The Nation and The Athenzeum

Tue Nation. Vor. XXXV., No. 3.]

SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 1924.

[Tae AtHENzuM. No. 4903.

CONTENTS

PAGE EVENTS OF THE WEEK ... ad ‘im ‘ike ae. oe

UNEMPLOYMENT AND PROGRESS aie 74

THE OUTLOOK FOR GREAT BRITAIN. By Sir W. H. Beveridge a @, 74

THE Facts OF THE CASE. “By Festeiper Arthur L. Bowley 75

THe Experts’ Report.—II. The McKenna —— By J. M. Keynes _... 76

ENGLAND’S GREEN AND pemeniene panine The Beech Leaf. By H. C. ee a

LIFE AND Po.itics. By A. S. G. < = sci ——— THE HovusE oF Commons. By M.P. ae 79 LETTERS TO THE EpiIToR. By F. - ‘< Sesion of the London Stock a "ana Sir Maurice Bonham Carter... 81 Lorp Byron. By atone H. zs C. protean si 81

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHILDHOOD.—VI. By heen MacCarthy ose © on a ae ae <a

~ > Q w

ART :— The London Group. By R. R. Tatlock From ALPHA TO OMEGA.

POETRY :— Exile. By Conrad Aiken

THE WORLD oF Books :— The Fall of Stevenson.—II.

REVIEWS :— Two Sides of an Old Question. By Augustine Birrell Kensington Gardens to Looking-Glass-Land. By anes

Graves ds Economics and ‘Industry. By Alan Dale New Conception of Civilized Man.

Massingham &

RESSS BB SKF RK BE

By Omicron

By Leonard Woolf

ay it J.

Hustling Criticism. By Lewis Horrox ... An ervey | Miscellany. By Gilbert Thomas... Timbuktu and El Dorado. By Clennell Wilkinson

NOVELS IN BRIEF (Janet March; Out of Reach)

All communications and MSS. should be addressed to the Editor, THE NaTION aND THE ATHENZUM, 10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.2.

EVENTS OF

HE good-will of the building industry is essential to the success of any adequate housing scheme, and Mr. Wheatley has shown good judgment in seek- ing in the first instance to enlist the responsible co-opera- tion of the industrial interests concerned. It would bea mistake, however, to regard the Report of the Committee, which was published last week, as constituting a housing programme in itself—much less a solution of the housing problem. What it does is to indicate the conditions on which certain obstacles arising from within the industry can be overcome. In effect, the building unions are will- ing to permit an increase in the supply of labour provided that Parliament will undertake, in return, to carry out “a definite and continuous programme extending over fifteen years for the erection of an inclusive total of up to approximately 2,500,000 houses upon a basis of cost to be agreed.” The increased labour is to be obtained, not by dilution, but by relaxing the restrictions on apprentices. Apprentices are to be accepted up to the age of twenty years, and need only serve for four years (or in excep- tional circumstances for three) as compared with the stan- dard six. The rule that the number of apprentices must not exceed one in four is to be withdrawn, so far as the individual employer is concerned, and is to apply only to the total figures for each district. It is to be a condition of contracts for the housing scheme that this ratio of apprentices should be employed. By these means the Committee are confident that the supply of skilled labour can be gradually enlarged until in 1934 it will be capable of dealing with an annual programme of 225,000 houses —in addition to ordinary commercial and private work, on which the Committee are emphatic that no restrictions should be imposed. * * *

The “ agreed basis of cost’’ on which Parliament is asked to commit itself for fifteen years is obviously a vital feature of the scheme. The Committee deal with this matter in terms of z and y; but, as they state their opinion that “ houses are being built to-day at the lowest possible cost,” they clearly mean by “z” something in

THE WEEK

excess of present costs of construction. But Parliament can hardly be expected to agree to an “zx” which is much in excess of present costs; so that everything turns on the assurance we can feel of being able to keep build- ing costs down to somewhere near their present level. Here the Committee are more optimistic than helpful. They suggest that every increase in the prices of building materials should have to be approved by the Statutory Committee under the Housing Acts before “ being allowed to operate,” and they print as an appendix a report by the Building Materials Manufacturers’ and Suppliers’ Committee, who pledge themselves to “ a policy of non- exploitation.” The latter observe, however, that “obviously, increases in costs due to advances in wages, coal, raw materials, &c., must be dealt with,” and they add that “ some particular goods have been and are being sold below actual cost price, in competition with imported articles or for other special reasons.’’ The prices of these commodities call already for “ adjustment,’’ and the manufacturers, warming to their task, suggest that “foreign manufactured materials should only be per- mitted to be used by the consent of the proposed Statu- tory Committee,’’ which is to take into account the unem- ployment benefit that is saved by using a somewhat dearer home-made article. We do not ourselves find these obser- vations very encouraging. The truth is that the familiar phenomenon of rising prices, when demand outruns supply, arises not so much from any “ policy of exploita- tion,” as from the natural tendency to “ adjust” those prices that seem unduly low, a process in which everyone, employers and merchants and workpeople, at every link of the chain from raw material to finished product, plays his part with a cumulative effect which shocks each of them taken separately.

* * *

To take only one factor, increased remuneration for labour in the various industries concerned, on a scale for which a plausible case could be made out, might raise the cost of house-building considerably. Demands for wage-advances are at present under negotiation. More-

72 THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM

[April 19, 1924.

over, the Committee singled out one demand of the building unions, viz., that for payment for lost time, as a matter which must be dealt with. One consideration fundamental to the problem is worth emphasizing. The attempt to stabilize building prices in connection with a prolonged housing scheme is only practicable, if at all, on the basis of a stable general price-level. Substantial inflation and substantial deflation must be ruled out if we are to proceed on the basis of the Committee’s pro- posals. The question of cost is, however, only one factor in the financial problem that Parliament has to con- sider. There is also the question of the rents at which the new houses will be let. It is entirely without precedent for Parliament to commit itself over fifteen years to proposals involving large financial expenditure. Such an undertaking can only be given by agreement between the three political parties. It ought only to be given on the basis of a clear estimate of the maximum financial liability for the State; and that liability ought not, in our judgment, to be increased unnecessarily by attempt- ing to let the new houses for lower rents than could be

obtained for them. * * *

Meanwhile, Mr. E. D. Simon’s Bill to prevent the eviction of tenants who pay their rent, unless the land- lord can show that his need for the house is greater than the tenant’s, has passed through the Committee stage, with one amendment. This amendment, moved by the Attorney-General and supported by the Tories, allows the County Court Judge somewhat wider discretion in weighing up the hardship suffered by the respective parties than the original clause. On the other hand, it makes the measure applicable to those who buy houses in the future, instead of limiting it to those who became landlords before July 31st, 1923. The change is not of vital importance, though a good deal of heat was created over it in Committee, and the matter will come up again in the House on the Report stage. :

* *

To the surprise of everyone concerned, the Repara- tion Commission, hardly more than twenty-four hours after receiving the reports of its expert committees, decided by a unanimous vote to approve them as they stood. The question has thus passed swiftly from its first phase, agreement by the experts, to its third, agree- ment between the Reparation Commission and Germany. That agreement is not yet assured, but the prospect of any serious discord arising diminishes daily, particularly since the German Government’s decision to accept the report ‘‘ in principle.’”” Many German critics believe the estimates in the Dawes Report to be unduly optimis- tic, as well they may be, but the Report goes much too far in the way of safeguarding Germany, particularly in its insistence on the restoration of her economic unity, for any German to think lightly of opposing it. Few Germans, fortunately, appear to be entertaining any such thought, and in a question essentially economic in its present form the views of a man like Dr. Schacht are likely to carry more weight than any Nationalist denun- ciations, Germany will no doubt have observations to lay before the Reparation Commission. Her Govern- ment (moribund Government though it be) would be incredibly neglectful of its country’s interests if it omitted that. The opportunity, it may be supposed, will be taken of exploring the Commission’s views as to what would constitute a default under the new scheme. But an accord both reasonably rapid and reasonably complete ought to be attainable, after which it will be for the Allied Governments to come to agreement among them- selves on matters not purely economic. Mr. MacDonald has very rightly declared at once that the British

Government is ready to accept the Report as it stands, if the other parties will do so. * * *

The Conference between the British and the Soviet Governments was opened at the Foreign Office on Monday with speeches rather more significant than such addresses often are. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in welcoming the delegates from Moscow, tempered the cordiality of his greeting with some frank and opportune words as to the necessity of good faith on both sides, and in particular of a cessation of that kind of anti-British propaganda from which, whether in an official or unofficial guise, the Soviet Government and its friends have never wholly desisted. The attacks of Zinovieff on Mr. MacDonald himself pro- vided the Prime Minister with an appropriate text. M. Rakovsky, in his reply, prudently avoided such deli- cate questions, and contented himself with expressing con- fidence in the outcome of the negotiations and affirming the Soviet Government’s conviction of the necessity for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of a new type of League of Nations. No very profound suggestions were made on either point, and in any case these questions are not likely to be considered officially in London. It is much too early to form any opinion as to the probable outcome of the conversations, which would be difficult enough without the sustained effort of an influential section of the London Press to secure their breakdown. Russia is the one subject which the “ Times ” seems incapable of treating with the objectivity it so admirably evinces in other fields, while there are other papers of not much less importance whose comments on this conference and similar subjects are, though their readers are not apprised of the fact, written by Russian émigrés with a strong anti-Soviet bias. Due allowance should be made for these influences.

* * ~

It is doubtful whether publication of the Bankers’ Memorandum to the Prime Minister will assist the pro- gress of the negotiations. They are quite correct in saying that the amount of private capital attracted to Russia will depend on the confidence of investors in the security: of their property; but no negotiations are likely to be successful if one party begins by publicly asserting its dis- belief in the good faith of the other. When the Bankers lay down, as conditions essential for the restoration of Russian credit, “that a proper Civil Code should be brought into effective operation, independent courts of law created,’’ and “that bankers, industrialists, and traders in this country should be able to deal freely, with- out interference by Government authorities, with similar private institutions in Russia, controlled by men of whom they have personal knowledge,” they come dangerously near the kind of propaganda of which they complain in the Russians themselves. Financial safeguards may reasonably be required; but it can hardly be expected that the Russians will revise their whole legal, political, and economic system at the instance of foreign financiers. If we wait for these conditions, others are likely to get in on the ground floor.

* * *

The immigration question has created a deadlock between Senate and House in the United States, and the Japanese Ambassador has intervened with a protest against the threatened restriction of the rights of Japanese immigrants. Two bills on immigration, irreconcilable in their main provisions, have been introduced simultaneously—one in the Senate and the other in the House of Representatives. Both Senators and Congressmen are agreed that immigra- tion must be curtailed, but while the House would fix the figure of the annual influx at 2 per cent. of the total of

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM 73

immigrants of each nation dwelling in the United States at the census of 1890, the Senate is content to work on the census of 1910. The point of the House’s pro- posal is that the influx of Latins and Slavs is of comparatively recent development, and that by going back to the 1890 census as datum-point the country would secure a much higher proportion of immigrants from Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. Unfor- tunately, the House Bill also contains a clause excluding Japanese, that proposal being sponsored by Mr. Hiram Johnson, the well-known Senator from California. As it is, under the “ gentlemen’s agreement ” with Japan, only about 150 Japanese immigrants come in each year, and it was generally assumed that what the House had put wrong the Senate would put right. Unfortunately, that astonishing pettiness of which American Senators seem frequently capable led them to endorse by 76 votes to 2 the proposed exclusion of Japanese as a protest against the Japanese Ambassador’s action. A grave situation has undoubtedly been created, and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Coolidge, only seven months before the elections, will have the courage to exercise his right of veto. * * .

At the end of last week shipyard workers were locked out all over the country until the Southampton workers abandon their strike. As this strike has now gone on for eight weeks it cannot be said that the employers have shown a lack of patience. Moreover, the lock-out does not apply to the boilermakers, who are not participating in the strike, or to the shipwrights, whose Southampton members have been expelled by their Union When the crisis was right upon them, the unions concerned used every effort to persuade their members to return to work, but the results showed that they had lost all control over the Southampton men. In Southampton itself a move even more effective than the lock-out has been the dispatch of the Mauretania, at some peril, to Cherbourg for exten- sive repairs, taking with her several weeks’ work and wages for over a thousand men. As the result of inter- vention, by Mr. Purcell, the chairman, and Mr. F. Bramley, the secretary, of the Trades Union Congress General Council, a mass meeting of the strikers has now passed a resolution in favour of an immediate resump- tion of work, on the basis of a conference with the em- ployers for the purpose of securing uniformity between the Southampton and London rates. It remains to be seen whether the employers and the Federation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades will accept this basis.

+ . *

The results of the miners’ ballot were very instruc- tive. Ona poll of over 650,000 men there was a majority of only 16,258 against acceptance of the owners’ terms. South Wales, Scotland, and Lancashire were strongly against acceptance, Northumberland and Durham were more strongly in favour ; and Yorkshire voted in favour of acceptance against the advice of its own union officials. A two-thirds majority is required to declare a strike, and although strike action was not in question when the ballot was taken, it is reasonable to assume that nothing like such a majority could at present be obtained. The public is thus relieved of what was only a little time ago a very grave and justifiable fear. Now an inquiry is to be held—over which Lord Buckmaster will preside—into the wages earned by miners compared with their real wages in 1914, and with the wages paid in other industries. Such an inquiry may well precipitate a general discussion of the notable discrepancies in wages between the “ sheltered ’’ and the competitive trades, which are already a source of discontent.

Tuesday’s debate in the House of Commons on Indian affairs shed little fresh light on the situation, but the speech of Mr. Richards, Under-Secretary for India, confirmed the impression created by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s declaration on taking office and Lord Olivier’s more recent speech in the House of Lords that the Government has no intention of playing into the hands of the minority of extremists in India whose temporary capture of some Independent and Liberal votes in the Assembly gave them a bare majority against the Government of India. The results of Swaraj action in rejecting the Budget have given small satisfaction to the business community or the Provincial Governments, whose expenses were to have been lightened by a contri- bution from the Central Government, and there is some prospect of a sufficient reaction against the Swarajists to enable a return to government by the Assembly, as opposed to government by certification, to be made when the next session begins. The present interval for reflec- tion is opportune, particularly as Mr. Gandhi is exer- cising a restraining influence. The one serious mistake would have been the adoption by Ministers here of an attitude capable of being interpreted as an encourage- ment of Swaraj tactics. That mistake is, fortutlately, not being made.

* * *

Greece has definitely taken her constitutional resolve, and fortunately by a majority so decisive that there can be no question of upsetting the decision. The Republicans have scored roughly seven votes out of every ten throughout Greece, only parts of the Peloponnese and one or two of the islands showing a monarchist majority. The Royalists appear to have taken their defeat in good part, as the result largely of the wise moderation shown by the Republican Prime Minister, M. Papanastasiou. Immediately the polls were declared, the Regent, Admiral Conduriotis, was appointed Pro- visional President, and the election of a permanent President will take place probably next month. M. Zaimis seems to be the most favoured candidate, unless M. Venizelos can be persuaded to return once again. That, however, is unlikely. Personalities in any case are no longer of prime importance. The essential fact is that Greece has at last, it may be hoped, eliminated the con- stitutional question from the field of political controversy and can now settle down to the urgent task of economic restoration.

+ * *

The Conference on Christian Politics, Economics, and Citizenship came to an end last Saturday, but the work of this robust and encouraging organization is to go on. It is all to the good that representatives of the various Christian communities should co-operate on ground which, whatever their other differences, should be common to all of them—the application of the ethical principles in which they believe to the practical issues of the present day. We trust that C.0.P.E.C. will not be discouraged by the snub administered by “The Times ” on Monday. “ The Times ” accused it of impracticability and lack of “common sense” on account, among other reasons, of its sweeping condemnation of “ all war’’ and of Imperialism as unchristian. ‘Christian moralists,”’ maintained “ The Times,” “ never have denied the right, and it may be the duty, to wage a just war.’’ Yes, and Christian moralists have never been lacking who were ready to argue that any war was just. C.O.P.E.C. will do far more good by preaching the Christian ethic as it stands, than by adopting the easy-going and wide- spread pretence that the principles on which the modern world manages its affairs are reconcilable with that ethic.

74 THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM

fApril 19, 1924.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND PROGRESS.

