1482. _Elegantiolae_, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by

an unidentified printer in 1483. _Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit_, Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: _Les exposicions des euungilles en romant_, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484. (Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect copy of the first.) _Jo: Balbus Januensis_: Catholicon, Jean du Pré, Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, _Laus Veneris_, Moxon, 1866, and _Dolores_, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a letter to the editor of _The Examiner_," an attack on Robert Buchanan, written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and printed for private circulation in 1875. ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books. * * * * * Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite. _Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio _Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140. * * * * * It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._ On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown. People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10_s._ and two first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece. A first edition of _Trilby_ (1895) can be purchased for 7_s._ 6_d._ at Messrs. Dobell's, and of _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) at 18_s._ _Evan Harrington_, in the twelve original parts of _Once a Week_, is offered at 25_s._ at the Serendipity Shop. * * * * * Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's _Odes_, dated 1868, but never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it (as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning is £8 10_s._, and a first edition of _The Unknown Eros_ (1878), with inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10_s._ * * * * * Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_ (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure. * * * * * Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung. A. L. H. CORRESPONDENCE (_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY) SIR,--On the assumption--I hope justified--that you propose to have a "Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe, called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote some consideration to their physical form. It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world. The Germans produce--or produced before the war--a larger number of agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed and bound editions _de luxe_, such as were specialised in by firms like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial" tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions, with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys, who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles" have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric. But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier than ours. The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the authors, and (3) the critics. Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books; but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice of commenting on the physical design of books--which, after all, is an ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages. I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the MERCURY, from which we all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.--Yours faithfully, ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER. [We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers. Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book; and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent satisfaction.--ED. L.M.] BOOKS OF THE MONTH POETRY REYNARD THE FOX. By JOHN MASEFIELD. Heinemann. 5_s._ net. It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots, their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He; wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that incredible plot in the _Widow in the Bye Street_; the public-house scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse for _The Daffodil Fields_. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises that _Biography_, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has done) seems to have discovered his bent. In _Reynard the Fox_ there is only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's faults of writing are still evident. Lines like He, too (a year before), had had A zest for going to the bad might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will give equal enjoyment every time. The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does, and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in front of the red-coats: Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying, Smiling at people, shoving, playing, Nosing to children's faces, waving Their feathery sterns and all behaving, and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and Pye: Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen Closest, but all in little space. Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace, Yawning, or tilting nose in quest, All stood and looked about with zest, They were uneasy as they waited. Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is, unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country. But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable fresh painting. Here is the close: Then the moon came quiet and flooded full Light and beauty on clouds like wool, On a feasted fox at rest from hunting, In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting. * * * * * The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night, With moonlight fallen in pools of light, The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed, A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed. It is just the end of such a day. THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton. 6_s._ net. Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like Legible haply in that brow benign. Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons With the huge monster's dragon armature, Out of the pregnant and parturient dust Large hereditaments of bliss and woe, sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written. MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net. Mr. Waley's 170 _Chinese Poems_ (Constable) was one of the most memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one; those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one. In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood; and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We may quote two shorter examples. One is _The Cranes_, which has the terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine: The western wind has blown but a few days; Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough. On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes; In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat. Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away; Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light. In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss, The garden boy is leading the cranes home. Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in _The Lazy Man's Song_ (A.D. 811): I have got patronage, but am too lazy to use it; I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it. My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it. My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them. I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink; So it's just the same as if my cellar were empty. I have got a harp, but am too lazy to play; So it's just the same as if it had no strings. My wife tells me there is no more bread in the house; I want to bake, but am too lazy to grind. My friends and relatives write me long letters; I should like to read them, but they're such a bother to open. I have always been told that Chi Shu-yeh Passed his whole life in absolute idleness. But he played the harp and sometimes transmuted metals. So even _he_ was not so lazy as I. The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's _The Great Summons_. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's version of a brief lyric by Li Po, _Self-Abandonment_: I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk, Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress. Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream; The birds were gone, and men also few. These translations may be not without their influence on English poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their exactitude and economy will not be thrown away. COLLECTED POEMS OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot," which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait. FORGOTTEN PLACES. By IAN MACKENZIE. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net. In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped to make our age--as it will in any case be--glorious in song. Brooke and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves; others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some, whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty. The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest, sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen. There are several such in _Eyes_: Eyes swim out like strange blue fishes Recovering beauty from the dark. And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike reflection: What a strange marvel is the telephone. The whole of the second section of _Friends_ is clear and passionate, and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words: I watch you talking, catching mouthfuls of air, Which you twist around till you throw them out In various shapes, such that each is clear. Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout; Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin, Some writhe and quiver fantastic about, Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in, Till the waves of silence shut them out. So, if we could not hear any sound, But could see air moving like waves in a pond, And the shape of every word had been found Till they faded away in the air beyond, And words came twisted in breaths of air, You could tell each one by a careful stare. The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase: There is as much of beauty in one breath As there could be upon the largest star! He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself about These three last years of fraudulent Subconscious plagiarism, For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural. A CHALLENGE. By MAITLAND HARDYMAN, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen & Unwin. 2_s._ 6_d._ net. Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace, was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation, was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry in the book is _Via Crucis_, which begins: Lord Jesus of the trenches, Calm, 'midst the bursting shell, We met with Thee in Flanders, We walked with Thee in hell; O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage We strewed our glorious youth; Yes, we indeed have known Thee, For us the Cross is Truth. POEMS OF THE DAWN AND THE NIGHT. By HENRY MOND. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net. "Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will not care to begin a poem with An aged filthy hag, with bloated face, Upon her haunches, wrapped in bloody rags, There squats Bellona--splashed with entrails-- --words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him. He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of _The Silver Corpse_, and in parts of _The Fawn_. But he strains after effects and misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries. He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline formally. NAPOLEON. By HERBERT TRENCH. Oxford University Press. 2_s._ 6_d._ net. This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at 10_s._ 6_d._ net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the exception of _The Requiem of the Archangels_ and one or two other poems it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre. ATHENIAN DAYS. By F. NOËL BYRON. Elkin Mathews. 