally entitled to divulge things he would not have seen save in his official capacity. He mayâ€”this we suppose is beyond disputeâ€”resign and conduct argument on the basis of facts known to the public; but should he watch statesmen at private assemblies, judge their characters by what he sees there, and then come out and attempt to blow them sky-high? We suppose that Mr. Keynes, who is no doubt convinced that his estimates are sound and that the whole future of the world may depend upon people realising what he believes to be the truth, would say that there was a conflict of obligations, and that the larger one had overcome the lesser. But we do think that there is room here for investigation and definition by a political philosopher with some practical experience. The problem is not a simple one.

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