HE two eminent correspondents, whose contribu- 7 tions we now print, are in full agreement as to the fundamental importance of the questions raised by Mr. Lloyd George in our last issue. That they deal mainly with the facts of the situation, leaving others to discuss the practical measures which should be taken to improve the outlook, is not surprising. The country has been so immersed in the struggle to get back to some- thing like its pre-war prosperity that only a few economists and statisticians have hitherto made any attempt to estimate the national income and to envisage the obstacles which still have to be overcome. The wise direction of national policy may well depend upon the results of such an inquiry, yet the materials available for the purpose are extremely scanty and will not be sub- stantially increased, as Professor Bowley remarks, until the forthcoming Census of Production is available, some three years hence. Small wonder that Sir William Beveridge adheres to his opinion that an ‘‘ Economic Gereral Staff” is urgently required!

In the absence of precise information, the estimates of our aggregate national production in 1923 vary from 87 per cent. of that in 1913 (Professor Bowley’s esti- mate) to 95 per cent. (the ‘‘ Economist ’’). The dis- crepancy, though substantial, does not vitally affect the It is agreed that the failure of full employment for our labour is the fundamental trouble, and that if the surplus could be reabsorbed in industry there would be no serious difficulty in maintain- ing the present standard of life in this country. Whether that reabsorption can take place without a reduction in the prices of our exports, perhaps involving a fall in the level of wages, is more difficult to determine. The ques- tions which emerge are, therefore, the three to which Sir William Beveridge draws attention in his letter :—

(1) Is the unemployment of the past three years due to temporary or to permanent causes?

issue under consideration.

(2) If not permanent, remediable?

(3) May we expect to return to Victorian pros- perity ?

are the causes easily

The third question, though interesting, is of a highly speculative character. With regard to the first, nobody will deny that some at least of the causes of unemploy- ment are temporary. The second question therefore raises issues of most urgent practical importance, and it is upon these issues perhaps that the discussion to which we have opened our columns can most profitably turn. Can we hope to recover from our present economic dis- orders merely by the exercise of patience? Does the hope for the future depend upon the restoration of our inter- national trade to its pre-war scale, and must we wait on that? Or should we aim at restoring by expansion at home the prosperity which we find it harder than before to win from abroad?

We suspect ourselves that a trust in pure Jacssez- faire is not enough, and that we must be prepared, with Mr. Lloyd George, to consider large schemes and new ideas, if we are to hold our own We invite further discussion.

THE OUTLOOK FOR GREAT BRITAIN.

SIR WILLIAM BEVERIDGE’S VIEW.

Smr,—I have read with great interest your article of last week and Mr. Lloyd George’s letter. Neither I nor, I imagine, anyone else will be prepared to give definite answers to all your questions. I shall content myself with advancing three propositions that seem reasonably certain.

First, the abnormal unemployment of the past three years is no ground for misgiving as to our distant future. It can be accounted for fully by causes peculiar to these days—the normal trade cycle, abnormal uncer- tainty as to monetary policy and so as to the course of prices, misdirection of labour to meet war-time needs, crippling of production in Europe and the consequent shrinkage of international trade. To these considera- tions one more, of a different type, may be added. The greatly improved provision for unemployment, through insurance, since the war must lead to a more complete registration of the unemployed, in the trade unions as elsewhere; with equal prosperity we should therefore expect to find recorded a higher ‘‘ unemployed per- centage ’’ than before.

Second, some of the special causes named above. though not permanent, do not admit of speedy cure. It may take ten or fifteen years to absorb the glut of labour in the munition trades; it took at least as long to correct the glutting of the building trades by the boom of 1897-1900. The full restoration of international trade may need a comparable period, though personally I am more optimistic there. It would be easier, however, to guess at the prospects in this field, if we had clearer evidence of what is checking the recovery of foreign trade at the moment. The demand for our exports has fallen greatly, but the price in imports which our customers are prepared to pay for them has risen greatly. The gifted authoress of ‘‘ Irene Iddesleigh ’’ once described an auction at which ‘‘ bidders were numerous and offers low ’’; we have now the contrasted paradox of a trade in which buyers are few and prices soar. What is the explanation? It may be, as you suggest, that we are ourselves unduly restricting the market for our exports by demanding excessive prices. But if so, why do we do this? With raw materials, as you say, up (on an average) only 50 per cent. and wages up 75 per cent., why can we not afford to sell our exports for less than 90 per cent. (on an average) above the pre-war level? Presumably, since we want more trade, we should be prepared to sell more cheaply if we could do so without loss. Has our efficiency really fallen off as much as these figures suggest? Or is there something wrong with the figures themselves? This problem of what is happening in detail to our export trade and why, whether the fault is in ourselves, our stars, or our statistics, is just one of the matters which an ‘‘ Economic General Staff,’”’ such as I suggested in your columns last December, would have investigated, by itself or by commissioning experts. Perhaps some day we shall get a Government less amiably desirous than the present one of being indistinguishable from its predecessors, and prepared in this or some other way to apply science to politics.

Meanwhile, the practical suggestion made by Mr. Lloyd George is clearly on the right lines. For one reason or another we shall in the ordinary course have a great many unemployed on our hands for (say) the next ten years. Most of the other countries of the world have @ similar if smaller glut of ex-munition makers, and will not want to buy what ours can make. If we cannot at the moment sell abroad as much as we used to do or occupy so large a part of our population on manufactur-

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM 75

ing for immediate export, let us overhaul and improve our national equipment of power and transport, of education, of methods of scientific research and experi- ment, and of industrial organization, so as to prepare for greater and cheaper production in future.

Third, while our present distresses need not be taken as heralds of national decay, we should not expect ever to see again the easy riches of Victorian days. The prosperity of a State depends at bottom on two things— the natural resources of its territory and the national character of its people. The natural resources of Britain are certainly not greater than those of many other parts of the world ; we prospered exceedingly in the Victorian Age and became a numerous people simply because we were the first to exploit our coal and iron fully. But we had lost the temporary advantage of that early start on our natural resources even before Victoria went. Whether in future a sufficient share of the better-paid work of the world, in industry, transport trade, and finance, will fall to be done in Britain, so as to maintain in prosperity our present and prospective population, depends on the efficiency of that population and on little else—that is to say, upon the abilities of our people and how we use them. Prosperity in future can only be secured by working for it—by working harder or at least more effectively, more scientifically, more harmoniously, than others ; it will not fall into our laps as of old.

Yours, &c., W. H. Beverince.

THE FACTS OF THE CASE. PROFESSOR BOWLEY’S VIEW.

Smr,—In the consideration of the question how rapidly industry in this country may be expected to reach or pass its pre-war position, or, alternatively, how far below it it is likely to remain, we shall all agree that it is relevant to compare national production and national income now and in 1913 or 1914. No certainty can be reached in such a comparison ; many essential statistical estimates are wanting; the variety of the estimates quoted in your issue of April 12th illustrates the difficulty of the problem.

In the estimate of the working force we are on fairly safe ground. The increase of the population of working age so nearly balances the increase of unemployment that we may estimate that (apart from strikes and lock-outs) the number of persons receiving wages this week is very nearly the same as ten years ago. Further, the average increase of weekly wages for persons in full work is esti- mated as practically equal to the increase of the cost of living to a working-class family, so that (but for a rela- tively slight reduction due to part-time working) the total of the goods that wages will purchase must be very nearly the same as before the war. Within this unchanged total there has been a change in distribution, some classes of workmen having gained and others having lost. Work and wages have not yet been found for a number approximately equal to the increase of the working population.

Though the number of persons at work is numeri- cally nearly the same as before, the number of hours worked ‘has been reduced by about one-tenth, and the actual strength of the workers is lowered a little by the inclusion of some partly disabled men, while among the younger ones many have had an insufficient industrial training. If there were no counterbalancing factors the total output (and with it the bulk of the real national income) would have decreased at least 10 per cent. (For last autumn, when unemployment was more prevalent, the corresponding figure was about 13 per cent.)

;

There is a presumption that a reduction of hours from an excessive number would increase the hourly effort per operative. Evidence is very difficult to obtain, but working-class sentiment has notoriously been opposed to working harder, and it may well be doubted whether any increase on the average has yet been obtained from this cause, except the very small change due to the adop- tion of two instead of three spells in the day where work now begins after instead of before breakfast.

The ‘‘ Economist ’’ (April 5th) is of opinion that in the majority of cases the reductions of hours ‘‘ have not been followed by a corresponding reduction in out- put,’’ mainly owing ‘‘ to the great mechanical develop- ments and improvements in organization in the last decade.”” Though the consumption of coal at home and the goods carried by railways have fallen 6 and 7 per cent., it is held that there has been a compensating saving of waste in the one case, and a substitution of road transport in the other. The view (in support of which few statistics are given) appears to be based on the developments of the metal and engineering trades. Against this may be put the reduced output of coal per miner, and the reduction in output in shipbuilding and pig-iron. Where machinery had already been developed to the utmost, as in sections of the textile trades, or is little used, as in building and an infinity of small indus- tries, in agriculture, at docks, in much railway and road transport, it is very difficult to believe that output per hour has seriously increased. We must take into account the whole of the 16 million (or more) persons earning wages before we can get a balance. In support of the view that accelerated output has not made up, on the whole, any large part of the missing 10 per cent. may be put the estimate that the quantity of materials imported in the last quarter of 1923 was estimated at more than 10 per cent. below the amount ten years before.

One of the pressing needs of that improvement of national equipment that Mr. Lloyd George desires (THE Nation anD THE ATHEN#vM, April 12th) is the provision of information by which our progress can be measured. The estimate here in dispute cannot be settled till the forthcoming Census of Production is available, perhaps three years hence. Other countries have succeeded in assembling sufficient current statistics to enable an adequate judgment of progress to be made at any time.

That average real wages have been so far maintained at the pre-war level for those who are employed, in spite of the reduction of hours, is a notable achievement for the working class, whether it has been obtained by improvement of the rate of output or at the expense of other classes. The latter source is, however, nearly dry, and further progress must depend on an extension of the improvements to which the ‘‘ Economist ’’ refers, on the more hearty co-operation of Labour, and on the methods (which include both) indicated by Mr. Lloyd George.

No doubt, as you say in your issue of the 12th, the difficulties of exportation to disturbed, restricted, and impoverished markets are responsible for most of the present unemployment. But in considering the falling off of quantity, it is not realized that the value of exports of home produce (for example, in the quarter just elapsed) is 50 per cent. more than ten years ago, and that with the smaller rise in price of imports than in exports the latter will pay for nearly the same amount of the former as before. We are, in fact, able to purchase from abroad the food and materials we need, and we have replaced part of the manufactures formerly imported by nearly similar goods produced here. In exports the change to be anticipated is a lower price and larger quantity. There is no evident need that exports should increase pari passu with population ; when they (together

76 THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM

[April 19, 1924.

with the~earnings of shipping and capital invested abroad) tend to fail to pay for food and materials they must be offered more cheaply. Till then there are enough unsatisfied domestic needs to afford a scope for home capital and labour. There is no necessity to wait for the rest of the world to get settled before we get to work. As you pointed out last week, there is nothing sacred in any particular proportion between production for home and for foreign consumption.

So far as the increase of population has accentuated the difficulties of finding employment, we are already in sight of an easement. The reduction in the number of births in Great Britain since 1903 is already resulting in a falling number of recruits to the labour market, and from the time that the diminished numbers of children born during the war come to work, viz., in 1930, there will be no increase of any importance in the number of persons to be employed.

Given a relief from labour troubles and a better appreciation on the part of labour of what wages are possible, there are no insurmountable obstacles to the continuance of the reduction of the number of unem- ployed, who are now no more numerous than in 1909.

Yours, &c., ArtTHur L. Bow.ey.

THE EXPERTS’ REPORTS. Il. THE McKENNA REPORT. By J. M. KEYNES.

HIS Report, of which the object is to estimate the value of the foreign assets owned by individual Germans, is of high general interest, but the practical effect is mainly negative. The Report clears away illusions, and furnishes us with facts. It does not disclose any unsuspected resources immediately available for the payment of Reparations, and it makes no practical suggestion directed to this end. Thus the common-sense view is confirmed, that German foreign assets are moderate in amount and quite beyond the reach of con- fiscatory legislation. The Committee seem to take the view that these assets can only be made available to assist the payment of Reparations in so far as they voluntarily return to Germany; and that the best way to promote this lies in the removal, rather than in the extension, of restrictive legislation. _

The Report arrives at a conclusion, definite within limits, and quotes separate estimates for each of the main items; but—rather oddly—it does not bring the individual items together in any balance-sheet or show precisely how they lead up to the final result. Enough information, however, has been given to enable us to draw up a balance-sheet for ourselves as below, subject to a few dubious entries.

The Committee follow previous investigators in dividing their problem into two parts: first, the remnant of Germany’s pre-war foreign investments, and, second,

the net acquisition of foreign assets since the war by the sale of marks, &c.

I. Ner Foreicn Assets 1n 1919.

(All the following figures are in terms of milliards of gold marks. Those figures which are not separately stated by the Experts are marked with a query.)

Foreign Assets in 1914 28.0

Foreign trade deficit and Profits in occupied

loans to Allies during the

territories during war a. el an -. 152 the war... ... 5.7 to 6.0 Loss by depreciation, liqui- Sale of gold during dation, and sequestration 16.1 the war... en 1.0 Sale of securities during the Income from ~y war abi - me ww» 22 assets during the Net assets remaining in 1919 4.0

war ... we . 1.3 ( ?) 36.3 3.3

——s

Thus Germany’s pre-war investments have fallen from 28 milliards (£1,400,000,000) to about 4 milliards (£200,000,000) ; that is to say, she has lost six-sevenths of them. This estimate of 4 milliards agrees closely with the figure which I published in 1919 in “ The Economic Con- sequences of the Peace’’ (pp. 161-168), where I gave 5 milliards for the maximum size of the remnant and 2 to 5 milliards for the maximum which the Reparation Commission could reckon on from this source. It is higher than a@ figure which I published in September, 1922, as applicable to that date (namely, } to 1 milliard), and somewhat higher also than the figure of 2 to 3 milliards, given by the American Institute of Economics in their recent volume “ Germany’s Capacity to Pay.” These discrepancies are explained by the McKenna Report starting from a higher initial figure for the pre- war period. Hitherto 20 to 25 milliards has been the generally accepted figure (I have summarized the various pre-war estimates—“ Economic Consequences of the Peace,” p. 162), whereas the McKenna Report sets out, as we have seen, from a figure of 28 milliards. Since this estimate appears to have been made on the authority of the German Government itself, it must be accepted. The difference seems to be due to the McKenna figure (1) including the value of foreign partnerships and participa- tions and not merely Stock Exchange securities, (2) esti- mating the value of securities at their face value, and (3) giving the gross total without deduction for property in Germany owned abroad. After allowance under these

heads, the Experts are very close indeed to the earlier estimates cited above.

II. Net Post-war Acquisitions.

The McKenna figures for the post-war period, set forth in the same manner, are as follows:—

Sale to foreigners of Adverse trade balance

mark balances and and cash payments to banknotes «+ 76 to 8.7 Allies since the war... 9to 10 Sale of gold... .. 1.5

Foreign Notes in Ger- n

_Many ee a we £3 Net acquisition of foreign assets since the war... 1.7 to 3.8

Sale of German pro- perty and German securities to foreigners... on a8 Remittances, tourists, shipping, &c. (net), German private pro- perty in ceded ter- ritory was «. 1.3 to 3.3 ( ?)

11.9 to 15

11.9 t0 15

These estimates will finally dispel the legendary figures which had been accepted by the credulous. It is curious to recall that so recently as August 29th, 1922, the ‘‘ Times ’’ in a leading article estimated at eight or nine hundred millions sterling the sum “‘ safely invested in foreign securities or lodged in foreign banks ”’ on German account. ;

Remembering the comments with which my own estimates of these figures were received in certain quarters, I am justified in comparing them with the final verdict. In an article published in the ‘‘ Manchester Guardian Commercial ’’ Reconstruction Supplement, on September 28th, 1922, I estimated that by June 30th, 1922 (by which date indeed the bulk of the business had been done), the sales to foreigners of paper mark balances and banknotes and German property and securities amounted to 9 milliard gold marks; the McKenna Report puts the figure up to December 31st, 1923 (eighteen months later), at between 9.1 and 10.2 milliard gold marks. (It appears, however, that a greater proportion than I reckoned was held in bank balances and a smaller proportion in notes, property, and securities.) I estimated the adverse trade balance and cash payments to the Allies at 8 milliards; the Committee put the figure at 9 to 10 milliards eighteen months later. I estimated the value of the foreign notes

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM 77

held in Germany at 1 milliard; the Committee put the figure at 1.2 milliards—again for the later date. Allow- ing for the difference in date and for the fact that I did not reckon private German property remaining in ceded territory, Silesia, Posen, Danzig, &c., as repre- senting new acquisitions of foreign capital, the general accuracy of these conclusions—conclusions reached inevitably on data far more imperfect than those avail- able to the Committee—is narrowly confirmed.