2_s._ 6_d._ and 1_s._ 6_d._ net. Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom clear why he begins them. ANY SOLDIER TO HIS SON. By GEORGE WILLIS. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net. A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up his feats thus: I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun, I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum, I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum; I never borrowed money, and I never lent--but once. Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the allusiveness, of Prior. THE STATION PLATFORM AND OTHER POEMS. By MARGARET MACKENZIE. Sands, 2_s._ 6_d._ net. "These Verses are not all sad--indeed, I hope that in a very real sense none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation, decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being _too_ simple. It takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the souls of men are bulbs." ECHOES FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By J. G. LEGGE. Constable. 2_s._ 6_d._ net. Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of Thermopylæ. NOVELS JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net. THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net. POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net. SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net. TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net. RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net. The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail. The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose. Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening to the English novel? Is anything happening to it? It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion, conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_ is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why he should have written it. Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her, said: "Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?" "I don't care," he answered gruffly. "It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind if I stayed here too?" "I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her, determined, as he was, that she should never know it! "I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out across the garden. "I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I can't get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate the Dean's Ernest?" A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to bear the weight of this exhaustive description. Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African Campaign, _Marching on Tanga_, the second his collection of poems, _Five Degrees South_. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can hardly be noticed. In _The Young Physician_ the persons are not so unobtrusive, and the hero, if we had not been aware of him before, would have forced himself on our attention by committing manslaughter in the last pages of the book. He does, however, live and move before that, and the characters around him at home, at school, at the university where he studies medicine, are living and moving human beings. But the more clearly we see Edwin and his surroundings the less, very unfortunately, we see of those poetical qualities to which we have grown accustomed in Mr. Brett Young. Certain of the human relations are indeed very well drawn. Edwin's love for his mother and his grief at her death make moving passages. The episode in which he is drawn closer to his lonely father is excellently done. But the second part of the book, where Mr. Brett Young voluntarily confines himself in North Bromwich, is not, on the whole, a distinguished piece of work. Here the author is without his hills, trees, and clouds, and is compelled to exert himself in the observation and delineation of character. But though he does his work here cleanly and honestly, as we have a right to expect from him, he does it lifelessly and without enthusiasm. "W. G.," Boyce, even Rosie Beaucaire are alive and credible, but it is hard for the reader not to suspect that Mr. Brett Young takes but little interest in them and impossible, with that suspicion in his mind, to take much interest in them himself. Much the best part of the book is the description of the journey made by Edwin and his father to the deserted mining village in the Mendips, which had been the father's home. Here Mr. Brett Young has his opportunity for description and uses it well in a dozen passages. And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasms Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered; more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn's upper waters that he had seen so many times from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water within the memory of man. And more than all this ... far more ... they were the home of his fathers. This quotation does not indicate, a dozen such could not exhaust, the grace and charm of the episode in the Mendips. Here, perhaps, for a moment in the midst of an unsatisfactory book Mr. Brett Young has attained a higher level of achievement than ever before. His persons do not here fade into the landscape, but rather blend with it into one picture, of which they are as essential a part as the hills and clouds. There is still, it must be confessed, a certain lack of vigour in the presentation, but if the author could compose a whole book in this manner it would be a very fine and remarkable performance. Perhaps he may still do so. It would be very rash to decide at this moment that the novel is not the form of art which he ought to pursue. But even if we reserve judgment on this point, there can be no doubt that the scheme of _The Young Physician_ is in any case not well adapted to his particular gifts. Mr. Compton Mackenzie, however, who invented and popularised this kind of novel, has, in his latest production, thought fit to drop it. It was indeed desirable, after the unfortunate affair of _Sylvia and Michael_, that he should attempt to break new ground; but we think that many of his admirers will read _Poor Relations_ in a mood of pleasure mingled with dismay. One critic observed of _Guy and Pauline_ that the future of the English novel was, to a quite considerable extent, in Mr. Mackenzie's hands. But the future of the English novel does not really lie in the direction of rattling books for railway journeys, where humour is derived from cows, comic clergymen, and an overwhelming hair-wash. Those who fixed Mr. Mackenzie with solemn expressions of expectation on the ground of _Carnival_ and _Sinister Street_ will probably be hard put to it to know what to make of this romping and boisterous piece of work. It contains little more of what the author has been praised for than his vitality--which was much diminished in _Sylvia and Michael_--and his verbal ingenuity. But it does show high spirits and an eye not blind to those obvious humorous effects, such as bad wine, mischievous and inquisitive children, the nervous author with his secretary, and so forth, which when they are whole-heartedly embraced are, after all, still humorous. If the future of the English novel really is in Mr. Mackenzie's hands and if he continues in his present mood, the English novel is going to have a queer time of it. But if he has done nothing else, he has proved himself free of priggishness. Among these novelists only two, Mr. Swinnerton and Mr. Lynch, much concern themselves with what was once an urgent topic of conversation, with the business, namely, of giving the novel shape and compactness. This, it was at one time announced, was the direction in which English fiction was moving, and perhaps it is still the most significant movement, though it is accidentally a little veiled at present. But Mr. Swinnerton, who is a novelist pure and simple, who follows no extravagant theory, has no doctrinaire axe to grind, seems bent on making shipwreck of his powers. Some novels can be written, as was _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, in six weeks. But Mr. Swinnerton has not yet written a novel like _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, nor does it appear probable that he will do so. He seems to have fallen into the habit of producing a cross between a good book and "the commercial article" in good time for the autumn publishing season once a year. Thus are the hopes raised by _Nocturne_ disappointed; and those who were disconcerted but cheerful last year under the stroke administered by _Shops and Houses_ will possibly falter in despair this year under the more poignant blow of _September_. It is the theme of a beautiful woman, whose placid life does not flower into passion until she is nearing middle age. Cherry Mant, who hardly hurts Marian Forster by tampering with the affections of her good fellow of a husband, wounds her deeply by making off with her youthful lover, Nigel Sinclair; and both acts of rapine are cleverly introduced by a silly joke about the name of a brand of cigarettes. It is true: Mr. Swinnerton knows his business. And if he has not the final fusing fire of genius, he has talent in great quantities, experience, and knowledge and cleverness. He has learnt his art, but rather than apply his learning he gives us once a year the irritating phantom of a good book. His theme and his conception of its treatment are excellent. But he will not pursue sufficiently deeply his researches into character, and unless he can resign himself to missing the season now and again, he will be lost to the English novel. His is not one of those talents that shine in rash and careless brilliance. It requires intensive labour to make the best of it. The same judgment applies with equal force to Mr. Lynch's talent. The difference between him and Mr. Swinnerton is that he has taken the trouble to make the best he can of his theme, which is exiguous and yet sufficient. The story turns on Jimmy Guise's gradual discovery of his wife's worthlessness; and the hasty reader might complain that in a short book Mr. Lynch has spent a great deal of time over a very small matter. But those who range through contemporary fiction, anxious to be hopeful, will be more interested in the care which he has spent on every facet of the tale. The device, by which Jimmy is at once presented, full length and in detail, to the reader, while Blanche is gradually discovered, is one of those solid and sufficient inventions which immediately command respect. The exact and measured discovery of her worthlessness takes place by slow, inexorable degrees which show that the author has never once relaxed his vigilance over his composition. There are, it is true, irrelevancies even in so short a work. Jessie Carruthers was not really necessary as a foil to Blanche. The "New Department," though it is deliciously sketched, takes too prominent a place. But these irrelevancies do not noticeably distort the general scheme, and are in fact probably the result of Mr. Lynch's unconscious recognition that his plot was a little too slender for even so brief a novel. But, in spite of this initial difficulty, _The Tender Conscience_ is a very creditable and satisfactory performance and gives grounds for looking forward with much interest to Mr. Lynch's future development. The novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Stephen Hudson are of the sort in which an attempt is made to simulate distinction by gratuitous eccentricity. Some painters, in order to improve the landscapes with which nature has provided them, screw up their eyes until the scene before them runs into a confused blur. Mr. Cannan and Mr. Hudson make this grimace before the spectacle of life. It is a fashion like another, but it has less usefulness and, we imagine, less durability than the novel of adolescence. Mr. Cannan's book contains a gentleman named Perekatov with a "massive Jewish face, thick, sensitive lips, a heavy blue chin, and tragic, short-sighted eyes," another gentleman named Stephen Lawrie, whose characteristics are not so obvious, and a young lady named Valérie du Toit, who appears to be the incarnation of all that Mr. Cannan considers glorious. The thesis of the story, so far as we have been able to discern it in the gyrations of these and other characters, is that the true England was not in the war, but sat unheeded, forgotten, alone, in a little garret until the fighting was over. Mr. Cannan is plainly dissatisfied about something, but he lacks a brain sufficiently clear to make the reader understand what it is or what he wishes done. Meanwhile he creates unreal scenes of physical and mental misery and squalor through which the stoutest hearted could not drag themselves unyawning or undepressed. Their yawns and their depression are, it is true, in some sort a tribute to Mr. Cannan's powers. He creates these scenes with a certain vigour and finish, but his qualities will be for ever wasted unless he can raise himself out of his present state of aimless gloom. Mr. Hudson, perhaps even more than Mr. Cannan, has forgotten the limitations imposed on him by his material, which is life. In this story of Richard Kurt, his shallow and philandering wife, Elinor, and his crafty young mistress, Virginia, he seems to suppose that nothing more than his bare word is needed to carry off impossible events and unnatural psychology. But the novelist's task is not so easy as this. He cannot secure originality by willing it or by producing an unexpected situation out of the void. The unusual situation must be justified, not only by itself, but by all that has preceded it. The novel effect which is obtained by suddenly altering a character already defined is below childishness. As for the rest, this is a tale of the idle and indigent rich and their experiments in adultery. Richard Kurt appears to be a perfectly worthless person, so irritating in his sins and weaknesses, that it is easy to understand the feelings of his disagreeable father and his frivolous, selfish, restless wife. Virginia, unfortunately, does not in a strict sense, exist. The maiden, whose one desire it is to be seduced without appearing to consent or even to be aware of the incident, may live somewhere in the case-books of the pathologists; but Mr. Hudson has not delivered her from that prison-house. He tells us that such was her behaviour and such her motives, but the reader involuntarily declines to accept the assertion. Nor is it likely that the reader would much care if it were true. OVER AND ABOVE. By J. E. GURDON. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. This is a curiously naïve and artless story of the adventures of an airman, as seen through the eyes of one Warton, whom we meet crossing to France for the first time and leave going back to England on transfer to home service, with a Military Cross and two bars. It is written with evident knowledge and covers most of the typical incidents in an airman's life at the front. It is written, too, with complete sincerity, and it is easy to discern the author's personality behind the speeches of his characters and his own asides. Yet for all this it is hardly a success, hardly so convincing or informing as a number of books that have been built on a much slighter foundation of first-hand knowledge. The fights described are not clear or lucid, the persons introduced never become real. All this goes to show that both some natural gift for, and some practice in, literary composition are necessary for any book as well as experience of the life it depicts. THE NEW DECAMERON. By VARIOUS AUTHORS. Blackwell. 6_s._ net. _The New Decameron_ is a fascinating title which covers a disappointing book. The greatness of the original Decameron springs, after all, in the first place from the extraordinary beauty of the introduction, which sets the reader in a proper state of mind for the stories that follow and which lingers with him ever afterwards if he reads a story here and there at random. But the state of mind produced by the setting here, in which a miscellaneous collection of rather disagreeable persons is becalmed in mid-Channel in an excursion steamer, by no means recalls the magic of the Tuscan garden. The stories vary greatly in quality, but none of them is entitled to be considered very seriously. The best would make pleasant patches in our magazines, and the worst would be bad anywhere. The jokes at the expense of German dullness in the "Professor's Tale" are made with neatness and point. _The Stone House Affair_ is not a bad detective story. _The Upper Room_ is a decadent effort of a somewhat antiquated kind, but it is not too ill-written. There is no reason why these stories should not have been both written and published. But the great name under which they are announced and the elaboration of their frame make them seem perhaps more insignificant than they really are. THE REVOLT OF YOUTH. By CORALIE HOBSON. Werner Laurie. 6_s._ net. The squalors of theatrical touring companies seem to be, and no doubt are, capable of indefinite exploitation by novelists. Readers who care to be mildly harrowed by these topics will find in this volume all the pabulum to which they have been accustomed in innumerable other books. But those who have no particular taste for this sort of thing beyond moderation will confine themselves to wondering in what the revolt of youth here consists and in what way they are expected to find it a moving performance. Louie breaks away from home, goes on the stage, is a failure, returns and marries her cousin. There is a suicide and a good deal of illicit love-making, and at the end the heroine behaves with conventionally noble unconventionality. But these things are wearisome if one has no special taste for them. BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. Diversions? In a sense they are all, they have always been, diversions. Mr. Gosse has never allowed the chains of the critical vocation to weigh heavily upon him. It has been consistently his especial characteristic that he has approached the most difficult problems in literature with undaunted courage and vivacity. Where others have sat down to the difficult siege of Donne or Swinburne with the pedantic long faces of writers determined not to flinch even though all their readers fall asleep during the fray, Mr. Gosse advances lightly, blows a pleasant blast on the trumpet of his familiar prose and topples the most obdurate walls over before him, without ever losing the least part of his dignity. This it is which makes his reputation one of the assets of modern English literature. He represents among us a school of critics of which the disciples in this country are by no means too numerous. During a long career he has found and continually practised the secret of being almost always sound and never dull, invariably vivacious, and hardly ever superficial. His critical essays have always the gay, untrammelled air, if not the frivolous substance, of pure diversions. In his new collection he ranges among a variety of subjects and takes now a well-worn road, now a path that has tempted few enquirers. _The Songs of Shakespeare_ is not precisely a subject to attract the dealer in literary fireworks. It is, on the other hand, a subject ripe for the most portentous, the most meaningless, the most tedious aberrations of the pedant. Yet how delicately does Mr. Gosse, in no more than five pages, steer between these extremes and plant the arrow of his comment exactly on the necessary spot! Benjamin Disraeli, in his capacity as novelist, makes a theme not much less forbidding to the critic who doubts his own ability to be original. But Mr. Gosse is, with justice, serenely confident in the power of his style to overcome this difficulty. There is perhaps little in this essay which has not been both perceived and expressed before. But it is Mr. Gosse who crystallises mature opinion on the novels of Disraeli in a passage which might be taken as a model of discrimination and style or critical prose: Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the earlier part of this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment to the public in a popular and not very dignified kind. He contended with the crowd of fashionable novelists whose books consoled the leisure of Mrs. Wititterly as she reclined on the drawing-room sofa. He found rivals in Bulwer and Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His brilliant stories sold, but at first they won him little advantage. Slowly, by dint of his inherent force of genius, his books have not merely survived their innumerable fellows, but they have come to represent to us the form and character of a whole school; nay, more, they have come to take the place in our memories of a school which, but for them, would have utterly passed away and been forgotten. Disraeli, accordingly, is unique, not merely because his are the only fashionable novels of the pre-Victorian era which anyone ever reads nowadays, but because in his person that ineffable manner of the "thirties" reaches an isolated sublimity and finds a permanent place in literature. But if we take a still wider view of the literary career of Disraeli, we are bound to perceive that the real source of the interest which his brilliant books continue to possess is the evidence their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of the man. Do what we will, we find ourselves looking beyond Contarini Fleming and Sidonia and Vivian Grey to the adventurous Jew who, by dint of infinite resolution and an energy which never slept, conquered all the prejudices of convention, and trod English society beneath his foot in the triumphant irony of success. It is the living Disraeli who is always more salient than the most fascinating of his printed pages. We have chosen this passage, not because it is the most remarkable in the book, but almost at random, and in preference to some which are more brilliant and more highly wrought. But it is a fair example not only of the grace, but also of the precision, with which Mr. Gosse habitually uses his pen. His _Three Experiments in Portraiture_ are specimens of the same skill in delineation with the added advantage that the author knew his subjects directly. This is an art in which he has always excelled. His slighter, and his more elaborate, portraits of Swinburne stand easily among the first things of the kind in our language; and though perhaps Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lord Cromer, and Lord Redesdale did not offer material so variegated or so unusual, it may be for that reason that Mr. Gosse's portraits of them are even more interesting as studies by a virtuoso. When we come again to pure criticism, we find in _The Message of the Wartons_, a lecture delivered before the British Academy, the same graceful and distinguished gesture with which Mr. Gosse points to the interesting and useful traits to be discerned in his subject. Mr. Gosse will never be a true or a factitious fanatic elevating some spark of genius in a neglected worthy above the true fire discovered in others by the just sense of mankind. He makes no exaggerated claim for the Wartons, but he does see in them what has not been sufficiently insisted on before. They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow cold," and he was an ineffective Poet Laureate. His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect. All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had laid down in his celebrated _Réflexions_ (1719) that the poet's art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon by Pope and all his followers. To have been the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton. They had a faint conception: they demand respectful attention. These are indeed the accents of moderation, but then, as Mr. Gosse knows, to praise the Wartons with enthusiasm would be unjust. It is the centre of his critical talent that he is always moderate and precise in his estimates, and this fact gives his commendation more value, his blame more weight, and makes his judgments more readily acceptable. It is possible to bring forward charges against Mr. Gosse. The two essays in this book on contemporary literature, _Some Soldier Poets_ and _The Future of English Poetry_, suggest that, at least when they were written, the author was not fully acquainted with the buds of the new spring. The opinions expressed in them are, within the limits of his apparent knowledge, equally acceptable to both older and younger critics; but these limits are somewhat narrower than they might have been. But it would be ungracious, as well as disproportionate, to make much of this point. What is important is that Mr. Gosse is a veteran of English criticism, who has enriched our literature with a body of work which has no parallel and whose powers show no signs of flagging. When we consider his latest, we involuntarily turn our eyes back to his earlier books, and we cannot resist the conclusion that he has rendered to English letters a very remarkable service indeed. The latest is a continuation of the earliest, and this is, after all, the most important thing which can be said of it. A CRITIC IN PALL MALL. By OSCAR WILDE. Methuen. 