If the Dawes Report opens a new chapter, the McKenna Report closes one of the strangest in modern history,—a most perfect example of tragic irony and the turning of the tables on those guilty of the excessive. For five years Germany’s victors have squeezed the lemon with both hands, have heard the “‘ pips squeak ’’ and felt their own hands ache, have seen a trickle flowing into the bowl,—only to discover in the end that every drop has come, not from the lemon, but from the hands them- selves. What Germany has appeared to pay in Repara- tions is nearly equal to what the foreign world has sub- soribed in return for worthless marks. The same illusion, the same ill-calculating ignorance, which generated oppressive and impossible demands, have brought forth also these vast losses, before which the losses of all previous Bubbles are nothing. A million foreigners, we are told, have acquired bank balances in Germany, and each of these accounts has cost its owner on the average about £400. It is these lively gentlemen who have paid the bill so far. These are the rich ones,—the bankers, the financial experts. Beyond them are the many mil- lions, the housemaids and the hairdressers, who have bought a few shillings’ worth or a few pounds’ worth of crisp Reichsbank emissions, fresh with the press of ink, —until all the world knows the smell of a new German note.

It is not reasonable to believe that this prodigious process has been brought about by the conscious guile and subtlety of the German people. The same sink, which has swallowed up the voluntary, gambling surplus of the foreign world, has swallowed up also the indispensable, relied-on savings of the mass of the German people. Ger- many has been the scene of the most extensive redistribu- tion of national wealth from the many to the few ever experienced within a like space of time, until she has become the outstanding example of distributive injustice. The death of the great Stinnes, who saw first and most passionately the glorious chances which civil disturbance, whether it be political or economic, must always offer to the bold and debonair freebooter, brings down the curtain with a just appropriateness. The extravaganza is over, and Common Sense resumes her quiet Sway.

ENGLAND’S GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND.

THE BEECH LEAF.

HAVE heard of only one Milsom about here— i Gilbert Milson, who lives with his two sisters in

one of the worst cottages in the hamlet. But the churchyard is full of Milsoms, farmer Milsoms with headstones for which good prices were paid. The Milsoms have died out.

Similarly, we have only one Gundry to give a thought to a score or two of dead Gundrys, lying with the Milsoms on the pleasant south side of the church— our labourers have been buried on the bleak north side.

It seems almost indelicate to speak of Miss Gundry as Phoebe. She was born into a ‘‘ genteel ’’ world. Her “ mamma ’’—the wife of a well-off miller, maltster and farmer—died of ‘‘ decline ’’ when Phoebe was seven. The only other child, tepid James, was two. Solid comfort was the portion of the Gundrys. Within ten

miles six farms were owned by uncles or cousins. “Mamma ”’ left gentle memories, a spinet, sewed pictures, some Chippendale, and many well-filled chests of drawers scented with musk.

When the miller-maltster-farmer himself died, after being nursed by Phoebe from the time she left ‘‘ finishing school ’’ till she was thirty, he left all in the care of James. Phoebe, who revered men, never doubted the wisdom of this. James married. Phoebe began a life of long visits to relatives.

For ten of her years she ‘‘ waited on ’’ Aunt Raven, the widow of “mamma’s’’ doctor brother. Aunt Raven had a sealskin coat, also a high dog-cart with a faint red line on its deep-blue surface. She lacked humour and died importantly. In her will was this item: ““ To my niece, Phoebe Gundry, ten pounds and my gold drop ear-rings.’” Phoebe was filled with surprise, pleasure, gratitude, and an earnest desire to ‘‘ mourn ”’ her aunt becomingly.

During the quarter of a century following the death of Phoebe’s father, brother James managed to fritter away house, mill, malting and farm. He then set up in a small way of business in Islington. In a letter to Phoebe explaining that her share of her father’s estate had gone, he wrote pompously that she “need not be afraid of anything happening ’’ to her while he lived. But neither then nor later did he send her any money.

By this time every one of the half-dozen local Gundrys had come to grief or moved away. There remained only Phoebe and a widowed aunt, Mrs. Bunt. By a series of misfortunes such as had pursued brother James, Mrs, Bunt had lost all but her pine furniture, upholstered in horse-hair, and china and other effects that went admirably with it. A son in America sent her four dollars a week. With this income and Phoebe in attendance, Aunt Bunt deposited herself in a rent-free alms-cottage on land that her husband’s people had farmed for five generations.

Aunt Raven had been exacting, but there had been compensations in comfort, elegance, and repose in living with her. To wait on Aunt Bunt, who had a perfect digestion, a small mind and a big body, meant the surrender of all independence of action. ‘“ Where have you been a-gaddin’, gell?’’ was her continual greeting to Phoebe. “ Upstairs, dear Aunt.’’ “ An’ whatever can you be stayin’ upstairs for, all by yourself, and me in my second-best cap at three in the after- noon ? ”’

Aunt Bunt’s claim to distinction was the length of her mortal life. Unconsciousness of emotional, intel- lectual, or physical strain brought her to ninety-four. In addition to doing all the work of the cottage, Phoebe had for years dressed and undressed a woman stronger than herself.

After her aunt’s death Phoebe lived for a time miraculously. There were a few pounds which she and Mrs. Bunt had managed to lay aside, and there was a small benefaction which a school friend of Phoebe’s began to send punctually every quarter. <A beautifully expressed letter acknowledged each instalment of the gift.

A comfortable day dawned for Phoebe and other timid souls when at seventy she could put pride away and meekly claim her old-age pension. A cousin who loves bright garments, and a more distant connection whose spirit is expressed in rusty black and thick grey, supply Phoebe’s wardrobe. In spite of failing sight, the grateful recipient, with painstaking neatness and a bor- rowed fashion paper, reforms these garments to her taste. Second-hand shoes might have been a greater difficulty than discarded clothing. Phoebe’s thin elegant foot is never easy in cast-offs. But she will say, “ Look how little I really need walk.’’ Until brother James died Phoebe squeezed out of her small funds a pair of high- heeled shoes for the visits which, on his rare invitations, she paid to London—without having the price of her

78 THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM

[April 19, 1924.

tickets sent her. When James died and left her an allowance for mourning, Phoebe wept sore for “ dear brother.’’

If you were in our hamlet on a Sunday at church- time you would easily pick out Phoebe by her walk. She still points her toes as she was trained to do at the school that taught her deportment and riding. Of the ringleted girl of those long-gone schooldays there is left but the faintest shadow. The slimness has become emaciation. The now thin and faded ringlets are packed under a “cloche’’ hat that looks ludicrously modern on a Victorian figure. Even when Phoebe was seventeen and wore muslin frills and pink ribbons her short-sighted hazel eyes were red-rimmed and drawn-looking. To-day she is almost blind. Phoebe has suffered so long from pain in her eyes and her head that she says, “ It makes no matter now, thank you very much; I am quite used to it.’’ In her whole life Phoebe has never grumbled nor complained, never resented Bunt or James or any of her lot. Her ready response to an apology for neglect or forgetfulness of herself or her needs is always, “ Pray do not mention it.’? Her preface to every plan, however simple, is “If all’s well.’’

Many of Phoebe’s years have gone, as we have seen, in caring for the more or less ungrateful old or elderly. She was deprived of her portion after a fashion which Mrs. Henry Wood has described for a curious posterity. “Old maid ’’ was a real reproach in her generation. Now that she is aged and almost sightless no relative does for her what she did so exquisitely for her own kin. In a town her lot would be hard. Here in the country the world seems kinder. Phoebe sits rent free, but in some dignity of general regard and family furnishings, which include a sewed picture that first simpered on a drawing-room wall of the seventeenth century. Old Jonas Budd, who worked for a time for her father in the days of plenty, digs her garden for love or duty, or both; but nowa- days he cannot get the better of the ‘‘ squitch,’’ and the garden could do with at least two loads of manure. For the smallest imaginable sum an old woman washes for Phoebe the sheets, the wringing of which is now beyond her. Miss Hinkson calls regularly with flowers from her gay garden. The rector’s wife invites Phoebe to tea once a year. A newcomer to the parish includes her in various gatherings, and has at times replenished her coal and wood shed. Farmer Bloss’s widow sends Sunday dinners, excusing the ‘‘ liberty ’’ on the plea that “‘ it makes no mite of difference to our joint, and saves Miss Gundry messing around on a Sunday.’’ Knowing nothing of snobbery, Phoebe’s sweetly meek spirit accepts favours graciously.

Phoebe’s biggest thorn was her late alms-cottage neighbour, lusty, lively, ill-tongued widow Bones. ‘* Ye may be gentry-born,”’ says I to she, “‘ but ye ’ave come down. An’ my son Tom, with his plumbin’ business up in Lunnon, can walk about with his hands in his pockets and send me ten shellins whenever he likes.’’ Poor Phoebe used to blush pitifully every time that terrifyirig voice intruded on her. But never once did she show ill feeling. Rather did she show the crusty old woman kindness, tending her when sick, and writing her letters to “‘My son Tom.’’ Perhaps if she had grasped the nettle of envy she would have conquered. But gentleness and long-suffering are fundamental in Phoebe. .

Sometimes, however, she dwells on a_ few moments in her quiet life, when she suffered a humilia- tion that, as she says, can still make her hot at night if she is lying awake. During the time of the late rector, Phoebe was invited with other grown-ups to attend a magic-lantern meeting for the school children. At the end of the entertainment there was a distribution of buns and tea. By an oversight Phoebe was given a cup of tea but no bun, She drank the tea and had just given up her cup when there was a second distribution of buns. She accepted one. Alas! she did not know that this second

distribution was to mark the close of the evening’s programme. The parson at once, to Phoebe’s dismay, pronounced the benediction. What was poor Phoebe to do with her bun? No adult but herself had had a bun of the second distribution. Phoebe could not swallow her bun whole. Good manners forbade her to pocket it. She could not return it, for the carriers of the bun baskets were back in their places. It might be seemly for children to leave a treat, bun in hand, but not for the grown-up, genteel Phoebe. In her distress she furtively hid the bun in her handkerchief. But how could she, so incommoded, go forward and shake hands with the rector’s wife? She slunk from the room, feeling that every adult eye and many childish eyes were upon her. As she says, “If only I had thought of giving the bun to a child!’’ ‘ But,’’ she adds humbly, “I never do think of the right thing to do or say at an awkward moment until the day afterwards or in the middle of the night.”’

Like a clinging beech leaf in winter, Phoebe lives on. She is now in her eighties. Friends prove kinder to her than her relatives ever were, and her unselfishness and charity of thought enrich the hamlet.

H. C.

LIFE AND POLITICS

HE Easter recess finds Mr. MacDonalg still at the helm and bis Government unchanged. The trial run has left the Ministerial crew somewhat battered but not disgraced. Two excellent achievements stand to their credit—the peace with Russia and the denunciation of the Singapore scheme. In the domestic field the record has been poor, and the attitude of mind in regard to such matters as the Rent question has been narrow and unprofitable. This has been due mainly to two causes, the disinclination to admit the appearance of being under any obligation to the Liberals, and the neces- sity of making demonstrations that are intended to keep the Communist wing quiet. Mr. MacDonald has done better outside the House than in, where his manner is apt to be irascible and, as in the case of the speech on the Evictions Bill fiasco, disingenuous; but he has confirmed his position as the real and not merely the nominal head of the Government. It is clear, however, that if the Government is to survive—and there seems no reason why it should not survive for a year, for no one wants to dis- place it or to have another election—some reconstruction of the Ministry will be necessary. Mr. MacDonald himself cannot continue to carry the double burden, and he will need to find a Foreign Secretary or a leader of the House who will relieve him much more than is the case at present. Unfortunately, his range of choice in either respect is very limited. Mr. Thomas has the necessary agility and readi- ness for leadership in the House, but he is not loved by the I.L.P. section, while Mr. Wheatley, who has been much the most striking Parliamentary success, is ruled out by his close association with the extreme Left. In regard to the Foreign Office, there is no visible substitute, and it would be disastrous if Mr. MacDonald surrendered his hold upon European affairs at this most critical stage of development.

* * *

If Mr. Snowden wants to bring in a popular Budget he will not omit to make a savage cut at the sugar tax. No impost is more bitterly felt by the poor, for sugar is an essential food in which economy can only be exercised within severe limits. There is no commodity of general necessity which has been kept at such an extravagant

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THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM 79

level above pre-war prices. A countrywoman who was showing me the other day the promise of her fruit trees and talking of her jam-making prospects complained that sugar which used to cost l?d. a lb. before the war now cost 74d. An appreciation of 400 per cent. is unex- ampled, and in the case of an essential food, especially of children, is worse than inexcusable—it is cruel. * * *

There seems general agreement among representa- tive Germans whom I have seen of late that the coming election will leave the Socialist Party in a very depleted state. In the present Chamber they are easily the most numerous party, with something like 180 members; but it is not expected that they will return more than 100 strong, and possibly even only 80 strong. Not much change is anticipated in the Centre Party, for though I understand that one of the tendencies of the time is a distinct movement towards Rome, it does not touch the mass of the people in a way that will affect the poli- tical complexion of things. Nor is it likely that the loss of the Socialists will be the gain of the Democrats, who are suffering from the general depression that afflicts the Liberal movement in Europe in these days. The Com- munists will probably improve their position slightly, but it is the parties of the Right which will come back masters of the situation. A wave of nationalism is sweeping over the country, and it is affecting the working classes, who have hitherto been solidly regimented under the Socialist banner. It is the result of the policy of the past four years, and especially of the Ruhr chapter of that policy, which, in creating the impression that nothing less than the political and economic serfdom of Germany is the aim of France, has aroused a feeling which is compared with that which spread over Germany after Jena. This change in the spirit of the working classes is an ominous fact. They had no enthusiasm for Kaiserism, and at the end of the war threw that incubus away with a sense of universal relief, under the belief that a new career of freedom was before the country. Five years of disillusion have done their work, and though monarchism shows no signs of revival an intense nationalism pervades all classes, and Socialism, as the representative of the international idea, has suffered

a killing frost. : * * *

It is to be hoped that the coal inquiry will probe to the root of the problem. There are coalfields in the country in which the miner can hew five tons of coal in a day, and there are other mines in which the miner does well to hew a ton. In the one case the miner is well paid and the companies make profits so vast that they dare not distribute them openly, but apply them to new developments and capital appreciation. In the other the miner is ill-paid and the companies get a bare return. The poor mines keep the price of coal high, the wages of the miner low, and the industry in continual ferment. The public gets no benefit from the cheaply produced coal of the rich mines, because the poor mine dictates the market and pours the surplus of the rich mine into private pockets. The price of coal is one of the chief causes of the depression of industry, as well as of the high cost of living, and until it is reduced the great staple trades of the country will continue to be handicapped. There is no cure either for the discontents of the miners or for the extravagant cost of fuel except the pooling of the national coal resources, their common administration under statutory regulations, and the transfer of some portion of the enormous profits of the rich eoalfields to the reduction of the price of coal to the

consumer. Even the more enlightened coal-owners them- selves admit that with a reasonable national policy the miners should be better paid and the price of coal should be reduced by many shillings a ton—a reduction which would change the whole complexion of industries depen-

dent for their production on coal. + * .