6_s._ 6_d._ net. This volume appears, rather regrettably, with no indication of how it came into existence, how Wilde wrote the essays of which it is composed or who chose them for republication and on what principle. But the references given at the heads of the essays show that they are reviews collected from the _Woman's World_, the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and other papers. Wilde did not gather them together nor, so far as we know, even contemplate such a book. It is probable that he would be a little dismayed by it if he could see it. In some of these pieces there occur phrases and judgments which are the genuine Wilde at his best, witty and well turned if not always wise. There is, for example, a pleasing pertness in his remark on dialect poetry: To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialism. There is a long essay on Lefébvre's _Embroidery and Lace_ which is very characteristic, and has, we think, been quoted before. There is a short essay on _Dinners and Dishes_, from which the following passage may be extracted: There is a great field for the philosophic epicure in the United States. Boston beans may be dismissed at once as delusions, but soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, blue fish, and the pompons of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies, particularly when one gets them at Delmonico's. Indeed, the two most remarkable bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and the Yosemite Valley, and the former place has done more to promote a good feeling between England and America than anything else has in this century. These are worth having, if Wilde is worth having at all, because they are characteristic. There would have been no great occasion for weeping if they had been lost or if they had never been clipped from the papers in which they appeared. But since someone has had the industry to collect them, and since there is a sufficient demand to warrant their issue in volume form, we may receive them with a moderate pleasure. The greater part of the volume, however, does not rise to this level. Even the most brilliant and versatile of writers cannot consistently display his individual powers in journeyman work; and Wilde, though his wit was irrepressible, almost involuntary, was no more conscientious than any other reviewer. When the good sentences came they came: when they did not, he made no particular effort to maintain either his style or his ideas on any very elevated plane. There is no great value for the reader of to-day in a picture of Mrs. Somerville in a review of a book on her by a Miss Phyllis Browne. And no reader is likely to take a very vivid delight in Wilde's comment on a book called _How to be Happy though Married_, that Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as one of the best of wedding presents or in the jokes that Wilde quotes from the book. Unfortunately it is by no means clear that the anonymous compiler has realised how much uninteresting matter he is reprinting. He closes the volume with twenty-odd pages of _Sententiæ_, selected from reviews in which the gems of thought and language were detachably scattered. But these gems include such remarks as "No one survives being over-estimated," and "No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor." We cannot therefore excuse him on the ground that he knew he was dragging lumber into the light, and did so from a pious if mistaken motive. CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. THE PROBLEM OF HAMLET. By the RT. HON. J. M. ROBERTSON. Allen & Unwin. 5_s._ net. Swinburne's book, as Mr. Gosse explains in his introduction, is the complement of his work _The Age of Shakespeare_. He had intended a comprehensive survey of the whole of the Elizabethan drama, the glories of which he spent a great part of his life in celebrating. He did enough of it to show what the complete work would have been; the outlines are all here, but they are only filled in patches. That, carrying on as he did the Lamb tradition, and expressing it in his own language, he was sometimes over-enthusiastic, every reader of his sonnet on Tourneur knows. That he was liable to say incompatible things on different pages, where his purposes were different, is also common knowledge. We do not go to him for an exact "placing" of men or for temperate statement; it might be roughly said that he was willing to regard any minor Elizabethan writer as a master, unless he desired to use him to point a contrast with someone else, in which event the unfortunate playwright might be treated as a buffoon, an incompetent, and an impostor. Yet even of just and balanced criticism there is much in this book. No critic before him has so acutely dissociated the great Marlowe from the Greenes, Peeles, and Lodges, who are indolently classed with him. (It is characteristic that in making this dissociation he says of one of Peele's plays that it is "a riddle beyond and also beneath solution" how a man of any capacity could have "dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of _Edward I_.") And the essay on Chapman, here reprinted, is one of the finest panegyrics and most illuminating pieces of imaginative criticism in the language. He may, when he turns his searchlight on little men, illumine them too much; but Chapman was not a little man, and with space to move in and time to think in Swinburne here produced a masterpiece. The long passage on Browning and his obscurity is almost as good, so good that a digression, otherwise unpardonable, is self-excused. The book as a whole is among Swinburne's best prose books. His writing is what it ever was. Almost every word and sentence is duplicated. He would write: "No man and no woman who has ever ridden on a bus or driven on a cab down the quiet bye-streets and crowded thoroughfares of Paris or of London could fail to have noticed with interest and to have condemned, or at least deprecated, without hesitation or afterthought, the design of the posters displayed on the hoardings or exhibited in the windows, even as, with no greater hesitation and no less microscopic afterthought, he would have," &c., &c. We feel that the sentences might have been split into halves and two books of precisely similar meaning made out of the one. Yet his manner is a part of him. Even his most serpentine sentences have vigour and directness when they are read aloud; and his invective is as entertaining as ever. Swinburne had a very small vocabulary as a poet, but a very large one as a writer of denunciatory prose. He refers to a play of James Howard's as "a piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the nauseated reader," and through a series of "laughing jackasses," "howling dervishes," and things ignoble, impure, infamous, and abominable he reaches the climax of his abuse with the beautiful appellation, "verminous pseudonymuncule." Mr. Robertson also has planned a large work on the drama, but his is restricted to Shakespeare. He proposes to complete a series, of which his _Shakespeare and Chapman_ was an instalment, on "the canon of Shakespeare." He has more concentration and more industry than Swinburne, and he may complete his task. He is not an inspired critic and, unlike Swinburne's, his manner does not contribute to the readableness of his books. He is often--though an engagingly acrimonious controversialist--heavy-footed; and he has a passion for words like "theorem" and "confutation" which is almost incomprehensible in a man who obviously loves the simplest and most beautiful art. In the present volume he tackles the problem of Hamlet. He ridicules those who think that Hamlet was very vacillating; who would not be upset if he discovered that his father had been murdered by his uncle and his mother, and who would not hesitate before killing a man on the word of a ghost? But he admits, as we all must admit, that there are inconsistencies in the play, and he argues, with what we think conclusive force, that these are derived from Kyd's lost _Hamlet_, which Shakespeare used as a basis. Here, as elsewhere (in _Othello_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ for example), Shakespeare was handicapped by his sources. Mr. Robertson sometimes pushes his arguments too far, and he exaggerates, we think (where he finds it convenient), the inexplicability of Hamlet's character. But he has spent immense industry on the book, and it is a contribution to Shakespearean study that no scholar will be able to ignore. We wish, by the way, that he would not spend so much of his time, here and elsewhere, arguing with people, German and other, who are not worth arguing with. APPRECIATIONS OF POETRY. By LAFCADIO HEARN. Heinemann. 15_s._ net. Hearn was a sensible critic. But it is a fact--and a pity--that his criticisms of English literature were addressed to an audience of Japanese students. In examining a few of them (and we have already had two immense volumes) we get some instruction and entertainment from observing what he selects for Japan and how he explains it--a comparison and a contrast of the Eastern and Western points of view. Here and there, too, trying everything "on the dog," he reveals unexpected merits in English writers. In the "Interpretations" he demonstrated not merely the worth of Longfellow, but the intermittent genius of Mrs. Norton. But we can have too much of a rather interesting thing, and it is inevitable that these lectures on Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Morris, and various minors should be too elementary, however sound they may be, and however happy the quotations, to give serious English readers much satisfaction. We note with pleasure that many years ago Hearn was pointing out to Japan the great qualities of Robert Bridges as a poet of landscape. HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE (1415-1789): A History of the Foundations of the Modern World. By W. C. ABBOTT, Professor of History in Yale University. Bell. Two vols. 30_s._ net. Every schoolboy, in the Macaulayan sense, has at some time or other determined to write a history of the world in twenty volumes from the earliest times to the present day. Achievement is fortunately given to few. Omniscience becomes yearly more impossible, and, since the human mind can no longer single-handed cope with the accumulations of human knowledge, in history, as in so many other things, we have reached an age of intensive specialisation. These are truths which are continually being impressed upon us by the schools of modern history, and that they are to a great extent truths will be shown by a glance at any well-loaded shelf in a library devoted to the output of the modern historian. Yet there is distinct evidence of a reaction against this meticulous specialisation; there are signs that several most learned historians are discarding the historical microscope for the historical telescope and are yielding to the old fascination of writing histories of the world. The free airs of the New World seem to encourage this new phase of an old fascination. It is not very long ago that Professor Hayes of Columbia University took a large brush and a large canvas and produced two excellent and impressive volumes which he called _A Political and Social History of Modern Europe_. These two volumes were in effect a world history from 1500 to 1915. The mere thought of such a venture would produce a feeling of intellectual vertigo in most historians of the old world. But now Professor Abbott of Yale University comes along with