Sir John Simon’s plea at Chester for the maintenance of the civilities of Parliament was badly needed. The temper of the House has sadly deteriorated of late, and the Amery-Buchanan incident was only a symptom of the general growth of ill manners. No one expects the House of Commons to be conducted with the solemnity of a Sun- day School, and a witty interruption is always welcomed, but the practice of throwing abusive epithets across the House, of tearing a passion of often cheap indignation to tatters, and of returning ill-tempered replies to civil questions is an offence not merely against the best tradi- tions of the House, but against the conduct of business. I am bound to say that some of the members of the Government do not give a very happy lead in this matter. Mr. Clynes is always courteous and civil, and Mr. Thomas has a breeziness that clothes his retorts with good humour; but there are others who are easily and un- accountably nettled, and I am personally sorry to include among them my old friend Mr. Snowden. Few men in the House are more respected than he is, and certairly no one has had less reason to complain of the bearing of the House towards him than he has had ; but on the Front Bench he has developed a waspishness in reply as urrea- sonable as it is inexplicable. His angry retort to a civil question by Mr. Masterman—“ My right hon. friend can understand from the answer what his intelligence erables him to comprehend ’’—surprised the House all the mure because it was in precisely the same terms of one he ad made not long before to Col. Gretton, which led, I believe, to the threatened resignation of that gentleman from a committee as a form of protest. A joke may bear repetition, but a snub that is reduced to a formula is intolerable.

* * *

I am glad to see that the protest made in these columns some weeks ago against the monstrous adver- tisements of beer, whisky, &c., that cover the whole sky- line of the Wembley Exhibition has been taken up in many quarters, and there is every reason to expect that when the King performs the opening ceremony on Wednesday next the offence will have been removed. It is astonishing that the promoters should have thought that such an affront could be tolerated. The day-and- night spurt of the last ten days has wrought wonders in the Exhibition, and the public will find it much nearer completion in all its details than seemed humanly possible a month ago.

A. G. G.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

CLYDESIDE. Turspay, Aprin 157TH. H ELL, as Shelley might have remarked, is a city

much like Glasgow. The definition applies as

much to the horrors of wealth in Kelvinside as to the horrors of poverty in Gorbals. The mixture of races, Lowland Scot and West Highlander, Ulsterman and Irishman; the intolerable nature of the housing accommodation, unequalled throughout Britain; the inordinate consumption of liquor, both cause and effect of such accommodation ; the fierce rivalry of class against

80 THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM

[April 19, 1924.

class in the passionate pursuit of gain; all the squalor and riches in an unequalled centre of the struggle for existence, have proved ready material for the preaching of a defiant Socialism, unknown elsewhere. Inflamed by intelligence above the average and an intellectual pro- letariat, it has bred a movement which has spread from this centre through all the surrounding industrial dis- tricts, and even finds some echo in the tranquil homes of England. That movement has sent some of its ablest representatives to Parliament. They are simple men, easily aroused, passionate fighters, many of whom are seemingly willing to make the House of Commons as much a bear garden as the Glasgow City Council. Some of them have been in prison for their opinions. Some are now Ministers on the Front Bench. Some have com- bined both experiences. They have considerable con- tempt for their Trade Unionist colleagues, and an increas- ing contempt for this Government, which, as one confided to me, has ‘“‘no guts.’ They put Mr. Ramsay MacDonald into power, and still believe in him, though with some hesitations as to the company he keeps.

They fight in Glasgow with equal ardour Conserva- tism and Communism; for Liberalism there first went Coalitionist, and then perished. They still maintain Puritan standards. Most of them are teetotallers. The definition of London given to me by one would probably be endorsed by all: ‘‘ Sodom and Gomorrah.”’ ,

There are many members who have been converted by their antics to advocacy of Scottish Home Rule, pro- vided that means the creation of a separate ‘‘ Scottish Free State.’’ I find them, however, a welcome relief from the comparative dullness of the life of Parliament. When, like Mr. Wheatley, they are called to high office, they immediately become businesslike, self-restrained, courteous to all. Not all of them are of pure Scottish

blood. Mr. Shinwell, the Minister of Mines, is a Jew, .

and supposed to be able, though some regard him as a rather sinister figure. The chief disturbers are Mr. Neil Maclean, whose temper is easily aroused; Mr. Maxton, who, I should think, has some foreign blood in him, and looks delicate and fragile, with a body, too, wasted by fury or sympathy; Mr. David Kirkwood, who gazes gloomily in front of him with folded arms until suddenly aroused to shout out insults in an unknown tongue; and Mr. Buchanan, good-looking, red-haired, blue-eyed, who looks as if he has stepped straight out of an English public school. Connected with these are such men as Mr. Tom Johnston, the editor of ‘‘ Forward,’’ the ablest and sanest of the Socialists outside the Govern- ment, who should be within it; Mr. Weir, universally popular, a Highlander from the Hebrides, and now Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; and many less conspicuous lights, such as Mr. Hardie, brother of Keir Hardie, who are popular everywhere outside the actual debating chamber, and sometimes also within. Undoubtedly these form a group far above the average in intelligence and energy; and a group which is determined not to compromise with its principles. Most of the men mentioned make interruptions which, if too frequent, are always intelligent, if not always intelligible. They only occasionally explode when they lose all self-control ; and that is normally because, though not lacking in their own quaint humour, they have little of the English sense of fun. They take themselves per- haps too seriously. There are others of the Labour Party, better left nameless. who yammer with indistinguishable noises and discordant cries, indicative of disagreement or bad temper. These are far thore disconcerting to the average speaker than the definite, if defiant, interrup- tions of the Clydeside ‘‘ Mountain.’’ One comes to have more sympathy with these than with the mass who blindly support a Government which, like the Church of Laodicea, appears at present “‘ neither hot nor cold.”’ They have their tormentors, indeed, who set them- selves deliberately to goad them into rage; and generally succeed in their desires. First of these I should put Sir Kingsley Wood. A short, stoutish Wesleyan solicitor, with a cherubic face decorated by pincenez, always bland,

plausible, and self-possessed, always there, and always with a vast mass of unchallengeable knowledge, he has easily become the Prince of Obstructors. Clydeside gazes dourly at him, seeing a type it has never dealt with before. It has written down that in Woolwich, as in Denmark, ‘‘ one may smile and smile and be a villain.’’ When interrupted, he smiles patiently, and then resumes his argument. When called ‘‘ Jackass,’’ ‘‘ Vulture,”’ “* Liar,’’ ‘“‘ Lawyer,’’ or any similar endearing epithet, he smiles pleasantly and continues. He assiduously gives way to any hubbub or ‘‘ Point of order,’’ and when it is over hops up again to resume his narrative. Upstairs, in the orgy which is humorously termed the Committee which is considering the Rent Restrictions Bill (they are now considering, I believe, an amendment to the amend- ment to omit the first word of Clause I.), he reigns supreme. With Lord Eustace Percy, he torments the Labour benches. He will make a long, plausible, irre- levant speech, frequently interrupted, with an aspect of earnestness and solemnity, until called to order. This will excite a dozen Labour Members to compete in furious reply; after they have exhausted the vocabulary of vituperation he will then point out to them cheerfully that they have exhausted some forty minutes of valuable time on their own Bill. And so the merry work continues.

Last week he launched a bomb which ultimately exploded in the ‘‘ Scene in the House.’’ He ‘had dis- covered that eviction orders were being served, in the name of the First Commissioner of Works, on a Govern- ment estate in Woolwich. He forthwith impeached Mr. Jowett in grand, eloquent manner, with apparent indignation, and without a vestige of a smile. He used the very words of Mr. Wheatley’s emotional appeals. He imitated the very Wheatley manner. He again and again simulated indignation, sorrow, and astonishment that ‘‘ his right honourable friend ’’ should turn ‘‘ these poor ‘people ”’ into the street. Mr. Jowett was held up, as the Glasgow landlords are being held up, as a monu- ment of hard-hearted iniquity. Mr. Jowett, the kindest- hearted of men, who would not evict a fly, foolishly took all this ‘‘ rag ’’ (to which every Minister is occasionally subjected) quite seriously, and read out the official defence of his Department’s action (of which he probably knew nothing). This drove Clydeside into fury. They contained themselves until little Mr. Amery, quite gratuitously interfering, and peering up at them through his spectacles just over the Box, denounced their ‘‘ sob stuff.’’ Then the storm broke. Mr. Maxton kept up a continuous cry of ‘‘ Dog! Dog! Dog!’ Mr. Buchanan suddenly exploded into ‘‘ Swine! Gutter- snipe! ’’ The adjournment arrived amid general con- fusion. There was no “‘ fight,’’ as has been said in the newspapers. I was present at the fracas, and can bear witness. Mr. Buchanan, advised that he should apolo- gize, strolled over to Mr. Amery with his hands in his pockets, with intention to do so. The valiant Amery immediately struck him in the face. That was the only blow struck ; although Clydeside was mad with fury, and a real conflict was only averted by the efforts of Mr. Pringle and Mr. Ernest Brown on the one side, Com- mander Eyres-Monsell and Viscount Curzon on the other. Next day there were apologies all round, and with a solemn warning from the Speaker, the incident closed. I thought Mr. Amery was unwise to give a rather boastful interview to the evening papers, and Mr. Buchanan wise to keep silent. His apology was more frank and complete (and the House loves a frank apology), and I think the honours rested rather with the Member for Gorbals than with the late Scholar of Balliol and Fellow of All Souls. Anyhow, Clydeside is thgre and to be reckoned with. It is wearied, as all the House is wearied, with infinite talk and no progress made. Two days have been spent in voting travelling expenses to members; rather chivalrously sup by Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Stanley Baldwin, against some rather ungracious speeches from rich men. I think everyone is glad that the first period of strain and stress is over, although the future is nothing but darkness and conjecture.

M.P.

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM - 81

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LIBERALISM AND LABOUR.

Sm,—We all honour and admire “A. G. G.” for the splendid service he has rendered to every progressive cause, but I confess I am a little puzzled by the nagging tone that sometimes creeps into his criticism of the Government. “It is floundering on rather forlornly.” Its prestige is “at the lowest possible ebb.” Mr. Clynes is “a rather pitiable figure.” It is doubtful ‘‘ whether the Government can long survive.” And soon. I suppose the real trouble is revealed in his complaint that the attitude of some members of the Government towards tho Liberals is one of ungracious- ness bordering on the uncouth. But is the attitude of the Liberals to the Government so remarkably friendly? Is it not occasionally rather obstructive and malicious? And is it not true that at the General Election certain Liberals accepted Tory support in order to keep Labour out? The plain, simple fact is that Liberals are keeping the Govern- ment in power because it suits them to do so. They know that if they precipitate a General Election they are (to quote the political correspondent of the “Sunday Times ’’) “almost certain to be ground to pieces between the other two parties.” And if, as “A. G. G.” asserts, the Govern- ment floundered over the Rents Bill, how would he describe the pitiful exhibition the Liberals made of themselves? Half of them (including most of the leaders) abstained from voting ; fifty supported the Government, knowing that the proper place to alter and improve the Bill was in Committee, and twenty voted with the Tories, thus enabling them to destroy the whole Bill. Does that situation fill “A. G. G.” with pride and satisfaction?

My own view is that we have the best and most efficient Government England has known for many years. But to be scrupulously fair, I will call a witness who might be expected to eclipse ‘A. G. G.” in unfriendly criticism of a Labour Government. In yesterday’s ‘‘Observer’’ I find the highest praise for this “strong, capable Administra- tion.” ‘Its positive acts have increased the public con- fidence. . . . The first Labour Prime Minister has preserved unimpaired the lustre of that great and splendid office. . . . Mr. J. H. Thomas is an unmistakable success. .. . Mr. Arthur Henderson is a valuable asset for the Government. Steady-going, competent, cool, and prudent, he is proving an admirable Home Secretary.... Mr. Tom Shaw as Minister of Labour is dcing magnificently. . . . Mr. William Graham is one of the best Financial Secretaries to the Treasury we have had in the past dozen years. ... Mr. Rhys Davies has won golden opinions as Under-Secretary at the Home Office.” And so forth. I fear “A. G. G.” is a little difficult to please. What does he really want? Does he want Sir Hamar Greenwood back? Is he anxious to restore Mr. Lloyd George to power?—Yours, &c.,

F. A. A.

April 14th, 1924.

NEWSPAPER FINANCE.

Sm,—As a member of the London Stock Exchange of several years’ standing, I write to endorse heartily your out- spoken criticism of the recent issue of ‘‘ Allied Newspapers ”’ Preference shares. Almost alone amongst the Press you have taken: up an independent standpoint, and your very lucid article deserves the gratitude of the public.

It may interest you to know that many of the leading firms of the London Stock Exchange deplored the fact that such an obviously unsatisfactory issue was sponsored in any responsible quarter. In justice to them, I may state that, from my personal knowledge, a most hostile reception was given by them to it, and, as you say, it was only the enormous publicity supplied by a very generously subsidized Press, a subsidy sufficiently large to ‘stifle criti- cism, that made the issue an apparent success. Leading dealers in the industrial market of the L. S. Exchange refused the underwriting, which was “hawked” round for days before the issue was made at increasingly generous rates. The lists seem to have been closed prematurely on the day of issue, probably to prevent withdrawals, otherwise the promoters would not have failed to make much capital out of an announcement that the issue was oversubscribed..

When dealings commenced in the Stock Exchange, the market was deluged with selling orders, and, but for the fact that substantial supporting orders were immediately forth- coming from interested quarters, a heavy discount would have been established, and sales could only have been effected with considerable difficulty. In the market it is estimated that, to date, at least a hundred thousand shares have been taken from enlightened sellers in an attempt— in my opinion foredoomed to failure—to support the market.

I might say that your issue of the 5th inst. was widely circulated on the L. S. Exchange, and the article in question heartily endorsed by nearly everyone.

The whole affair speaks volumes for the gullibility of the Public, and the power of the Press !—Yours, &c.,

MEMBER OF THE LonDON Stock ExcHANGE.

April 12th, 1924.

A BYRON MEMORIAL.

Sir,—You were good enough to publish last month a letter signed by a number of eminent literary men appealing for funds with which to establish a Byron Memorial feeding centre among the five hundred thousand refugees in Greece.

I am glad to be able to inform you that my Committee has been able to send a first instalment of £1,000 to Greece, with which a centre will be established where 1,000 refugees will be fed for four months.

While I would ask you to allow me to thank those of your readers who have been good enough to respond to this appeal, I nevertheless hope that the incidence of the actual centenary this week will induce those who have not yet responded to help us to extend the scope of this centre to a number more commensurate with the honour in which the name of Lord Byron is held by the Greek people. I shall be most happy to receive further donations at the Offices of the Imperial War Relief Fund, General Buildings, Aldwych, W.C.2.—Yours, &c.,

Mavrice BonHam CARTER, Hon. Treasurer, Imperial War Relief Fund. April 14th, 1924.

LORD BYRON. By -PROFESSOR H. J. 0. GRIERSON.

it | ‘HIS is probably the last of the anniversaries which have succeeded one another so rapidly— Keats, Shelley, Byron dying in the inverse order of their ages. The older poets lived on if their work was already done, and we shall have to leave another generation to commemorate the death of Words- worth and the publication of the long-delayed “ Prelude.” The poet whose name we recall today is not quite of the same order and kind as Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth. The anniversary of Byron’s death will appeal to a wider but a less select circle. To their names honour was paid chiefly by poets and lovers of poetry for its own sake. “ Poets alone,’’ says an old Jndian writer, “and not the common herd, are moved by the sweet notes of poetry; it is the sea that the rays of the moon stir to motion, not the water in wells.’’ Their names were not “‘ received with plaudits in the Capitol,’”’ as Byron’s will be to-day at Athens, for Byron is a name in the history of Europe spiritual and political ; he is still a living personality to many who read but little poetry. j To Byron’s acute, clear mind the mystical philo- sophy which is at the heart of romanticism was alto- gether foreign. He never approached the inner shrine of romanticism where the mood of mere rebellion begins to give way to dimmer or clearer intuitions of a new and positive vision, a faith to take the place of that which the spirit has rejected, the dawning of a new comprehension of the magic and beauty of nature, the

82 THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM

fApril 19, 1924.

mystery and beauty of human nature, full as, it is of “ misery, heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression.’’

It was not in poetry that Byron found a “ way,” an escape. from the ‘‘ slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ but in the “‘ way ’’ we commemorate to-day. He gained his victory over life by laying down his life for the cause of humanity and of the country which inspired the purest strain in his earliest and latest poetry. We have read much recently of the last tragic year of Byron’s life in the works of Mr. Edgeumbe and Mr. Nicolson. The latter has laid great stress on what, after Gibbon, we might call the “ secondary causes ’’of the adventure; and certainly Byron had more motives than one for wishing to escape from the stale and unprofitable life he was living in Italy to one of action, adventure, and restored self-respect. But from the moment he landed at Zante these secondary causes, the purely per- sonal motives, became of trifling importance, things of interest to a valet rather than a historian, so entirely justified—as Mr. Nicolson admits—was the line of action he pursued in waiting at Zante and calling on the Greek chiefs to unite, in throwing in his lot with Mavrocordato and the Western Government, and in refusing to join Trelawny and Stanhope in their buc- caneering or Benthamite adventures. His conduct was marked by magnanimity, wisdom, courage, and endur- ance. He earned in Greece the right to have his life judged by his virtues as well as his vices, his achieve- ment as well as his failure. If Shelley is the saint of the romantic poets of humanitarianism, Byron died the death of the martyr. One can but wish that Lady Byron, touched by the narrative of his suffering and

death, had resolved to preserve the silence which had

done her honour, and would have done her greater honour. But magnanimity is a rare virtue.

Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats seem to us to-day purer and more essentially romantic poets than Byron, but to his own contemporaries throughout Europe Byron was the romantic poet par excellence, the fullest expression of the romantic, that is the modern spirit, the spirit which, awakening at the Renaissance—how much there is akin between Marlowe and Byron, Bruno and Shelley !—had been checked by the religious reaction, had gathered strength again during the century of the Aufklirung, and at the close broks forth demanding a transvaluation of all the traditional, accepted values in religion, politics, morals, and art, and has been at work ever since. Byron had predecessors (as he has had successors) who seem to us deeper thinkers and finer artists than he—Rousseau, Goethe of ‘‘ Werther,’’ and Chateaubriand, who declares not unjustly that “ Childe Harold est de la famille de René ’’; but none of these made the same appeal to the imagination and heart of Europe as the young poet of ‘‘ Childe Harold ’’ and ‘* The Giaour,’’ ‘‘ Manfred ’’ and ‘‘ Prometheus,’’ and the personal lyrics, for it is this younger Byron rather than the greater author of ‘‘ Don Juan ’’ who was the idol of the romantics.

The fact is, in part, a compliment to the superior power of poetry, but there were other causes. The very negativity of Byron’s thought, the fact that he seemed able only to destroy, of which Goethe complained—and Byron had no more appreciative and generous critic —was for a time a source of strength because the roman- tic movement was a revolt, a passionate denial, and a mood of revolt will hold together many who are bound to part company once reconstruction begins. Words- worth’s naturalism, Shelley’s transcendental humani- tarianism, Goethe’s Spinozistic universalism—all these were bound in time to make appeal, but it would be to different individuals and groups, | Everyone in

Europe who was discontented found in Byron’s vehement and coloured, if often turbid, poetry, an echo of his own craving heart. Moreover, negative and positive are relative terms. To emancipate is so far to recreate; to deny is to affirm. Byron’s heroes, who seemed to the Victorian age such melodramatic absurdities, contrasting so ill with the Enoch Ardens and blameless King Arthurs and chivalrous Caponsacchis of their own poets, were not quite this to the readers of Byron’s own day. Rather in them Byron seemed to be reasserting values that Johnson and the moralists, Cowper and his pious friends, had repressed or ignored, the values of courage, endurance, resistance to unjust power, physical or spiritual— “ Triumphant where it dares defy, And making death a victory,”’ and passionate devotion. It is a strange, but a true, picture which the author of “ The Revolution in Tan- ner’s Lane ’’ draws of a young artisan finding in ‘‘ The Corsair’’ a new interpretation of the significance of life and love, feeling a new well of life springing up within him as he read:— __ “ Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells, Lonely and lost to light for evermore,

Save when to thine my heart responsive swells, Then trembles into silence as before.

“There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen ; Which not the darkness of despair can damp, Though vain its ray as it had never been.”

But the romantic Byron of ‘‘ Giaours ’’ and ‘‘ Cor- sairs,’’ even in large measure of ‘‘ Childe Harold ’’—if the last two cantos are as great as they are faulty—belongs to his own time. It is by an effort of imagination that we must recover the thrill of Mr. White’s hero as we turn over these early poems. It is partly that what Byron says, his negative philosophy, his arraignment of life and its failure to satisfy the heart’s desire for justice and love and beauty—all this has been worked out by deeper thinkers and more perfect artists, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, Arnold. We have our Byron still in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s gentle arraignment of the President of the Immortals and Mr. A. E. Housman’s more passionate strain, for Mr. Housman alone of the poets of to-day can give his poetry the verve and sting of Byron’s. The other reason is, of course, what I have already touched on—that Byron’s negations were not enough, and readers soon turned to those poets who had a more positive message. ‘‘ Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe.’’ The Byron whom we still read is the satirist who found the medium for the expression of his many moods in the Italian ottava rima, and wrote “ Beppo ”’ and “Don Juan”’ and the “ Vision of Judgment.’ Here he found a style of which he is the supreme and only master. He recovered the art, which had been lost since Chaucer died, of telling a story in verse, in the right style and measure, which shall seem as easy as talking and yet be capable of rising to any level required ; and, indeed, in some parts of “ Don Juan,”’ the shipwreck and the battle between the Turks and Russians, it is not Chaucer one is reminded of, but Homer. And in “ Don Juan’’ Byron found expres- sion for two complementary aspects of his character, his love of life and his hatred and arraignment of life. Despite his professed love of nature and solitude, Byron’s heart was in society, the stir and the gaiety of social intercourse which for a short time he had enjoyed in that society where the stream of life flows swiftest and with the most sparkle, if not most deeply. There is no doubt Byron suffered acutely in Italy—as did Shelley—from the enforced solitude of exile, from

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM 83.

ennui, the most deadly of human ills. And in “Don Juan’”’ he found an imaginative escape from solitude into the life of society and action. He had already found an imaginative double in “Childe Harold ’’ :— “Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow

With form our fancy, gaining as we live The life we image.”

But now, instead of a gloomy solitary, he chose to relive, in the adventures of Don Juan, the life he himself had lived, or wished to live, by sea and land, in love and war, in the whirl of social gaiety and intrigue. So “Don Juan’ sparkles with life, radiates a jote de vivre such as one feels in the very different poetry of Burns. But while “ Don Juan” thus gave an outlet to the more superficial Byron, an outlet which the Guiccioli was unwise for her own sake to close, the deeper Byron, the spirit which made Byron speak truth even against his will, found satisfaction also, for “‘ Don Juan ’”’ is a satire on, an arraignment of, this brilliant life of war and diplomacy and gaiety and intrigue, the “ orgiastic whirlpool’’ which underlies the brilliant surface. Like Tolstoi, Byron paints the life of social intercourse and adventure with a gusto which betrays that he had known and enjoyed it, in a style and verse that move like a moving sea; but, like Tolstoi also, he knows its moral and spiritual emptiness, the cruelty of war and politics, the heartlessness of society’s adven- tures in love. Byron’s realism is instinct with the romantic protest against life as it is, its inadequacy to satisfy the human spirit, its deficiency in justice and love and beauty. But while Tolstoi also, like Words- worth and Shelley, believed, or half-believed, he had found a solution of the enigma, a way of escape, Byron to the end knew only that he knew nothing—

“ Between two worlds life hovers like a star,

’Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar Our bubbles ; as the old burst new emerge, Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.” Then came the call from Greece, and Byron went forth to show that, after all, there were for him enduring values :— ‘ “Tf thou regret’st thy youth, why live? The land of honourable death Is here ; up to the field, and give

Away thy breath.”

Compared with the greater romantics Byron is, in the mythology of Keats’s ‘‘ Hyperion,’’ a Titan beside the new gods. He was held in the grasp of too many contradictions—aristocrat and democrat, believer and blasphemer, man of the world and inspired satirist. But, to speak more truly, the Romantics were all prophets, not unlike their Jewish precursors, intent at a period of world-disorder on the quest of justice and mercy and love and beauty, a recasting of life and reconstruction of faith. And if Byron is the least to us now because the most negative and an imperfect artist, except in the field of satire, he cannot be over- looked, for he is the constant reminder to the thinkers and dreamers, Wordsworth and Shelley and those of their kind, of what the world really is, of the greatness of the task of interpreting and reforming it. If Byron was the chief of the Satanic School, well, Milton had found and Blake had rediscovered—as Carducci was to do later—that there is much to be said for that Satan, the tempter who appears among the sons of God, who will not suffer the soul of the just to relapse into the slumber of sloth and complacency and vain dreams and

. desires.

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHILDHOOD. By MARY MacCARTHY. VES

WAS taken away from Marsh after two more terms;

from the skilly, the cold, and the squalor, and

returned to the schoolroom at home. But I took with me the High Church fervour.

Adela was now nearly grown-up, and Evelina had her own friends with whom she went out for lessons; I was now thirteen and was to be taught by Teresa. In the little brown-panelled schoolroom I sat preparing, aione; and the relief from my school life was very great. I liked my father’s appearing at the door for a few minutes to talk to me and to recommend some book which bore interestingly upon Simon de Montfort or Joan of Arc (in our days children never seemed to get on to modern history). I liked, too, my mother’s coming in and sending me on pleasant interruptive errands about the house or into the garden.

Perhaps it would be to remind the College Bursar to be sure and tell the gardener that there must be no yellow in the College bedding-out, of which she had seen a threatening in the pots he was mustering in his wheel- barrow in the distance; that as there were at least one hundred calceolarias already in the greenhouse, she could not stand any more. At school one never had such interruptions. There one never flew out into a garden to smell the lilac and the Indian currant, and to feel the summer warmth upon the lawn, or to have a chat in a potting-shed with a large bearded gardener who looked like Neptune. He tells me that his wife irons him with a hot iron every night for his rheu- matism, and that he finds it comfortable.

But I hardly like to mention the gardener or even the garden ; for both gardeners, who were kind of jesters to the families to which they were attached, and gardens were already beginning even at that time to be over- written.

The “ Capability-Browns’’ of the time were setting to work to sentimentalize and commercialize; grouping and massing, sending pink creepers and ramblers greedily rushing over pergolas. And ever since, things have gone from bad to worse. The place of the man who spits into his hand before thrusting in a spade has now been taken by a professor paid professorially for tend- ing cushions of Aubretia in a “ crazy pavement,’’ and producing in a couple of seasons the “Old World ”’ garden, which has become the phrase of auctioneers. It is not to be wondered at that the young find these improvized “ Haunts of ancient peace’ uninteresting ; and it explains, perhaps, why they should have taken into favour by contrast ‘“‘ The mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks and darnels,’’ prickly and pulpy cactuses, Gauguin-like exciting poinsettias; and even the wax fruit and flowers of early Victorian days.

Then there were other interruptions to these leisurely studies of mine. People it was a surprise to see would come into the schoolroom. Perhaps Maurice Baring would suddenly open the door, and either urge one to be as naughty as possible, or, following what one was doing, sit down to lessons himself, and write a life of Simon de Montfort in another copybook; or if one happened to be doing German and Goethe, he might paint in a few minutes a dream-picture of Faust’s last night on earth,

I was very lazy; my mind was constantly wander- ing. I see myself gazing out of the window over the

* Part I. os THE NATION AND THE ATHENZUM for

September Ist, art II. on September 8th; Part III. on November 3rd; Part IV. on December 15th; and Part V. on February Sth, 1924,

84 THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM

[April 19, 1924.

top of “The Barons’ War”’ propped up on the table, out beyond the stream and the willows, up at the grey castle, and wondering what is going on up there. Let us see it as it may have been.

The Royal Standard is flying from the Tower, for Queen Victoria is at Camelot. Let us pry in at the Castle, but do let us for once not see the Queen with her dispatch-box, signing papers, with her Indian ser- vant behind her—having been up since six. Let us more comfortably suppose she has a slight cold and has for once decided not to get up. So I see her propped up on her pillows with her knitting and the “ Times.”’

The service in the Royal chapel is just over. Vergers with silver wands are closing the gates of the choir; and are barricading and shrouding everything they can. The prayer for her “ gracious Majesty Queen Victoria and all the Companions of the most honourable and noble Order of the Garter ’’ has been intoned by a Canon ; the blessing and the last Amen have been given. Dean, Canons, and Minor Canons disperse. The Dean takes his leisurely way through the Camelot Cloisters, passes under Anne Boleyn’s chamber, and up into his library to his letters and work, to his “ Church Times,’’ his ecclesiastical biography, his chair by his great fire. The Canons and Minor Canons scatter through still older and more mouldering Cloisters, climb- ing winding staircases, to thick-walled chambers; the aristocratic old ladies, prayer-books in hand, disappear into Norman towers and Saxon towers, towers of Henry III. and the Edwards. Those fine old knights,

with their cocked hats, who have sat in an imposing”

row through the service, every one of them looking like a field-marshal, have burrowed into their battlemented dwellings. Sir Walter, Master of the King’s Music, and the most exquisite organist in England, has played out the shuffling congregation with some celestial Bach. Now he comes down from his loft. On his brisk walk to the railway station he makes several depressed resi- dents perfectly happy for a few moments as he greets them, with his delightful bracing charm ; he jumps into his train and plays chess all the way to the Royal College of Music.

It is a bright sunny morning. At the Castle gate- way the Guard is changing; bayonets gleam in the sun- shine; the word of command echoes under the arch; rifles are grounded with a rattle and stamp. Then the little body of busbied Grenadiers comes on up the hill, marching all round about the Castle, dropping men and picking up men. You enter into the relief from ennui of the picked-up man swinging into step with the others, also into the mood of silence which envelops the man dropped, as his comrades’ marching footsteps die away. Surely, if he happens to be of a patient, receptive disposition, it must be pleasant being on sentry duty up at the Castle. For instance, out there— on the North Terrace “ bosomed high in tufted trees ”— he can actually look down into rooks’ nests!

However stiffly he must hold himself, he can watch the winding river, the boats like water-beetles upon it, and the lively town down below him; the carts and carriages, the hawkers, children and dogs coming down the hill under the Curfew tower. He can see into the crooked street which runs out to the river where the poor swarm, and the Italian organ-grinders and ice-cream men live. He can see, too, right out into the shire with its heavy elm trees ; and there to the right a little way across the meadows he sees Runnymede College, its dark brick

towers and battlements. If he had very good eyesight he might even see me, a speck, as, yawning and shutting up my book, I come to the window and lean out to enjoy the panorama which also contains him, keeping guard in scarlet among grey battlements.

ART

THE LONDON GROUP. A T the twentieth exhibition of this Society, at

Messrs. Heal & Son’s, while among the missing

are Messrs. Anrep, Baynes, and Nash, there is

a welcome return of some of the most interesting and experienced members who did not exhibit last season. But this cannot account for one’s impression being not, as once of old, of a few sturdy veterans heading a pro- cession of the lame, the ‘halt, and the blind, but of a band of at least thirty very competent painters, some of the best. being well without the Society, and well on the right side of middle-age. One’s valuation of contem- porary effort is always modified by a sense of the direction that art for the moment is taking; and the effect of this exhibition may be partly due to the fact that the move- ment of which we are now hearing so much, the movement away from abstraction and towards natural- ism, offers a handicap in favour of the English tradition and our natural turn for romance; for English painting seems always to have been at its best—or is it only that English painters have been most at their ease?—when some formula had just been abandoned and the air resounded with ‘‘ Back to Nature!’’ The far larger, better organized, better classified, better trained, and better, Paris school is now engaged in exhausting itself by striving to wed to formule invented by the abstract painters, notions popularized by their erstwhile enemies, the Academicals. At the recent “Salon des Indépen- dants” one constantly came upon uncompromising abstract designs into one corner of which had been intro- duced some such thing as a needle and thread, so realistically done that you could almost believe you could pick them off the canvas, or else, shut somewhere within a patchwork as brilliantly intricate and almost as fatal as Joseph’s coat, the familiar features of the Fisherman’s Wife, suffering that particular distortion hitherto inseparable from the tidings that her husband had been ‘* drownded,’’ or the unnatural snarl and horrid eye of the cruel father turning his naughty little daughter out of doors for ever in a perishing New Year’s night. Before these pictures of the London Group one cannot help asking oneself, “Can it be that English criticism, spoken and even written, has after all accomplished something? Have the English, of all peoples, really succeeded in laughing sentimental subject-painting out of countenance?” For whatever reasons, there are in this collection of 136 pictures more satisfactory works by the young than in the whole of the enormous “ Indépen- dants.” The flight from Cubism is proving a sore trial in France, but here it seems to be liberating native impulses till now baffled by the demands of fashion. Among the most interesting landscapes are Mrs.