two great volumes, and a promised third, in which he approaches world history with an even larger canvas and larger brush. He tells us himself that he is presenting us with "a new synthesis of modern history." We confess to as profound a distrust of the word "synthesis" as some people have of the word "definitive," and when a professor tells us that he has produced a new synthesis of history we are inclined to believe that this is another way of admitting that Providence has not granted him the gift of clear thinking or clear writing. But Professor Abbott's preface does him and his book an injustice. Some doctors, if you go to them with a swollen arm, will tell you that you have œdema of the arm; but there is no need to be frightened--the doctor is only telling you, what you know already, that you have a swollen arm. So, too, there is really no need to be frightened by the historian who assures you that his book has a synthesis; he probably only means, what you know already, that his book has a subject. We have not discovered the synthesis in Mr. Abbott's 1000 pages, but we have discovered that he has a very good subject and has written, in many respects, a very good book. The book itself proves that he is well equipped with knowledge and has made full use of the intensive and microscopic study of the modern historian. But he approaches history from the standpoint of enthusiastic and large-minded youth. He has thrown away his microscopes and determined to look back at history through a telescope. Immediately a large and dominating fact has attracted his attention. The age we live in is pre-eminently the European Age. The world is dominated by Europe and Europeans: there have in the past been eras in which a race or races have by migrations and conquests spread themselves and their civilisation and government over wide spaces of the earth, but never before has there been so universal and permanent a domination and expansion from one small quarter of the globe. Professor Abbott, seizing his historical telescope, has looked back and tried to discover the origin, the causes, and the courses of this amazing phenomenon. And the more one investigates the phenomenon the more amazing it appears. Take the case of migrations. The European Age or the modern world, as Professor Abbott has no difficulty in showing, began in the fifteenth century. (In history, of course, there is really never any real beginning or any real end; there are no abrupt transitions, only faster or slower currents in the stream of change; nevertheless there are periods in which the movement quickens so perceptibly that they are clearly turning-points in human history; and the fifteenth century is undoubtedly such a turning-point.) Now one of the most striking facts in the modern world has been the migration of Europeans. In North America, Northern Asia, Australia, South Africa, and to some extent in South America we see the Europeanisation of vast regions of the earth still being accomplished by the most ancient form of migration and colonisation. At the same time Europe has sent out a continual stream of conquerors and traders by whose efforts practically the whole of the rest of the world, where the inhabitants were not exterminated, has been subjected to European rule and the European's political and economic system. As Professor Abbott points out, this was a complete reversal of the rôle of Europe and the European in history. "Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of America Europe had been rather the passive than the active element in that great shifting of population to which we give the name of folk-wandering or migration." And it is a curious fact that the new period of history, of the expansion of Europe, and of the modern world begins with an event--it is the event mentioned in the very first sentence of Professor Abbott's book--which involved not the expansion but the most notable shrinking and invasion of Europe and was characteristic of the old world. To the European of 1453 the fall of Constantinople before the victorious Turk seemed to portend one more desperate and disastrous struggle against a horde of Asiatic invaders, and the inevitable and universal blindness of contemporaries to the great movements and currents moulding their destiny and history could not be better illustrated than by this fear and foreboding of the European in 1453. Within a hundred years of the fall of Constantinople, instead of Europe fighting desperately against the non-European world of invaders, the non-European world was already engaged in a hopeless struggle against the swarm of European invaders. In fact, however, the movement, which within a generation was to send Portuguese and Spaniards ranging over Africa, Asia, and the New World, had already begun in 1453. Contemporaries thought the end of a European world had come with the capture of Constantinople; they should have seen that the fall of Ceuta to the Portuguese prince in 1415 and the discovery and colonisation of the Madeiras in 1418 marked the beginning of a new European world of colonisation, conquest, and territorial expansion. It is the story of this expansion, this change from the mediæval to the modern world, which Professor Abbott seeks to unfold in his two volumes. The estimation of his success or failure raises an important question for the historian. He is clearly right in his view that "a proper basis for the understanding of what has happened during the past five hundred years" cannot be found merely in the history of territorial expansion. If you look at the past through his historical telescope you soon see that you cannot isolate the voyage of Columbus from the break up of the feudal system and mediæval institutions, or the exploits of Hernando Cortez from those of Martin Luther. Consequently Professor Abbott attempts, as he says in his preface, to combine three elements into a narrative of European activities from 1415 to 1789. The three elements are described by him as first "the connection of the social, economic, and intellectual development of European peoples with their political affairs"; second, "the progress of events among the peoples of Eastern Europe, and of the activities of Europeans beyond the sea"; and third, "the relation of the past to the present--the way in which the various factors of modern life came into the current of European thought and practice, and how they developed into the forms with which we are familiar." The real question for the critic of Professor Abbott's book is how far he has succeeded in this tremendous undertaking. The undertaking is so tremendous and the attempt so gallant that we hesitate to give an answer which is in fact so easy. With all its good points, its wide learning, its scholarly arrangement, its great interest and enthusiasm, the book cannot really be said to succeed in its chief aim. To judge from our personal experience, the reader, when he is about a third of the way through the two volumes, begins to have an uncomfortable sense of having lost his way, and this feeling gradually grows stronger and stronger. The man who writes a history of the world which is not to be a mere catalogue of facts, but is to illustrate and explain the present by the past and is to keep us on the track of great world movements, has to select his facts, and it is mainly upon his intuition for relevant facts and his skill in selection and presentation that the success of his enterprise depends. Professor Abbott's failure to keep our vision clear and our feet steadily upon the right path comes from a failure to select and an error in method. His book as it proceeds tends to become more and more a catalogue of facts, divided into chapters and labelled with such labels as "Europe beyond the Sea" and "Social and Intellectual Europe"; the general theme which should connect these innumerable facts becomes lost and forgotten, or at least no longer visible to or present in the consciousness of the reader. The measure of this failure is the frequency with which Professor Abbott makes the connection between his facts purely one of time, for it is almost a confession of failure on the part of a world historian with a synthesis when he has to point out to us that the summoning of the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg, the conversion of John Calvin, and the conquest of Peru all happened in the same year. Professor Abbott's mistake seems to us to consist largely in having overloaded his book with detailed facts. As it stands it is invaluable as a mine of facts bearing upon the change from mediævalism to modernity and upon Europe's conquest of the world; but an immense number of these facts are irrelevant to his general theme and purpose. Open the book at random and this immediately becomes apparent. Here is page 384 in a chapter called "The Rise of Holland," and on it we find ourselves immersed in the details of the Thirty Years' War. Here Professor Abbott has failed to decide whether he is writing a text-book of history in which the military exploits of the Margrave, John George of Brandenburg-Jägerndorf are relevant, or a wide survey of the great currents of history in which John George had but a microscopic place. Here the author abandons his telescope and world history for the microscope and John George, with the result that the feet of his reader wander from the path and his eyes are clouded. It is fatal to attempt to use a telescope and a microscope at the same time on the same object. BOCHE AND BOLSHEVIK. By HEREWARD T. PRICE. Murray. 6_s._ net. The author of this book was born an Englishman, but at the outbreak of war he was living in Germany, a naturalised German. He was called up and served in the German Army on the Eastern front, was taken prisoner, sent to Siberia, and was a witness of the Russian revolution there. The book is a record of his personal experiences and views. He is as bitterly hostile to his adopted country as he is to Bolshevism and Bolsheviks. His book does not add very much to our knowledge of the war or the revolution, and his own knowledge may be measured by the fact that he apparently thinks that the "secret treaties" published by the Bolshevik Government were made by Kerenski. TO KIEL IN THE "HERCULES." By LEWIS R. FREEMAN. Murray. 6_s._ net. Mr. Freeman was Official Correspondent with the Grand Fleet, and he accompanied Admiral Browning to Kiel after the surrender of the German fleet as "Keeper of the Records" to the Allied Armistice Commission. The book contains an interesting record of the various inspections and of conditions in Germany immediately after the armistice. MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE! By WILLIAM ALLISON. Richards. 21_s._ net. If he never sacrificed a kingdom, Mr. Allison at least abandoned a first-class in his schools for the sake of horses. That day was, indeed, evidently the turning-point of his life. He was an admirable writer of Latin verse, and when he was in for Moderations at Oxford the Latin verse paper fell on the same day as the Derby. He left his composition unwritten to go and see whether Prince Charlie had won the Derby. Mr. Allison, with the modesty proper to heroes, now calls his action "extremely silly," but few readers of this book of recollections will agree. Many men get firsts; few men pursue horse-breeding and racing with the poetic fervour which Mr. Allison brought to them. His recollections are of Rugby under Temple and Balliol under Jowett, and this part of his book is an amusing mixture, recalling now _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ (for Rugby still kept the Arnold stamp) and now _Ruff's Guide_. When he left Balliol he was called to the Bar, but never gave it undue preference over the paddock. He ran a famous breeding establishment, and when the Stud Company Limited failed Mr. Allison combined practice at the Bar with journalism. As editor of _St. Stephen's Review_, which was started with £500 capital in 1883 and lasted till its famous conflict with the Hansard Union in 1891, Mr. Allison deserves praise for one notable act--he discovered Phil May. The cartoons of May's which he reproduces will not compare with the artist's later drawings, but it is not possible to estimate the value to May of the training he obtained in this early political work. The Fleet Street of the '80's, when Romano's was a place the quieter journalist entered with trembling, is portrayed in a dry, matter-of-fact way far more effective than any elaborate, highly-coloured description. There may be people who are not interested in horses or journalism; to them we can recommend the pleasant tributes to Bacchus which lace engagingly the more serious chronicle. As a boy Mr. Allison was not strong, and a good old-fashioned doctor ordered him a glass of port every morning at eleven; this "advice was followed scrupulously, both at home and when I went to school," and Mr. Allison never actually says that he has abandoned the prescribed dose. Mr. Allison writes with no pretensions to literary art, and he sometimes chronicles very trifling occurrences; but he has an engaging modesty and a genial "take it or leave it" attitude which redeem his book from the charge of triviality. _My Kingdom for a Horse!