' Vanessa Bell’s ‘‘ The Garden Room ’’ (8), magnificent

alike in design and colour; Mr. K. M. Morrison’s frankly decorative ‘‘ The Riverside’’ (13), with its lovely tangle of clear colours; and Mr. Roger Fry’s finely modulated “ La Siotta ” (30). The figure subjects include Mr. Sickert’s melodious ‘‘ The Old Fool ”’ (99), Mr. Duncan Grant’s two water-colours, Mr. F. J. Porter’s ‘‘ Negress’s Head ’’ (10), one of the soundest pieces of workmanship shown, and Mr. Mathew Smith’s characteristic “ Nude” (14). Mr. Walton, in his very romantic “ Still Life ’’ (24), has swept in the forms of his vegetables with a fine gesture that degenerates in the background into a Brangwynian sang-froid. The Con- temporary Art Society have bought Mr. Power’s ‘Stamford River ’’ (42) and Mr. Barnes’s ‘‘ Open Window” (4). One of the best things, not only in this

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM 85

exhibition but in recent English art, is the masterly sculpture “ Mme. Lydia Lopokova ’’ (130) by the new President, Mr. Dobson.

It would be a convenience if, in the catalogue, to the list of artists, the numbers of the exhibits, if any, were added.

R. R. Tattock.

FROM ALPHA TO OMEGA.

E Londoners know when Spring is here by thé

\V/ ‘ appearance of the speckled plovers’ eggs in their green nests. If you have eaten two, or

even three of them, and the rest of your dinner has been

equally satisfactory, I cannot advise you to do better than to go to the Royalty Theatre and see ‘‘ Polly Pre-

ferred.’’ The first act will please you: it is real comedy,

and moves quickly and amusingly. The conviction which you have probably always cherished that the American woman is delightful, and the American business man is stupid and sentimental, is confirmed—and thus your self- complacency is satisfied. You will notice that Mr. Reginald Dane, the only British actor, earns and receives great applause for a brilliantly played comedy part—and thus your patriotism will flourish. Finally you will be made thoroughly happy by the restoration of your belief in the veracity of the Press and the Puff. Miss Justine Johnstone, besides being a delightful actress, is obviously the most beautiful woman in America; Mr. Trevor, although he acts with vivacity, is clearly a professional dancer, and there is no doubt that twice during the course of the play the daughter of the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs flits across the stage.

The Fourth Goossens Chamber Concert gave us more of Mr. Eugene Goossens himself than usual. He played three new Preludes for Pianoforte entitled ‘‘ Ships ”’ —the three ships being (a) ‘‘ The Tug,’’ (b) ‘‘ The Tramp,’’ (c) ‘‘ The Liner.’’ The influence of Debussy’s two books of ‘‘ Preludes ’’ was evident in these carefully manipulated compositions, but whereas one often feels a connection between Debussy’s ‘‘ programme ”’ and his music, Mr. Goossens’s three Preludes might very well have been renamed (a) ‘‘ The Duck,’’ (6) ‘‘ The Swan,’’ (c) ‘‘ The Pelican ’’ for all the difference it would have made. His Sextet for three violins, viola, and two ’cellos made the same impression of uninspired fabricated work in which some pleasing harmonies were struck during the middle section. The chief other item in the pro- gramme was Dr. R. Vaughan Williams’s Three Rondels for Voice and Strings, ‘‘ Merciless Beauty,’’ a setting of words by Chaucer. In listening to this careful and almost distinguished work I found myself longing to hear just three bars of spontaneous lyric flow, but not a bar came to stir one from the apathy of a general belief in Dr. Vaughan Williams’s good taste and musicianship.

Aésthetically speaking, the new Aquarium is undoubtedly the most impressive of all the ‘houses at the ‘Zoo. Red fish, blue fish, nightmare fish, dapper fish, fish lean as gimlets, fish round and white as soup plates, ceaselessly gyrate in oblong frames of greenish light in the hushed and darkened apartment ‘hollowed out beneath the Mappin terraces. Scientifically, no doubt, the gene is a paradise for the ichthyologist ; but the poet might equally celebrate the strange beauty of the broad- leaved water plants trembling in the current, or the sinister procession of self-centred sea-beasts for ever circling and seeking perhaps some minute prey, perhaps some explanation of a universe which evidently appears to them of inscrutable mystery. Now they knock the glass with their noses ; now shoot dartlike to the surface; now eddy slowly and contemplatively down to the sandy bottom. Some are delicately fringed with a fin that vibrates like an electric fan and propels them on; others wear a mail boldly splashed with a design by a Japanese

artist. That crude human egotism which supposes that Nature has wrought her best for those who walk the earth is rebuked at the Aquarium. Nature seems to have cared more to tint and adorn the fishes who live unseen at the depths of the sea than to ornament our old, familiar friends, the goat, the hog, the sparrow, and the horse.

At the Goupil Gallery, besides the exhibition in the downstairs gallery of paintings by Mr. Wilson Steer, there are, upstairs, paintings and pastels by Mr. W. Arnold-Forster and drawings by Mr. Richard Wynd- ham. They are both landscape painters, and both have a strong feeling for the picturesque and romantic, which they emphasize in their pictures. They draw their inspiration, however, from very different sources, Mr. Wyndham from the landscapes and towns of Italy, Sicily, and Spain, Mr. Arnold-Forster from the “‘ stee frowning glories ’’ of the mountains of Skye and of the Alps. Mr. Wyndham is preoccupied with architecture in its more theatrical aspect ; his drawings are extremely clever, and his touch is delicate. It is a pity that there is such a monotony of subject as well as of treatment in Mr, Arnold-Forster’s work: the enjoyment of these pictures cannot but be lessened by the fact of there being so many together. He is a very skilful painter in the portrayal of peak, cloud, sea, and ‘‘ atmosphere ”’: his colour, confined almost entirely to sombre blues and greys, is restrained and pleasant, but also becomes some- what monotonous from so much repetition.

Things to see or hear in the coming week :— Saturday, April 19. ‘‘ Cartoons,’’ at the Criterion. Monday, April 21. ‘‘ To-night’s the Night,’’ at the

Winter Garden.

Tuesday, April 22. ‘‘ Penny Royal,’’ at Wyndham’s. Thursday, April 24. Vera Benenson, Pianoforte Recital, at 8.15 at Molian Hall. Omicron.

POETRY

EXILE,

TuesE hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,

Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak

Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew,

Dew as heavy asrain. The rabbit tracks

Show sharply in it, as they might in snow.

But it’s soon gone in the sun—what good does it do? The houses, on the slope, or amid brown trees,

Are grey and shrivelled. And the men that live here Are small and withered, spider-like, with large eyes.

Bring water with you, if you come to live here— Cold tinkling cisterns, or else wells so dee

That one looks down to Ganges or Himalayas. Yes, and bring mountains with you, white, moon-bearing, Mountains of ice. You will have need of these Profundities and peaks of wet and cold.

Bring also, in a cage of wire or osier,

Birds of a golden colour, who will sing

Of leaves that do not wither, watery fruits That heavily hang on long melodious boughs

In the blue-silver forests of deep valleys.

I have now been hhere—how many years? Years un- numbered.

My hands grow clawlike. My eyes are large and starved.

I brought no bird with me, I have no cistern

Where I might find the moon, or rivers, or snow.

Some day, for lack of these, I’ll spin a web

Between two dusty pine-tree — and hang there

Face downward, like a spider, blown as lightly

As ghost of leaf. Crows will caw about me.

Morning and evening I shall drink the dew.

Conrap AIKEN.

i H , i r

56 THE NATION & THE ATHENASUM

[April 19, 1924.

THE WORLD OF BOOKS

THE FALL OF STEVENSON.—II.

ESSRS. HEINEMANN have just published the second ten volumes of their ‘‘ Tusitala Edition ’’ of Stevenson’s complete works (cloth 2s. 6d.; leather 4s. 6d. each), and the pleasant little volumes have lured me into reading them in order to see whether, in what I wrote of Stevenson on this page last January, I was as unfair to him as many correspondents allege, and whether I ought, perhaps, to sing a palinode at Easter-time to his memory. I was really astonished at the number and vehemence of the people who protested against what I said—or what they said that I said—about Stevenson. One gentleman wrote to another weekly paper very angry with a sentence which he quoted from my article, but which did not happen to exist in it; a second was infuriated because I had not mentioned ‘‘ Weir of Hermiston ’’; a third accused me of “‘ bait- ing ’’ Stevenson. It is a secret of journalism, well known to all journalists, that in the columns of newspapers there hangs a mysterious haze between the minds of writers and readers, so that it is practically impossible for any one person to make any other understand exactly what he means. That is why, whenever I read a newspaper con- troversy between two persons, they always call up to my mind a vision of two blind men in a fog trying to fight a duel from opposite corners of the Hampton Court maze. It may, therefore, be useless, but I should like to make the attempt to repeat intelligibly what I meant to sa

about Stevenson. , * * -

I said, first, that no writer’s reputation ever fell more rapidly or more catastrophically after his death than Stevenson’s. This is hot a question of opinion, of likes or dislikes, but purely of fact. I do not think that anyone can seriously dispute the statement. There was a time when very few people would have considered it absurd to claim that R. L. 8. was a “‘ great writer, a great novelist, a great essayist, a great thinker, and a consummate artist in words.’’ I doubt whether to-day anyone would make the claim at all, and, if it were made, hundreds of persons, and all serious critics, would laugh at it. In other words, Stevenson’s reputation as a writer, during the last twenty-five years, has suffered the kind of post- mortem decline which is by no means uncommon in the history of literature—only in his case the fall was more rapid and heavy than is usual. I assure my correspon- dents that I am in no way responsible for this, for until January 5th, 1924, I had never written a word about Stevenson. I am merely the recorder of a fact which cannot be disputed.

* * .

My second point, which none of my critics have noticed, was that the reaction against Stevenson had gone too far, and that there was already a sign of an ebb in the tide of hostile opinion. I welcome the change, for, as I wrote, ‘‘ If Stevenson is not the great writer whom they thought him to be thirty years ago . . . he is better than his reputation among ‘ highbrows ’ would lead one to think.’’ This is, of course, a matter of prophecy and opinion, and here I am on the side of the Stevensonians. There is a great deal more to be said for ‘‘ Treasure Island,’’ ‘‘ Kidnapped,’’ ‘‘ The Master of Ballantrae,’’ and some of the other stories than the severer critics would allow. And here I may say that I do not mention ‘‘ Weir of Hermiston ’’ because I cannot believe that it is sound criticism to judge an

author, not on the twenty-nine volumes of his com- pleted works, but on a few chapters of an unfinished story. I admit that, if Stevenson had lived to complete it, ‘‘ Weir of Hermiston ”’ might have been a master- piece, but one has to record the fact that he died before

he could do so.. * * *

What is really interesting is to try to see the cause of the reaction against Stevenson. I suggested that it was due to the fact that his admirers were exaggerated in their claims for him as a prose-writer and stylist. Here at once one has to put one’s foot on the treacherous terri- tory of personal opinion, where it is very difficult to discover any solid ground of fact. I said that “his ear for verbal music was not fine”; whereupon a corre- spondent writes to quote a passage from “ Old Mortality ” in Stevenson’s “Memories and Portraits,” adding, “surely this passage aloné is enough to disprove Mr. Leonard Woolf's assertion.”” This is the passage quoted by him :—

“There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on the other by the windows of

a quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the

traffic of many lines of rail ; and the scream of the engine

and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison turrets,

and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy.”

On the contrary, it seems to me to prove my assertion. No one would say that it was anything but a well-written piece of English prose, the work of an extremely careful and skilful writer. One might well be happy if one could write anything half as good, but that is no reason for exaggerating its merits or refusing to see its defects. Let anyone read aloud the first lines of the passage with their ugly succession of ‘‘ do,’’ ‘‘ ho,’’ ‘lo,’ “ho” sounds, and then ask himself whether that is really a good example of verbal music, whether it is comparable with dozens of passages which one could select from writers who are great music makers, Sir Thomas Browne or Landor or even Pater or Ruskin. * * *

Stevenson was not a bad writer, nor had he a bad prose style, as has been the case with more than one author who was hailed an immortal during his lifetime. But he was not a great artist, a great stylist, or a “ con- summate artist in words.”” The trouble was that he tried to force himself to become what he could not possibly be. He had real talent for telling a good story in good, plain, honest English, but he had not the sensitive ear and imagination which are required for writing great “literary” prose. Unfortunately, he played “ the sedulous ape” to the most sophisticated of “ literary” writers, and forced himself to write elaborately and finely. The result is a very good imitation of great prose, but it never is great prose. The signs of the forcing and strain- ing always remain; the sentences never get going with their own momentum ; the paragraphs never soar away with writer and reader. His contemporaries who said that Stevenson was a great prose-writer had claimed for him a position which he could not sustain—the result was a reaction against him from which his reputation is only just beginning to recover.

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM 87

REVIEWS

TWO SIDES OF AN OLD QUESTION.

Jefferson Davis, President ofthe South. By H. J. ECKENRODE. (Allen & Unwin. 10s. 6d.)

Some Memories of the Civil War, 1861-1865. By GrorRGE HAVEN PUTNAM. (Putnam. 10s.)

Here, lying peaceably side by side, are two interesting books, fresh from the press, both dealing with the same series of events that happened in what now seems to the great bulk of the population to be a far distant past, the American Civil War. The ruthlessness of youth in disposing of the memories of the aged is a disagreeable characteristic that would occasion even more annoyance than it does to elderly folk anxious to find an audience for the babblements of their boyhood, but for the fact that years do bring just enough of “‘ the philosophic mind” to force the grizzled and the bald to remember how indifferent they once were to the oft-repeated tales of their grandparents.

After a period of uncertain duration, what is called “ History” lays violent hands on the events of the imme- diate past, and claps all the passions, and prejudices, and excited watchwords of those to whom these events were once “the news of the day”’ into the strait-waistcoat of octavo volumes. “ History,” however, takes a long time in getting rid of the “ Point of View,” and, indeed, seldom gets rid of it altogether.

Mr. Eckenrode’s book about Jefferson Davis will come as news to most people, for the first and last President of the Confederated Southern States of North America never succeeded in forcing an entry into the minds and memories of men. Even in Liverpool, in the early ’sixties of the last century, when and where the cause of the South was espoused with passionate violence, and the name of Lincoln was blackened with every kind of calumny, and cursed at every street corner with a picturesque variety that still lingers on our ear, the name of the Southern rival President was but seldom mentioned, save in the innermost circles of sym- pathizers. Lincoln was the villain, General Lee the hero; of Jefferson Davis little was heard.

Mr. Eckenrode writes of Davis very agreeably, and though sympathetic is critical. He announces in his preface that he is no partizan; and, indeed, after the passage of sixty years it is easy to avoid furious partizanship. Yet had General Lee prevailed over General Grant, we do not suppose Mr. Eckenrode, who is a post bellum man, would have minded very much.

Not so our gallant old friend George Haven Putnam, “late Major, 176th Regiment, N.Y.S. Volunteers,” who was “with Grant,” not “ before the war,” but during it, was a prisoner in Virginia, and present at the battle of Cedar Creek. There is no post bellum nonsense about Putnam, who has here collected, in one well-printed and cheap volume, the lectures he has been delivering up and down his own land and ours, ever since. Our veteran is plagued with no doubts. His “ point of view” has never varied. He was on the right side from the very first, and the right side triumphed. Rebellion against the United States was a high crime and misdemeanour, and only met the fate it deserved.

A lost cause is a bad subject for the historian.

Victriz causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni, is a noble, heart-stirring motto for a romance, or even for the life of a great, though defeated, soldier ; but a history, which must of necessity be concerned with politics and politicians, had better decide to be on the side of the Gods, and give Cato the go-by.

What was the main issue of this tremendous conflict? How this question revives in the aged breast the buried past, and awakens the echoes of fierce moral and political contro- versies, conducted in staid parlours, in chapel vestries, in noisy, rowdy public-houses, and in crowded assemblies all over England sixty years ago!