_ should be invaluable to the historian of social manners and to the novelist who is anxious to get material for the reconstruction of a time which already seems historical. There are plenty of illustrations--mostly process reproductions of old photographs and examples of Phil May's work. We wish, by the way, if Mr. Allison owns the copyright, that he would persuade some publisher to issue a new and worthier edition of May's _The Parson and the Painter_, which first appeared in the _St. Stephen's Review_. POLITICS AND ECONOMICS HOW THE WAR CAME. By the EARL LOREBURN. Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. There is very little disagreement to-day, we suppose, as to who were the prime authors of the War. But on the minor question, whether any blame attaches to the Entente Powers, opinion is, as it was from the beginning, far more divided. The controversy as to our own position in the crisis, which had almost faded out of the public mind, is sharply revived by Lord Loreburn's book. Lord Loreburn, let us hasten to say, does not deny the guilt of Germany. Indeed, he is at pains to show how the Bismarckian tradition, improved upon by chauvinistic professors, a more or less demented monarch and a ruthless military caste, had sapped the morality of the German nation and made it all too ready to follow its rulers into a deliberate attack on the peace of Europe. Nor does he lend any support to the suggestion that the British Government or the British people wanted war with Germany. He pays a tribute to the efforts made by the Foreign Secretary to avert the disaster at the eleventh hour. And yet Viscount Grey cannot, in his mind, escape a large share of responsibility for the final conflagration. For what made the war inevitable, he asserts, was our entente with France. That entente was a departure from the traditional British policy of holding aloof from all Continental entanglements. It was developed by Sir Edward Grey, with the assistance of Mr. Asquith and Lord Haldane, behind the backs of Parliament, and even of the Cabinet, from the end of 1905 onwards. Not only was Sir Edward Grey working in secret; he was committing this country to the support of France (and through France of Russia) without taking the necessary steps to increase the army so as to make that support effective. And, worst of all, he had nothing in black and white to define exactly to what amount of support we were committed. The result was seen on August 4th, 1914, when it became manifest that we were under an obligation of honour to join our arms with the French against Germany. Sir Edward Grey, of course, maintained that we were not so bound, that we were free to decide whether to declare war or not. And it is certain that a large part, if not the whole, of the nation, was convinced that it was the attack on Belgium which did finally bring us in. But this, says Lord Loreburn, was a delusion, which flowed from the arch-delusion of Sir Edward Grey that our hands were free. Lord Loreburn's case, it will be seen, clearly has two heads. He did not like the policy of the French Entente, and he did not like the methods by which it was promoted. On the first point most readers will disagree with him, and, in any event, the matter is now of merely historic interest. On the second point, public opinion will be more interested in his criticisms. Some will say that Lord Loreburn's old hostility to the Liberal Imperialists inclines him to magnify the faults that were committed between 1905 and 1914. Some will say that he exaggerates the ignorance under which we are alleged to have laboured in regard to our relations with France. His opponents will certainly suggest that everybody knew where we stood, as towards France, and that the secrecy was secrecy in name only. But these are not matters for discussion in these columns. Lord Loreburn thinks that "the persistent danger of secret diplomacy is hitherto tolerated and abused in this and other countries" is one that the nations ought to lose no time in taking to heart. THE MASTERY OF THE FAR EAST. By A. J. BROWN. Bell. 25_s._ net. This massive volume (it runs to some 650 pages) is a very interesting account of the Japanese and Korean peoples, their customs, their religions, their politics, and the influence of Christian missions in their countries. Dr. Brown is an American with an agreeable style, a sense of humour, and, in general, a nice critical faculty, and, though we are very doubtful of some of his conclusions, we do not hesitate to say that his book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the Far East. From a political point of view the Far East means to-day--and it will mean more and more in the future--Japan. Every schoolboy knows the story of Japan's rapid emergence from feudalism to the position of a first-class modern Power, of her successful struggles with China and Russia, of her mastery of the Korean peninsula, of the great part she played in the late war. And schoolboys, as well as statesmen, may presently watch the effects upon world politics of her status in Asia. Dr. Brown is a candid friend of the Japanese. He is not under the illusion that they are a model people, nor is he of those who describe them as "varnished savages." He comments severely on the lamentable labour conditions that prevail under their newly-created industrial system. He is no lover of the autocracy of their government. He does not deny the faults of their diplomacy. Nevertheless he is their friend, who believes in them. He expresses his sympathy with Korea and with China in their subjection. But he takes what he calls "the large way" of viewing Japan's Korean policy. "The large way," he says, "is to note that, in the evolution of the race and the development of the plan of God, the time had come when it was for the best interests of the world and for the welfare of the Koreans themselves that Korea should come under the tutelage of Japan." As for China, she is "an enormous and backward country ... like a ship without a captain or pilot, helplessly drifting on the high seas, apparently unable to right herself and, in her present water-logged condition, a menace to other ships." And so he sympathises "with the feeling of the Japanese that they cannot ignore this incontestable situation." He is an enthusiastic believer in Christian missions, and he hopes that Christianity will be the salvation of Japan. Japan's great need, he says, is to be spiritualised. Neither Buddhism nor Shintoism have the necessary moral influence. But Christian missions are a great reconstructive force--economical, social, intellectual, political, spiritual, international. What, then, is the position of Christianity in Japan? Dr. Brown produces statistics to show that it has made enormous strides, and quotations from Japanese statesmen and publicists as evidence that its growth is welcomed by the rulers of the country. Yet all the public schools are forbidden to teach religion; Buddhism has been driven to reform itself; Shintoism, as he admits, is a waxing rather than a waning force. In another passage he says that the old religions of Japan are losing their hold on the educated classes. Thus a recent census in the Imperial University of Tokio showed fifty Buddhists, sixty Christians, 1500 atheists, 3000 agnostics. It would appear, therefore, that the missionaries have a long row to hoe before Christianity becomes the general religion of the Japanese. RACE AND NATIONALITY. By JOHN OAKESMITH, D.Litt., M.A. Heinemann. 10_s._ 6_d._ net. There is some chance, now that the heat and passion of the war are past, that the vexed questions of nationality and nationalism will be discussed with a little more intelligence and discrimination. Dr. Oakesmith certainly sets a good example. He tells us that he was formerly one of those (they were the vast majority, we think) who had but a vague idea of what they meant by nationality, till he set himself to study the question and classify his mind. The results appear in this very interesting book. He criticises alike the theory that nationality is based on "race," and the opposing theory that there is no such thing as nationality at all. In his own view nationality develops as an evolutionary process, and the full-grown thing may be defined as "organic continuity of common interest." He argues strongly against the internationalist pacifist's contention that nationality is the cause of war, and that peace is to be obtained by the spread of cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, he avows, nationality is "actually the one instrument destined, if wisely directed, to secure lasting and universal peace." This is a statement which most sane persons to-day will accept easily enough. But the crux is the "wise direction." Dr. Oakesmith does not give us much practical guidance on this point. Generalities and fine words are not very helpful, whether they come from the side of passionate enthusiasts for the League of Nations or from those who, like Dr. Oakesmith, are a little doubtful whether the world is quite ripe for it. However, the book is well worth studying, especially on its critical side. WAR-TIME FINANCIAL PROBLEMS. By HARTLEY WITHERS. Murray. 6_s._ net. Mr. Hartley Withers is not only a "financial expert"; he is also a really interesting writer. Even though one may not agree with all his views, one can enjoy this collection of vigorous essays on war finance, company law and banking, currency problems at home and abroad, the conscription of wealth, the theory of Guild socialism. Mr. Withers does not spare his criticism of the Government's financial policy, which has brought us to the verge of bankruptcy. He dismisses the "capital levy" as impracticable; but he advocates a high income tax, with super-tax beginning at a much lower level, and "with skilful differentiation according to the circumstances of the taxpayer." THE GREAT UNMARRIED. By WALTER M. GALLICHAN. Werner Laurie. 6_s._ net. This book is a painstaking attempt to show the evils of celibacy (including the common state of "pseudo-celibacy") both to society and to the individual. Mr. Gallichan arraigns the false ideals and the economic pressure of our industrial system, the perverse influence of ecclesiasticism, and the other causes which produce the myriads of involuntary or voluntary celibates in the western world. He advocates no "fancy" remedies, such as free love, polygamy, or the taxation of bachelors, but rather an attack on poverty, the spread of education, the moralisation of the marriage laws. The book is not a profound or scientific study, but it might be instructive to those who have never given any thought to the subject. ULSTER AND IRELAND. By JAMES WINDER GOOD. Maunsel. 6_s._ net. This little volume is one of the clearest and the most interesting books that we have seen on the Irish problem. Mr. Good gives us a survey of Ulster history from the seventeenth century, which shows the unifying influence of the genuine democratic ideals common to both the contending parties. He argues that this unification has been, and is, thwarted by "religion," and by "Carsonism," "the supreme example in modern times of the triumph of the influences that make for divisions in Ireland." Sinn Fein, in Mr. Good's view, offers no practicable way out of the difficulty of Ulster. "If Sinn Fein is," he says, "as it can now claim to be, the creed of the Irish people it must propound a solution of the Ulster riddle based, not on abstract theories, but on the realities of the situation." Mr. Good's concluding chapters on "Ulster as It Is" are excellent reading. We do not suppose Ulster Unionists will agree with all the views he expresses there, still less with his conclusions--one of the chief of which is that Ireland is really one nation and not two. But his book may induce a good many mere Englishmen to take a more intelligent attitude towards Irish politics. THE GUILD STATE: ITS PRINCIPLES AND POSSIBILITIES. By G. R. STIRLING TAYLOR. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net. Mr. Taylor is an enthusiastic Guildsman, though a heretic, in that he stands for a localised system as against the orthodox National Guilds. His book is a very naïve account of the Guild proposals, and we can hardly imagine that it will convert anyone to his views. There is a vast amount of idealisation of the Middle Ages--an idealisation which frequently verges on the ridiculous. Many of the historical statements are extravagant. We are told, for instance, that Queen Elizabeth "had perhaps the most honest and most efficient ministers of State that this nation has ever possessed." And is it not going rather far to say that "the French peasant remains much as he has been for centuries--the most substantial fact in European civilisation, and perhaps its highest product"? Mr. Taylor's style would not suffer if it were less arrogant and less splenetic. He lets us know, till we are sick of it, that there is but little wisdom in the world save in the common-sense simple man and the hard-headed Guildsman. And his virulence against politicians and University professors almost assumes the dimension of a disease. RECONSTRUCTORS AND RECONSTRUCTION: A PLEA FOR COMMON-SENSE. By OXON. B.H. Blackwell. 1_s._ net. The greater part of this brochure is taken up with a defence of the capitalist against the attacks of revolutionaries, impossibilists, and all the tribe of intellectual "high flyers"--such as Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Orage, and the late Mr. Sidney Ball. The author's own plan is to harmonise the interests of capitalists and workers in a system of "separate autonomous industries co-ordinated with a National Federal Parliament of Industry." It is in fact something like Guild socialism with the socialism left out. "Oxon" hardly appears to appreciate the limitations or the difficulties of his scheme. A PRIMER OF NATIONAL FINANCE. By HENRY HIGGS, C.B. Methuen. 5_s._ net. This is a purely elementary volume which explains the revenue and expenditure of the British Government and local authorities, the National Debt, and the study of financial statistics. It is clearly and simply written, and might be a valuable schoolbook. For the interested and courageous student there is some useful advice on further reading. But Mr. Higgs will strike fear into the heart of many beginners by telling them in the first chapter that the science of finance is so vast a subject that Professor Jèze of Paris is preparing twelve bulky volumes upon it, and that his elementary treatise alone consists of over 1100 large octavo pages! THEOLOGY THE SUPREME ADVENTURE. By MERCEDES MACANDREW. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. Certain Nonconformist ministers had a habit--it is now fast dying--of interspersing the reading of the Lesson in service-time with comment and illustration. Mrs. Macandrew has applied a similar method in this volume. Writing to satisfy the needs of an agnostic friend, Mrs. Macandrew retells the story of the four Gospels and supports the narrative with critical expositions of her own or, occasionally, of such authorities as Edersheim. It is not easy to see for whom the book is intended. Mrs. Macandrew is frankly uncritical. She not only ignores the whole body of "higher criticism," but she makes no reference to textual difficulties, and, in discussing such a passage as the Confession of Peter, does not even mention the fact that a considerable controversy has gathered for some years around the precise significance of the promise, "On this rock I will build my Church." It will not be to everybody's taste to have the annunciation described in this way: God the Father sent an angel called Gabriel to that city of flowers--Nazareth in Galilee--sent him to a sweet and good and lovely _but quite poor girl_ called Mary who was soon to be married to a man much older than herself, called Joseph. And when we tried to read Mrs. Macandrew's paraphrases of the parables we recalled with a sigh Mr. Birrell's complaint against Canon Farrar, "who elongated the Gospels." It no doubt gave Mrs. Macandrew some months of happiness to write the book, but we think she was ill-advised in submitting it to the public. SCIENCE CATALYSIS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. By ERIC K. RIDEAL and HUGH S. TAYLOR. Macmillan & Co. 17_s._ net. In spite of the difficulties which war-time placed in the way of publishers, the production of scientific books, both in England and Germany, has been astonishingly large during the past five years. The greater number of them have--naturally enough--been devoted either to technical subjects or to branches of science having an immediate technical application. The field of industrial chemistry, especially, has been well tended by the writers, and not only new books, but new series of books--such as Messrs. Longmans' _Monographs on Industrial Chemistry_, Messrs. Churchill's _Textbooks of Chemical Research_, and Messrs. Baillière, Tindall, and Cox's _Industrial Chemistry_ series--have appeared to bear witness to the activity of the English chemists. Certain subjects in particular have been extensively treated; we may instance synthetic colouring matters, colloid chemistry, and catalysis, the last-named subject having books devoted to it in all the series just specified. In these the subject is handled from the industrial point of view, but it is frequently seen that the commercial and the theoretical developments of a science are mutually stimulating, discoveries made in the laboratory without any object but the wresting of knowledge from nature finding commercial application, and the commercial processes suggesting fresh theoretical problems. The great industrial importance of catalysis has led to a revived interest in the scientific theories of the process, and the latest book on the subject, by Drs. Eric Rideal and Hugh Taylor, deserves praise for having devoted considerable attention to the historical and theoretical aspect of the subject, which has been rather neglected of late. There are many chemical reactions which are promoted or accelerated by the addition of a small quantity of some foreign substance which is not used up in the process and does not appear in the final products. Thus one of the romances of chemistry was the discovery, occasioned by the chance breaking of a thermometer in the vessel, that the presence of a small quantity of mercury greatly hastens the oxidation of naphthalene to phthalic acid, a process of great importance in the manufacture of synthetic indigo. Similarly the presence of finely divided metals accelerates many reactions, such as oxidations and hydrogenations--for example, asbestos impregnated with particles of platinum promotes the oxidation of sulphur dioxide to the trioxide in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. The researches of Baker and others, showing that certain gas reactions, which ordinarily take place rapidly, proceed very slowly indeed if the gases are thoroughly dried, point to a catalytic action of small traces of moisture. The enzymes of the human body which accelerate the chemical processes of digestion and assimilation constitute another class of catalysts, and Drs. Rideal and Taylor class under catalytic action the effect of radiant energy in promoting such combinations as that of hydrogen and chlorine, although it is perhaps rather extending the usual conception of the term to do so. These examples will indicate the wide range of the subject and help to make intelligible Ostwald's famous generalisation that "there is probably no kind of chemical reaction which cannot be influenced catalytically, and there is no substance, element, or compound which cannot act as a catalyser," which is no doubt true if very slight accelerations of reaction be taken into account. Of course a catalyst cannot affect the final state of equilibrium, but only quicken or institute (the discussion as to whether, in some cases, the catalyst initiates or merely accelerates a reaction already taking place imperceptibly slowly seems to us pointless) a reaction theoretically possible. Other, the so-called negative, catalysts hinder reactions; other substances "poison," or stop, the action of ordinarily activating materials; others again, the "promoters," increase the efficacy of the catalyst. The phenomenon is a complex one. By no means the least interesting and valuable feature of the book before us is the exposition of the historical development of the subject. We who are apt to look on the feminine scientist as a product of the last twenty years are reminded that there was at least one woman chemist of ability in the eighteenth century, Mrs. Fulhame, whose _Essay on Combustion_, published in 1774, emphasised the importance of the presence of moisture in gaseous reactions. Faraday, "the prince of experimenters," also worked on catalysis, and, in fact, originated the adsorbtion theory of the process, which attributes the action to the extended compressed film formed at the surface of a porous solid. It is not only in the chapter expressly devoted to the early history that we find an account of the original workers; the advances made by them receive recognition throughout the book in connection with the branches in which they experimented. The treatment of the various theories of catalysis--the intermediate compound, the adsorbtion, electrochemical, and radiant energy theory--might have been extended with advantage. The mathematical exposition of the adsorbtion theory is one of the weakest things in the book, and McLewis's work is not very clearly handled. The difficulties of giving an adequate summary of this part of the subject are undoubted, but the need of it is so marked that we regret that the authors have not spent more energy on the task. This is not the place to deal in detail with the account of the practical applications of catalysis, which is excellently done and includes the most recent work, some of it, such as Partington's improvements in oxidising ammonia, only made public last year. The use of catalysts in, to take a few examples at random, surface combustion, the hardening of oils by hydrogenation (used so extensively in margarine making), the fixation of nitrogen, and electrolysis is well described, and there is a good chapter on ferments and enzymes, and another on the Grignard reagent. Omissions may be noted here and there, but the book is not, of course, intended to give detailed instructions to the commercial chemist. Rather, we believe, is it meant to supply to chemists in general, and even to the lay reader, an idea of the nature of the process of catalysis, which is becoming more important every day, and the extent of its applications, with sufficient detail to make the reactions clear, as far as they are at present understood. As a general exposition of the subject the book is really needed, and will undoubtedly find a place on the shelves of all who follow the advances of science. TEN BRITISH PHYSICISTS. By ALEXANDER MACFARLANE. John Wiley & Sons, and Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ 6_d._ net. Writing of the life of Rankine, Professor P. G. Tait gave as his opinion that "the life of a genuine scientific man is, from the common point of view, almost always uneventful," and, if the man in question has no interests but science, this is, in general, true. Engaged in researches on the laws of nature, the most that he demands from life is that he shall have his study, his laboratory, food, shelter and peace, and such an attitude does not lead to high adventure or romances of passion. Consequently, in writing biographies of physicists