If brought up in an “ Anti-Slavery” household, no doubt was permitted to enter as to the true answer to be given. It was the contest between right and wrong, between Negro slavery in the Southern States and hired free labour in the Northern. The ancient institution of slavery could not be allowed to extend itself over new territories, but must be abolished, once and for ever, wherever found. This was

the answer of the Abolitionists, an answer, not founded on American politics, on Missouri and Clay “ compromises,” on ‘Dred Scott” decisions in the courts of law, on boun- daries and lines of latitude, but on the Gospel of the Son of God.

True it was that Lincoln on his election as President, so far from being the uncompromising champion of abolition, had declared himself ready and willing to maintain the existing régime of slavery with the whole power of the Federal Govern- ment, but was it not also true that no sooner was he driven to issue a Proclamation declaring every slave on Southern soil a free man than the flickering successes and numerous rebuffs of his military forces were turned into triumphant marches and crowning victories? as if up to that moment God Almighty had maintained a sour neutrality, but thence- forth had, like an Homeric Deity, descended on the plain with His thunderbolts and declared Himself on the side of eternal right, despite that crusty Old Testament text, so drenched with African blood and tears, ‘‘ Cursed be Canaan.” This, at all events, is how it appeared to thousands of pious English homes sixty years ago.

Since then a great deal has been written round and about this stupendous issue, but now that nearly all that can be written or said has been both said and written, there is no getting away from the conclusion that the Institution of Domestic and Field Slavery was at the bottom of the whole business.

Originally slavery was a common feature of all the Anglo. Saxon settlements in North America, and there were slaves just as much in New England as in Virginia or the Carolinas. Nobody boggled at it. To get Red Indians out of the way, and to import black Africans to aid in the task of trade ana industry, seemed to the Pilgrim Fathers and their successors plain duties, dictated alike by God and common sense. But almost from the first a rift arose between the Colonies north of Delaware Bay and those to the South. In the Northern States slavery gradually died out, whilst in the Southern States, to quote the words of Professor Cairnes, “‘ it became constantly more prominent until ultimately it rose to a position of permanent importance, overpowering every rival influence, and moulding all the phenomena of the social state into conformity with its requirements.” (‘‘ The Slave Power,” Macmillan, 1863, p. 4.)

If you ask what became of the Northern slaves, you must be told that their owners sold them “down South.”

“It is certain that the New Englanders were not with- held from employing slaves by moral scruples, and if the system had been found suitable to the chyna se of the country, it is to be presumed that they would gradually have extended its bases, and that like their neighbours, especially since the Treaty of Utrecht had secured for English enter- prise the African Slave Trade, they would have availed them- selves of this means of recruiting their labour market.’’ (See Cairnes, 35.)

Mr. Eckenrode traces with great spirit (though his odd notion that he is writing history “‘anthropologically ”’ a little interferes with his reader’s enjoyment of his story) the growth of this rift between the industrial North, relying for their growing fortunes more and more upon the incursions of wage-paid hirelings from all parts of Europe, and the planters and squatters of the South, living semi-tropically amongst an outnumbering crowd of black or coloured servants, who were employed without wages, and on terms of board and lodging, and left entirely outside the scope and opera- tion of that famous braggart, the American Constitution.

If anyone wishes to understand how passionately and genuinely the born Southerner loved the institution of slavery, let him get Professor Cairnes’s book already men- tioned (and no profounder social or political treatise has ever proceeded, in times of change, from an English pen), and turn up in the Appendix a paper on “The Philosophy of Seces- sion,” reprinted from the ‘‘ Charlestown Mercury,” February, 1861, and when he has read this eloquent, almost poetical, yet carefully composed effusion, he will understand, in all his bones, how the South felt on this question of slavery and the right of secession.

Mr. Eckenrode, writing in 1924, sees clearly how from the beginning of the long strife slavery was doomed. If the South had not been compelled to secede, the North must have done so, and in either case the result, in the long run, would have been the same. It is an exciting story. If you first read Professor Cairnes’s book, written so composedly in

88 , THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM

[April 19, 1924.

England in the heat of the conflict, and then Mr. Eckenrode’s, you will find yourself for once behind the scenes of history ; and when you have finished Mr. Eckenrode and feel the necessity for a change of style, you can hardly do better than take up a brand-new novel, published by Jonathan Cape, called ‘“‘ Marching On,” by Ray Strachey, which covers the same ground and tells in stirring words, though after a cool, post bellum, and at times disconcerting fashion, the story of the Abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law, the troubles in Kansas, the murders plotted and committed by John Brown at “Dutch Henry’s Crossing,” and the execution of that old fanatic whose soul went “marching on.” It is a terrible tale—but better worth reading than any story we have read of the last Great War. AvGUSTINE BIRRELL.

KENSINGTON GARDENS TO LOOKING-GLASS-LAND.

Kensington Gardens. By HumspertT Wo.LFre. (Benn. 6s.) The Pilgrimage of Festus. By CoNRAD AIKEN. (Secker. 5s.) The Sleeping Beauty. By Epitn SiIrweE.Lt. (Duckworth. 5s.)

KENSINGTON GARDENS, as celebrated by Mr. Wolfe, remind me that recently a nineteen-year-old friend traced the melancholy and listless temper of his generation to an over- hearty upbringing between the ages of two and twelve. He elaborated this “ heartiness” as ‘“ You know, nice bright china porridge bowls and nice warm knitted suits and plenty of nice bright music and hearty walks and high teas and Peter Pan and Froebel and self-expression.” Let us hope that Mr. Wolfe’s little girl Anne, who if she wasn’t Anne would be Joan, and if she wasn’t Joan would be either Peter or David, won’t have this same atrabilious reaction to Kensington Gardens. Her father’s touch is extremely neat and light, and, if Messrs. Benn find some means of cir- cularizing the mummies and daddies and nannies of such Peters, Joans, Annes, and Davids as live within a morning’s hearty pram-ride of the Gardens, they should do well with this book. Almost the only gloomy thought here contained is an epigram on the Albert Memorial :—

**In his heavy ** Even Death Monument Could not assuage Good Prince Albert The burden of Sits all bent. His golden cage.”

But really I think Albert must at the bottom have been hearty too, or what would he be doing, else, in Kensington Gardens?

Mr. Conrad Aiken lives a long way from Kensington, its Annes and Peters, its fish, squirrels, and statuary. Festus is a new Everyman who is first discovered planting his Beans in the Early Morning. He soon, of course, gets tired of Beans and desires Beanos instead, together with crowns, orbs, sceptres, and suchlike. Tired of these in turn, he hankers after the fruits of the spirit and of philosophy: he does some hard thinking and comes to a dead end, and con- sults various sages, among them Christ, Buddha, Confucius, and Mephistopheles, but none of them, he finds, give a satisfactory answer to the question of personal reality that has been troubling him the most. Finally he and his alter ego in conversation decide that knowledge is so bounded by human conditions as to have only a relative value. He enforces the philosophic crux with this mirror simile :—

‘*The World is a mirror of God and we are but fragments. And how shall a mirror look into its own depths, Festus? The Mirror reflects all things that pass before it,

The Mind conceives those things that made and move it,”

and then a conclusion :— “Sleep be our beauty, darkness our abode,”

after which Festus revives somewhat, and decides, in spite of finding his own face staring back at him everywhere, to continue trying to look behind or through it.

A possible new line of thought for Festus might begin by his questioning the philosophic soundness of the mirror analogy, with its traditional assumption that the vision in the glass is a mere reduplication of the thing visioned and devoid of any other character; and, further, he might see that, though when truth is questioned it is often proved false, what is being questioned or disproved is no longer the truth that was, any more than a mirrored view of Festus is the

same Festus that looks in at the mirror, but a new creation altogether. Be that as it may, Festus has earned our respect for his courage, his poetic sensitivity, and his disavowal of the easier forms of absolutism.

Talking of mirrors, Miss Edith Sitwell reminds me of that famous Alice who won immortality by getting right inside one and finding that, beyond the conventional view of drawing-room and passage, all sorts of new strange things happen ; and she is further commendably aware that, though this fantastic view of the drawing-room has not contrari- wised or nohowed the accustomed one, Looking-Glass-Land is more than “only a dream,” it is another aspect of truth. What could be more conventional than the “Sleeping Beauty ’’ story? But read Miss Sitwell’s version. Then if you peevishly complain: ‘‘ But what about Prince Charm- ing? She has cut the story off short,” don’t forget that our familiar version is only a small part of Perrault’s original horrible tale, in which, instead of “happily ever after,” w wade in murders and obscenities, and in the end find the Sleeping Beauty cut up and dressed for a cannibalistic feast, but, we are cynically informed, her hundred-year sleep had _ made her mighty tough eating. Wisely, then, Miss Sitwell leaves her heroine still slumbering in the forest, and :—

“** Oh far best,’ the gardener said, ‘ Like fruits to lie in your kind bed, To sleep as snug as in the grave In your kind bed and shun the wave, Nor ever sigh for a strange land And songs no heart can understand.’ ”’

So the gardener is evidently related to Mr. Aiken’s Bean- planting Festus as he appeared in his last phase but one though Sitwellian horticulture (quinces, African Marigolds and an orangery) is more expensive and exotic. ‘The Sleep- ing Beauty” has the inconsequent but powerful movement of a dream, and is strewn with memorable images ; Tradition appears as a Dowager-Queen whose two interests in life are Latin Missals and a Parrot ** Long ago

Dead, but none dared tell her so.

And therefore the bird was stuffed and restored

To lifeless immortality ; bored

It seemed, but yet it remained her own’

and we are introduced to

Gousiey raga so countrified That in their rustic grace they try to hide

Their fingers sprouting into leaves, and to Laidronette, most wicked of Society hostesses in Fairyland, as she unwigs herself for the night, disclosing “that roc’s egg, her head,” to her delighted attendant apes.

I met Laidronette once myself riding in her sedan

chair, and believe this account absolutely.

" Rosert GRAVES.

ECONOMICS AND INDUSTRY.

Unemployment: Its Cause and Cure. By ALFRED Hook. (Labour Publishing Co. 5s.)

The Flaw in the Price System, By T. W. MarTIN. (King, 4s. 6d.) Trade Onionism. By W. A. APPLETON, C.B.E. (Hodder &

Stoughton. 2s. 6d.)

The Children of the Unskilled. By E. LLEwEtyn Lewis, M.A., Ph.D. (King. 5s.)

TuE title of Mr. Hook’s book is misleading. Titles frequently are; it is an apparently inevitable phenomenon of the present age of advertisement. Not that anyone would accuse Mr. Hook of insincerity. The whole tone of his book dispels any such suggestion. Nevertheless, in reality, what he has written is “An Indictment of Capitalism,’’ or per- haps, more correctly, “ Another Indictment of Capitalism.” Taking unemployment as an indisputable and inexcusable fact, which obviously in a sense it is, the author has set out to seek its many causes in the roots of the capitalist system. This, of course, is not very difficult. But is it of any very great value? One might equally well take the lack of housing, inferior education, ’bus strikes, floods, droughts, prostitution, or influenza, and prove that they also are the natural outcome of competition and private property. It is a perfectly logical conclusion at which to arrive. The

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENZEUM ([Apvrt.] 89

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90 THE NATION & THE ATHENAUM

[April 19, 1924.

problem of unemployment, or housing, or floods, or whatever it may be, is not solved, however. It is merely resolved into the question whether the standard of life of society would be improved by scrapping one economic system and setting up another. If the writer thinks it would be improved, he must set out to convince the reader, whose critical faculties then will be, or, we hope at least, should be, fully awakenéd. If, on the other hand, the writer comes to the conclusion that the standard of life would not be improved, he must then set to and deal with whatever problem he has in hand.

Mr. Hook falls between the two stools. Having weighed the capitalist system and found it wanting, he barely attempts to explain how he proposes to carry out schemes like the nationalization of the land, of the production of necessaries, of transport and distribution, to say nothing of the main- tenance of a national minimum—“the highest standard which the economic conditions of the time make possible.” Nevertheless, these measures are all borrowed, like spare trumps from a duplicate pack of cards, to solve the problem of unemployment as it exists here to-day. We are vaguely assured that these changes are all to be effected by taxing the incomes of the well-to-do (that much-overworked, economic deus ex machina), but there is scarcely a figure to show whether the taxation needed can be raised, nor yet how much would have to be raised. For, at this point, we imagine that the author, remembering the title of his book, feels that a discussion of such points would be irrelevant.

This confusion is inevitable from Mr. Hook’s primary treatment of the problem of unemployment. He contends (page 8) that the degree of employment of any one indivi- dual depends upon three things : (1) the productive character of the work, (2) the period and intensity of the work by reference to the hours and output of a normal day, and (3) the proportion of the produce which passes to the worker. In other words, a worker who is earning less than a desirable minimum is, in Mr. Hook’s meaning of the term, “ unem- ployed.” ‘‘ Productive labour” is taken to mean employment in those occupations which go to supply the “ normal needs ” of the masses, e.g., food, clothing, housing, &c. It is doubt- ful whether any really good purpose can be served by giving special meanings to such everyday words. In the first place, they savour too much of the-vocabulary of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Karl Marx, which so long obscured the study of economics. Secondly, it confuses the issue. To include the character of work and the distribution of the product as criteria of unemployment is to raise all manner of problems far transcending the original one. A consideration of the amount of the produce received by the worker should, indeed, be treated as a question of costs of production, or as a question of effective demand; and these im their turn are intimately bound up with the cyclical fluctuations of trade, which are so largely the cause of modern unemployment. But Mr. Hook does not appear to consider these aspects at all. He introduces the problems merely to illustrate the feilure of capitalism to provide, for so many workers, an adequate standard of living, and to point the superiority (unproved) of State Socialism.

In “The Flaw in the Price System,” Mr. Martin has attacked the problem of industrial crises, purely from the monetary aspect. The gict of his arguments is contained in Chapter III., which, in his preface, he asserts to be “rather tough” reading, but which is ‘“‘ comprehensible to anyone of good intelligence who gives them the necessary time and thought.” In some trepidation, therefore, we suggest that his conclusion is, apparently, that under rising costs of production, the rising prices at which goods can profitably be sold will finally exceed the total amount of “money” available for purchasing them in the hands of the com- munity ; the result being a fall in prices and all the other symptoms of a crisis and industrial depression. His remedy, though not original, is interesting, in that he advocates the reversal of the financial policy which is now followed. By restricting bank credits when prices are showing signs of rising, and extending credits when they are about to fall, Mr. Martin hopes to stabilize prices and, accordingly, production. But he does not explain how, when a depression is imminent, easier credit will restore the effective demand for conswmers’ goods, in time to maintain prices and production at their former level.

As a brief description of the main features of “Trade Unionism,” Mr. Appleton’s little book will be of service to

all who wish to become better acquainted with its ordinary functions and position. He does not attempt to go very deeply into any of the problems which Trade Unionism may have to face in the future; but he is quite positive about the part which it should fill to-day. His last chapter on its relation to politics is, in the interests especially of the workers themselves, intrinsically sound.

“The Children of the Unskilled” is an attempt at direct social investigation among the homes of the unskilled class, with the object of ascertaining what chance their children have of rising to better-paid occupations. For the most part, the percentage that succeeds in doing so is very low. Dr. Lewis’s methods of studying the problem are thorough and painstaking, but the results seem rather a foregone conclusion.

Aan DANE.

A NEW CONCEPTION OF CIVILIZED MAN.

The Growth of Civilization. By W. J, Perry, M.A. (Methuen. 6s.)

Mr. Perry’s new book partly breaks fresh ground, and is partly an abbreviation in popular form of the ideas set forth, with so great a wealth of illustration and com- mentary gathered from all parts of the world and founded upon years of patient research, in “The Origin of Magic and Religion,” various papers published by Manchester Univer- sity, and his great work published last year, “ The Children of the Sun.” Anybody familiar through these previous works with the lines of the ethnological revolution for which Mr. Perry stands will realize the necessity for the present volume. For the London University school of ethnology, to which Mr. Perry has rendered such service, has virtually destroyed prehistory as an exclusive and academic science, and brought it into relation with the most pressing modern problems concerned with the welfare of mankind. There- fore Mr. Perry could not do better than make his ideas about the way civilization arose accessible to a wider public than was reached by “The Children of the Sun,” and this task he has accomplished with a force, freshness, and lucidity that entitle him to the gratitude of all progressive thinkers. If further research corroborates the historical principles outlined in ‘‘The Growth of Civilization,” as there is every sign it will do, we shall have made a big stride forward towards coping with a social disease that must abolish civilization unless it can be itself abolished— the institution of warfare.