it is advisable not to dwell too long on their everyday life, marriages and meals, for there is a certain monotony about the material lives of these great men. In the lives before us, which are little more than sketches, the author has rightly laid most stress on the scientific achievements of his ten physicists, but he has a tendency to reduce his account to a catalogue of the discoveries and advances made. An estimate of the place of each man in the thought of the time, and of his scientific character, of the general tendencies of his work and the place it now occupies in the history of the science, deserves to take a rather larger place in these short biographies than it has received. Happily many of the ten are men of very interesting personality. The selection--James Clerk Maxwell, W. J. M. Rankine, P. G. Tait, Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, William Whewell, Sir G. G. Stokes, Sir G. B. Airy, J. C. Adams, and Sir J. F. W. Herschel--if based on no clearly-defined plan, has the merit that it includes one or two men who have been unduly neglected. Rankine, in spite of his important work on thermodynamics, does not receive much attention from the physicists of to-day, possibly owing to his unattractive "molecular vortices," and Babbage is known to most people rather from the sneer in the _Ingoldsby Legends_: Master Cabbage, the steward, who'd made a machine To calculate with, and count noses--I ween The cleverest thing of its kind ever seen, than for his really great, though imperfect, achievements. Why Babbage is set down as a physicist, when his whole effort was devoted to the perfecting of calculating machines, we do not know, but the life is one of the most interesting, and makes an attempt to expound the causes--obvious enough, perhaps--of his misfortunes. It is a generous appreciation of an ill-starred genius, now seldom heard of. Whewell, again, is scarcely known as a physicist, but rather as the historian of inductive science; we suppose that his writings on the tides have secured him his place. Joule is mentioned in early life, and was certainly one of the leading physicists of the century, yet he is not among the selected ten--neither, for that matter, is Faraday, so it is evident that scientific prowess has not been the test of admission. On the whole the ten are versatile men, although no one of them could come near in diversity of performance to the great Thomas Young, who was not only a physicist of the first rank but also a physician, a classical scholar, and one of the first successful decipherers of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rankine and Whewell were fair poets, and Clark Maxwell deserves higher praise for his verses. His description of Kelvin's reflecting galvanometer, in the form of a parody of Tennyson's "Blow, bugle, blow," illustrates the ease and finish of his light verse: O love! you fail to read the scale, Correct to tenths of a division. To mirror heaven those eyes were given, And not for methods of precision-- Break, contact, break, set the free light-spot flying, Break contact, rest thee magnet, swinging, creeping, dying. The poem is quoted in the life of Kelvin, and two of Rankine's songs are given. We hope that physicists can still show the same accomplishment. The lives are well written, and, while not a very profound contribution to the history of the science, make very pleasant reading for scientist and layman. There is, however, occasionally a lack of proportion, as when Clark Maxwell's work on electro-magnetic waves receives little attention compared to his other far less important achievements. A LETTER FROM FRANCE THE PRESENT STATE OF THE FRENCH NOVEL _Paris, October, 1919._ In France as much as, and perhaps more than, in England the novel has been since the eighteenth century the central massif of literature. While in England the poets and the novelists formed two quite distinct groups, while the poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Tennyson, Swinburne remained pure poets, in France there have been few poets who have not wished to write novels. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Vigny, Gautier have done so. A pure critic like Sainte-Beuve wished, with _Volupté_, to try his hand at the novel. Taine left in manuscript the novel _Etienne Maylan_ and Renan the novel _Patrice_; they did not publish these books because they recognised them to be mediocre, but both wished to obtain the glory of the novelist. The novel is in France the highest object of literary ambition. It alone assures a position of material and social importance. Thus it is that a novelist who is read by the upper and middle classes is necessarily admitted to the Academy while a historian or a philosopher is admitted only in exceptional circumstances, and great poets like Baudelaire, Gautier, Banville, Paul Fort remain outside unless they have certain connections and certain sources of support. The prosperity of the novel at a given moment may then be considered, in France, as the most obvious mark of a powerful literary activity. No form of literature addresses a larger public, provokes more discussion, or gives more of its own colour to a generation or to an epoch. I will endeavour to indicate here in a few pages the condition of the French novel on the morrow of the war. Beyond doubt it is passing through a moment of mediocrity. This is not because its public is beginning to break up. Publishers and readers demand novels. In default of genuinely new novels many old ones are reissued and read again and cheap reprints are swarming. Every new novel in which any grain of originality can be perceived is discussed and brought into the light and sells satisfactorily. And yet nothing so far has told us of the appearance of the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant of to-morrow. Naturalism proves to have been the last great school, massive, compact, and powerful, of the French novel. Well, the survivors of the naturalist movement, such as MM. Céard, Hennique, Descaves, have ceased to write novels or else, if they still write them, have given up completely the methods of naturalism, and seek, without success, to adapt themselves to new tastes. It is not, however, impossible that in a little time from now naturalism in several ways may again be somewhat in fashion. There is a tendency among young writers and critics to revise the judgment given in the case of Zola, as the judgment on Dickens has been revised in England, and to consider that the poverty and emptiness of his last books has unjustly thrown a shadow on the profound and powerful works of his maturity. Those works, born of the war, which have been most favourably received, have been on the whole inspired by naturalist methods of observation and composition. The European success of _Le Feu_ is due in large part to the fact that the author applies to the great war the point of view and the methods of Zola. It was also from the point of view of the story of a squad that Zola wrote _La Débâcle_. So far the novel of manners and psychology born of the war has only been attempted by writers of the older generation, that which knew the masters of the naturalist novel, which lived their life, which took part, from one side or another of the barricade, in their struggles. I am here thinking especially of the works written during the war by the doyen of the French novel, M. Paul Bourget. M. Bourget occupies to-day in the novel a position analogous to that of Zola in his last years. The young literary generation is hostile to him or regards him with contemptuous indifference, except that part of this generation which is grouped round M. Maurras, whose political ideas he has adopted. He is justly reproached with a painful style, with conventional psychology in upper and middle class surroundings, with laborious intrigues carried out according to antiquated formulæ. He must be regarded, nevertheless, with respect as a great worker, who seeks conscientiously to extend the limits of his manner, and, above all, as the sole representative to-day of the old tradition of the French novelists of the nineteenth century--that of Balzac, of Sand, of Flaubert, of Maupassant, of Zola. Perhaps he marks the irremediable decadence of this style which the twentieth century will replace by one more supple and more precise. The war novels of M. Bourget, _Le Sens de la Mort_, _Nemesis_, are mediocre, though showing always the same technical qualities of solid construction. But he has written a short _nouvelle_ of profound beauty, _Le Justicier_, on a great theme of human peace and reconciliation within a divided family; and this sketches perhaps the general lines of to-morrow's reconciliations on our torn planet. Among the innumerable books written by combatants, in which novels abound, no novel has achieved the powerful interest of certain collections of letters and journals which render, without literary modelling, fresh, authentic, and actually seen impressions. The generation which has lived through the war as an immediate and tragic reality has not written and certainly will not write the novel of the war. The Thackeray, the Balzac, the Tolstoi of to-morrow have probably been born, but are hardly out of the nursery. The two forms of the novel preferred by the young generation of to-day are the novel of adventure and the little novel of irony and sentiment. Neither has yet produced any great result. The first, after a year, is already out of fashion, and the second will probably follow it in a few months. And the writers of value who have passed through these phases are now passing through some other. The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the influence of which was visible in André Gide's _Les Caves du Vatican_, have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels of M. Pierre Benoit, _Königsmarck_ and _l'Atlantide_, are clever books, in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider Haggard, have not already given him. The _Maître du Navire_ of M. Louis Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in _Le Chant de l'Equipage_ of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the same difference as between the ghost in _Hamlet_ and the ghost which Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone, in _Semiramis_. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season. What I have called the little novel of irony and sentiment has had a longer, a more vivacious, and a more durable existence. It is almost peculiar to French literature and produces every year a good harvest of agreeable books. It is generally an invertebrate composition, made up of humorous episodes and reflections, the slight daily impressions of a man of letters, delicate and fatigued, in Parisian surroundings. It is, as it were, the chronicle-novel of French literary life. A great number of the works of M. Abel Hermant belong to this style, and among them, in particular, the Anglo-French novel, half of Paris, half of Oxford, which he is now publishing, and the first two parts of which are called _L'Aube Ardente_ and _La Journée Brève_ (the latter in course of publication in the _Revue de Paris_). These are, like M. Hermant's books, the elegantly but frigidly written compositions which come only from a literary and conventional atmosphere and appear to have been developed in the author's mind as in an artificial incubator. The true novel of this sort comes into existence under freer and more fanciful conditions than obtain in the intelligent and tidy, though somewhat melancholy, manufacture of M. Hermant. A young writer, who died a score of years ago, Jean de Tinan, produced masterpieces in _Pense-tu réussir?_ and _Aimienne_, which have not been surpassed. To-day this type of novel has a right and a left--elegance on the right and Bohemianism on the left, the latter as a rule being more picturesque and more highly flavoured. On the right there is what one might call, using the word in the sense in which it is used by historians of mediæval literature, a _littérature courtoise_--I mean a literature of the court with some refinement and some sensuality. Here the author describes his little amatory adventures, endeavouring to relieve their inevitable banality with a certain piquancy in the