One of the most persuasive elements of the historical method applied to the story of the origin and diffusion from one centre of the world’s first civilizations is its intellectual coherence. In the old days, ethnology and archeology were, to the layman, simply two patches of impassable jungle which he left to the expert explorer to play about in. Now we have a map in which these twin sciences are not merely related, but their subject-matter is co-ordinated with the politics and sociology of the present day. The distribution of the Egyptian culture from Ireland to Polynesia and America, as a result of the discovery of agriculture and the use of metals in the Nile Delta between 4000 and 3000 s.c., was the cause of certain phenomena in human society whose reactions have profoundly affected modern Europe, its beliefs and assumptions, as well as its institutions, and we shall hardly succeed in modifying them to the common human advantage unless we can scan in ordered perspective the reasons for their development. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars... . This is the service which Mr. Perry’s masterly reconstruction of the past has done for us.

For it is a liberating as well as an extraordinarily fas- cinating story. First of all we have the ground plan of human relationship—small family groups of pre-agricul- tural or “food-gathering’’ peoples, who actually live the world-wide traditions of the Golden Age, immune for thousands of years equally from new ideas and inventions as from ruling classes, from exploitation, and from violent and oppressive customs. Then the tale of a people who had acquired a superiority in arts and crafts over all others, and took the broadest hint given them year by year by Nature in the peculiar accidence of the Nile flood. This was the biggest “ mutation ” that has ever occurred in human affairs,

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92 THE NATION & THE ATHENEUM

[April 19, 1924.

and one that irrigated a few men’s minds as well as many men’s fields. Kingship and the theologies intimately asso- ciated with it, the science of government, the control of natural resources, clustered as rotating satellites about this one happy imitation of Nature’s way. There follows the amazing opening up of the world by the miner-mariner- migrants and their princely leaders in their quest for immor- tality and fortune promised them by gold, pearls, and other precious and “life-giving” substances, and the founding of settlement after settlement over the mining and pearl- bearing districts of the whole earth, each of them repeating in a lower key certain features of Mediterranean civilization. The decay of this more or less uniform civilization was in no sense a natural law; it was due to a variety of artificial conditions imposed by ‘‘food-producers” on “ food- gatherers,” and from them resulted the education of humanity in warlike habits—the central issue of Mr. Perry’s book.

I have not the space here to deal with Mr. Perry’s further and original discoveries since “The Children of the Sun ”—among them the theory of dynastic continuity and blood-relationship of all the royal families, old and new, with the dynasties of ancient Egypt—and must leave Mr. Perry to tell his own story: from it we shall see the history of mankind as a continuous and integral landscape, and feel in ourselves the power to reclaim or lay it waste.

H. J. Massinenam.

HUSTLING CRITICISM.

The Drama in Europe in Theory and Practice. F. JouRDAIN. (Methuen. 5s.)

Miss Jovrparn has written this book in order to trace throughout the great periods the subtle and changing rela- tionships of the dramatist and the stage for which he wrote. We are grateful to the dust-wrapper for this information ; unaided we might still have been dubious of the authoress’s purpose in the composition of this farrago. Rushed hither and thither between Greece, Italy, England, France, Hol- land, Spain, Denmark, Germany, and Russia, spirited for- ward now a hundred, now two hundred years, pushed back now fifty, now fifteen hundred, listening to a cicerone who never tells him what he wants to know, but chatters inces- santly in a jargon that is only half-intelligible, the vertiginous reader, just after a glimpse of the Garden of Eden, is finally, on p. 164, dashed against ‘‘ the stones of Greece,” smothered in “the curtains of the Elizabethan stage,” and then deposited in the Moscow Art Theatre with the choice of seeing “Lear,” ‘ Romeo,” “ Hamlet,” “Tancred,” or “Semiramis,” with scenery, or ‘ Andromaque” or the “ Agamemnon,” without.

Miss Jourdain’s weakness for abstract nouns is deplor- able. Elements, developments, relations, tendencies, move- ments, reactions, dominant types, dominating ideas, realism, romanticism, classicism, neo-classicism—when shall we come to understand that the true business of criticism is never advanced until these words and their like are banished from its vocabulary? Miss Jourdain is one of those persons who can’t say “ butter,” and ‘“‘ cheese” would choke her.

“To generalize,” said Blake, “is to be an idiot.” And yet generalization in the hands of an Aristotle, a Ruskin, or anyone who knows what he is about, may be amusing— or even better than amusing. But to pick up general state- ments from doubtful sources and then hunt for “ good illus- trations” of them is another game, and Miss Jourdain is fond of playing it.

She has chosen a most interesting subject, and, if she had taken a dozen, or half a dozen, plays and described in simple and comprehensible language how they were staged, pointing out how the conditions of the theatre had coerced the playwrights into making their plays this way and that way, how sometimes they had altered the stage and its customs to fit their plays, and how sometimes the very limita- tions of their stage had provoked them to achieve new felicities of dramatic art and poetry, then Miss Jourdain would have produced a serviceable and interesting book. But instead of such thoughtful work on the plays themselves she must have read through shelves of “ books about books,” filled her notebooks with extracts from them, and then

By ELEANOR

translated her notebooks into a dialect which only needs to be less sophisticated to remind us of Mr. Jingle. Everything has a second-hand look about it, with one exception. Miss Jourdain has some first-hand knowledge of Corneille and Racine; that part of her book which deals with them is passably good.

Her naiveté in the selection, and her caprice in the arrangement, of her material are amusing until, by being joined to carelessness of fact, they become alarming. Her preface informs us that her book is intended to be an intro- duction ; but anyone who needs an introduction to the study of European Drama may receive some curious impressions. For example, if he is so ill-advised as to trouble his head about the two most useless terms ever introduced into the vocabulary of criticism, he may be sorely puzzled to decide whether Shakespeare’s plays are “classical” or “ romantic” (pp. xvii, xviii). He will understand that Euripides is notable as the only Greek playwright who had the wit to make the musical phrases used in his choric odes “ fit the correspond- ing poetic phrases,” and that “the most lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe’’ was intended by Shakespeare as a parody on the Euripidean use of the prologue (p. 10). He will be of a suspicious nature if he is not led to suppose that the Parabasis was a species of tragic chorus due to a retarded process of evolution (p. 11). He will find the “ Agamemnon ” attributed to Sophocles (p. 67). He will infer that Euripides only occasionally departed from the A‘schylean method of constructing a trilogy (p. 74). As there is nothing between the covers of this book which can be suspected of making him wish to read the ‘‘ Septem,” the “ Antigone,” or the “ Pheenisse ” for his own delectation, he may very well go down to the grave in the innocent belief that Eteocles and Polyneices were two shepherds in the service of Creon (p. 147). And soon. It is only charitable to suppose that our cicerone’s memory fails her at times. Perhaps she too is flustered by the hurricane pace and inconsequential course of our journey.

Lewis Horrox.

AN ENTERTAINING MISCELLANY.

The Harleian Miscellany. (Cecil Palmer. 12s. 6d.)

Txais volume contains a selection from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tracts, pamphlets, and other records collected by Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, and Edward Harley, second Earl. The “ Miscellany” was originally selected from the library of the second Earl by his secretary, William Oldys, and was published in ten volumes, with an introduction by Dr. Johnson, during the years 1744-46. It was later reissued, with additional matter, under the editorship of Thomas Park. Mr. Savage regrets that it is impossible to reproduce the “ Miscellany” in its entirety. “T can imagine, however,’’ he says, “the emotions of any modern publisher to whom the suggestion was made. The ‘wild surmise’ of stout Cortez, gazing at the Pacific, would be nothing to them.” In the present volume, therefore, he offers us as much of the cream of Park’s edition as could be compressed into three hundred pages.

Varied indeed is the feast set before us, and there is some- thing for every taste. Those whose interest in history runs in the narrower and more conventional grooves will find, for example, interesting sidelights on the Armada, the Gun- powder Plot, and New England’s troubles with the Indians. Readers with a thirst for romance may find it but indiffer- ently satisfied by the selection of Henry VIII.’s love-letters to Anne Boleyn, but will not be disappointed in the story of Claude Duval, the highwayman, who “ stole the purses of men and the hearts of women.’’ Students of social customs will enjoy the chapter on “A Cure for the Small Pox,” and the description of the ritual which, until 1661, compelled those who received the Order of the Bath to be literally immersed, and then to “stay in the chapel all night, till it be day, bestowing themselves in orisons and prayers.”’ Lovers of quaint lore will find it in some of the travellers’ tales of the period; while there is rich fare for those who like the horrible. The account, from the French, of “ the terrible and deserved Death of Francis Ravilliack, showing the manner of his strange torments at his Execution,” is fascinating in its loathsomeness.

Edited by HENRY SAVAGE.

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April 19, 1924.]

THE NATION & THE ATHENZEUM ([Apvr.] 93

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94 THE NATION & THE ATHENZUM

April 19, 1924.

But humour finds abundant place in Mr. Savage's medley. He reproduces a delightful pamphlet published in 1635—its full title runs to some two hundred words— relating to ‘‘ The old, old, very old man, or, the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr.” Parr was born in the reign of Edward IV., and perhaps his longevity was due in some measure to the comfortable philosophy that made him always a supporter of “the religion of the King and Queen then in being.” Among other amusing selections is a tract by some ponderous divine, who, while he holds chess to be a lawful amusement, sets forth ten lengthy arguments against its expediency ; while “The Art of Living in London,” in which Henry Peacham advises youths as to how they may rise to be aldermen, shows that the eighteenth century did not lack its Samuel Smiles.

Finally, reference may be made to the “Seasonable Advice for preventing the Mischief of Fire, that may arise by Negligence, Treason, or otherwise.” This pamphlet was issued in London, by command of the Lord Mayor, in 1643, and was “thought very necessary to hang in every Man’s house.” It is @ long and wordy document, crediting its readers with no native imagination or common sense. The “orders” which it contains were “invented” by one “William Gosling, Engineer.’ If, however, Gosling’s “ inventions” were a little elementary, he was at least some- thing of an evangelist, as is shown by his closing “ appeal” :

‘© O! the miseries of cities, towns, villages and particular houses that have been burnt, where some could not recover their losses in thirty years after, and some never. . . . What lamentable cries, frightenings, and amazements there were to all sorts of people . . . and all through the miseries of fire, that came by carelessness and wilfulness. . . . Therefore, let the very sight of fire and candle put it in mind to prevent the like miseries. . . . As good order and care prevent our fear of fire, so a good life prevents the way to sin: and if every one mend one, then all will be mended. The Lord commandeth us to have care of our neighbours’ good,

Deut. xxii. For the love of our neighbour fulfilleth the law,

Rom. xiii.”

We commend this style of publicity to the promoters of our modern “ Safety First” campaigns.

GinBert THomas.

TIMBUKTU AND EL DORADO.

The Road to Timbuktu. By Lady Dororay Mitts (Duck- worth. 15s.) In Quest of El Dorado. By STEPHEN GRAHAM. (Macmillan, 12s.)

Tue motives which drive men to travel are many, and often mixed. The commonest is the pursuit of wealth. The best, from the point of view of the resulting travel book, is nothing more exalted than an eager curiosity to see as much as possible of the earth’s surface and its inhabitants within the span of a man’s life. It was a mixture of these two simple motives that produced the great travel literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the mind of the modern traveller is more complicated. He will travel because he likes it—and it is certainly a more pleasant business than it used to be—or in search of adventure, which it is no longer easy to meet with at home. The real objective of such a traveller is the journey, not its goal ; he agrees with R. L. Stevenson that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. And then there is that essentially modern type of traveller who goes abroad with the deliberate intention of collecting material for a book; he plans his journey with that object in view and looks at everything through a pair of spectacles which he has previ- ously prepared for himgelf in consultation with his publisher,

Lady Dorothy Mills belongs to the first of these two classes of travellers. Anticipating the charge of “ super- ficiality ”’ against her book, she explains frankly that she seldom stayed more than forty-eight hours in one place, so that “ obviously my knowledge cannot be profound.” All she has tried to do is to describe the incidents of her journey te Timbuktu, “the purely personal things, the little jokes and mistakes and tiny tragedies of every day.”” Such a book may be mere journalism, but it should make amusing reading for the stay-at-home. Lady Dorothy Mills must be one of the first European women to travel up and down the Niger unattended except by black servants, and relying on

her own efforts to keep a crew of lazy natives up to the

scratch. It was an amusing adventure, well worth under- —

taking for its own sake, even if it adds nothing to our previous knowledge of Timbuktu. But the writer makes the mistake of not sticking to her personal experiences. We could have swallowed a daily journal whole. Instead she hands us out—to use one of her own expressions—many weary pages of second-hand information about the French Soudan and its meagre history, which those who are interested in the subject could have obtained elsewhere. This destroys the character of the book, and cuts short the space that might have been devoted to more entertaining topics, such as the doings of that conscientious black boy Saghair, who, when it was explained to him that he must not sit upon his employer’s bed and watch her toilet, com- promised by glueing his eye to a crack in the wall “so as to be informed and ready the moment I might want him.”

Mr. Stephen Graham—is it necessary to say ?—makes no such mistake. He belongs to our second class of travellers. He conceived the idea of following Columbus’s keel from Cadiz to San Salvador, of climbing “a peak in Darien ’’ to see the Pacific as Balboa saw it first, of pur- suing the tracks of Cortez and Coronado, and of comparing this Spanish quest of gold with the modern American “quest of power,’’ which has made the great northern Republic “the arbiter of Latin-American destinies.’”? The result is a well-balanced and readable, if not very vigorous, book. Mr. Graham is all for the American as against the Spanish spirit. Every time he sees a Spaniard he thinks of thumb-screws. He prefers the parade of gaily dressed cowboys at the Las Vegas Reunion to any procession of toreadors in a Spanish bull-ring. His liveliest chapter is devoted to the Las Vegas show—the riding of wild horses, the leaping from horseback to the back of a bull, which must then be thrown by twisting its horns. Here is the glamour and excitement of the bull-ring without its cruelty. “The men,” Mr. Graham points out, “take a chance of death; the animals do not.’’ And on the more general question he holds that the Americans are right to “ clean up”’ their newly acquired possessions in the south. For the dirt must be removed even if a little of the colour comes

away with it in the process. CLENNELL WILKINSON.

NOVELS IN BRIEF

Janet March. By Fioyp Dewi. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.)

This is a thorough, painstaking, if formidable, study of several generations of American family life, interesting, or not, for its extreme local detail, its evident experience, and absence of high fictitious lights, but unfortunate in its

top-heavy proportions. The love story of Roger and Janet occupies the concluding score of pages; the previous four hundred deal with their grandparents, parents, and rela- tives, and with their own several upbringing and college experiences, with a minuteness that no amount of belief in hereditary influences and admiration for the industry of self-made business men can excuse. The quest of Janet towards her ideal lover, and the similar approximation of Roger, are technically spoiled by elaborate multiplication. The method of Ibsen, who worked out the lives of his characters to the smallest detail beforehand, might well be recommended to modern novelists. Viewed episodically rather than as a whole, this novel, however, is well made, conscientious, realistic, and full. * ®

Out of Reach. By Davip LYALL. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.)

Our sweetest novels are based on oldest plots. Hesey,

a winsome, sweet-natured girl, confirmed by her war experi- ences in France, decides, with her Scotch friend Janet, to — farm the mortgaged estate left to her by her father. Sheis © pestered by the attentions of the family solicitor, Stephen — Turner, a young, handsome man, who is, in fact, a villain of deep dye—for which note the sensual curve of his mouth under a fair, but ineffective, moustache. The girls engage a young Scotchman, David Raeburn, with a fine war record — and a sweet, aged mother, as farm bailiff. Stephen, having seduced Jinny, a country wench, or, in the words of the © wrapper, “ a passionate child of nature,’’ is forcibly removed from the plot by her rustic sweetheart. After that a happy ending is inevitable and desirable. These pleasant per- — sonifications of charm, good, and evil, move and have their — — being, for no very particular reason, in summertime ssex.