Chapter C: A. Tait (17)

ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By IRVING BABBITT. Houghton Mifflin Company. 17_s._ net.

Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise. Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.

Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good, and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a philosopher and not a poet.

Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians, in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America. It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby. Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.

What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest at the door of the foundling hospital.

Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation. His incursion into literature is a border foray, and he is off at once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated. Wordsworth, until he began the _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, was betrayed by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.

One wonders, too, whether this massive series--the present volume is the fourth--will contribute much more to ethics than to literature; whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to 1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.

It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.

SPRINGTIME AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir FRANCIS DARWIN. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however, together with that on a _Procession of Flowers_, and the paper entitled _Recollections_ are both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances. Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:

He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything
about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a
postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on
a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's
friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner
to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day;
with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address
us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am
afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.

It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to the _Graphic_ Special Numbers. Sir Francis's paper on _Names of Characters in Fiction_ does not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in Thackeray--whom Sir Francis rates far too highly--and frequently absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap, Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical" names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of Henry James's.

DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS, SENSATION NOVELISTS: A STUDY IN THE CONDITION AND THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By WALTER C. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public. The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with the _Pickwick Papers_, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years. But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his monsters--Quilp in particular--are pantomime monsters, and some of his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day, calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade--a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson," he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of story-books" than Charles Reade.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

A GALLOPER AT YPRES. By Lieut.-Col. P. R. BUTLER, D.S.O. Unwin. 15_s._ net.

A KUT PRISONER. By H. C. W. BISHOP. Lane. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

THE ROMANCE OF THE BATTLE LINE IN FRANCE. By J. E. C. BODLEY. Constable. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"--two of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at Marseilles on his way to "some other theatre of war." The book contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and fought and billeted.

Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually crossed the Black Sea and made his way home _viâ_ Russia. There is no attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they lived well--eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!

Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls, "An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing, and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley's _bête noire_; he regards them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"--peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched. There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that "the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter" is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.

RECORDS. By Admiral of the Fleet LORD FISHER. Hodder & Stoughton. £1 1_s._ net.

The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel, in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found. _Records_ begins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest! One can't see the foundation of it!" And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and irritating and arresting and astoundingly human--a torrent that sweeps the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom, and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars, and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms." His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely" about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!

But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from the defects--or should one say the excess?--of his qualities. It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Englishman--and above all an official Englishman--to take a man seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ!_ as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet there is serious stuff in this book--discussions of the conduct of the war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these matters--and on a thousand more, no doubt--with many of his colleagues. It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short, this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors, declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!

HENRY FOX, FIRST LORD HOLLAND, HIS FAMILY AND RELATIONS. By the EARL OF ILCHESTER. In two volumes. Murray. 32_s._ net.

The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius. Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to his hand--a German King, a discredited opposition, and a horde of rapacious place-hunters to keep fed--must be remembered and allowed for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man, but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words, if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington--remarkable only because, a thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.

If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called "a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers, disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.

Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They
are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of
such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy
as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of
people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of
the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the
people.

Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes, from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.

By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country, was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in his attachments, nor always temperate in his actions. He alienated Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the Clandestine Marriages Act--an opposition which may have been grounded upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III. succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony, steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he did not succeed was not his fault.

Fox directly attacked two separate members of the House of Commons,
and with so little decorum on the part of either buyer or seller
that a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither members
flocked, and received the wages of their venality in bank bills, even
to so low a sum as two hundred pounds for their votes on the treaty.
Twenty-five thousand pounds, as Martin, Secretary of the Treasury,
afterwards owned, were issued in one morning; and in a single
fortnight a vast majority was purchased to approve the peace.

It is perhaps going far to say that nothing more disgraceful was ever done in Parliament, but it is not too much to affirm that no greater act of treachery was ever attempted against the theory of popular representation by a member of the supposed popular House. But he had his barony, and received it three years later than Bubb Dodington obtained his.

It is not Lord Ilchester's fault that much of the intrigue he elucidates is rueful reading. The wonder is that he has found the spirit with which to achieve it. When one's native country, its neighbour states and colonial dependencies, when King, Lords, Commons, Army, Navy, and Church are all seen to have been counters in a great game of grab; when patriotism is as much an unknown quantity as even a rudimentary civic sense, and the only certainty is that of one's own and one's rivals' common dishonesty, it is no wonder that the accidents of his book count for more than the substance. What we get of Charles Fox makes amends for Henry. Everything that Lord Ilchester has to tell us of Charles is good. We have him first as a baby. "He is weakly, but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivell'd about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and 'tis incredible how like a monkey he look'd before he was dress'd." Then he is at a preparatory school, in 1757, where it seems that Charles has more emulation than any boy almost ever had; next at Eton, where he and his brother Stephen entertained their father at a dinner "bespoke from the Christopher: ... boil'd mutton and broth, three large fowls, and a leg of mutton roasted." It was at Eton in 1758, when he was nine years old, that he thus announced his philosophy of life. The father is writing to the mother:

That odd dog Charles said, with a smile, he wish'd his life was at an
end. I asked the reason. "Why," says he, "it is a troublesome affair,
and one wishes one had this thing or that thing, and then one is not
the happier; and then one wishes for another thing, and one's very
sorry if one can't get it, and it does not make one happier if one
does."

We can follow him to Oxford, and wish we had room for his letter to his father explaining with elaborate pains how he came to knock the bottom out of £150, or for another which announces the loss of eighty guineas at cards, and registers the first of a series of vows that it shall never happen again. All this will be found in Volume II., together with some account of the stormy opening of his parliamentary career--at nineteen; but there or thereabouts we regretfully leave him, the best thing by far that Henry Fox ever made.

If it were asked what this man had done in his days to deserve two biographies on the scale of Mr. Riker's and Lord Ilchester's, the answer would be long in coming. Henry Fox was a man of good but moderate abilities, a bad speaker, a fair debater, one of the few, at any rate, who ever stood up to William Pitt the first. He conducted his War Secretaryship with diligence, his Paymastership with what must be called legal honesty. He robbed his country, but no more than any other Paymaster had done. He enriched himself by trading with the huge balances left on his hands, sometimes lending of them to the country which found them at twenty per cent! Every Paymaster except Pitt, who would have none of it, had done as much, and most of them did worse. But one searches Lord Ilchester's pages in vain for anything definitely _done_ by Fox, except, to be sure, the infamous attempt to betray the constitution by making the third estate of the realm a creature of the first. Even that he did not succeed in doing. It was Lord North who reaped for King George what Fox had sown. And that is about all that one can say, and very much what Lord Ilchester himself says of Henry Fox. What should be added to that is that the book is admirable both for lucidity of style and arrangement, for gallantry of attack, and gaiety in action.

RECOLLECTIONS OF LADY GEORGIANA PEEL. Compiled by her Daughter, ETHEL PEEL. London: Lane. 1920. 16_s._ net.

Lady Georgiana was born in 1836 and is daughter of Lord John Russell. She should have memorable things to tell, and perhaps she has. But Providence, which has given her length of days and illustrious descent, has not conferred the garnering eye or the gift of tongues. It is a pity, for she has seen so much: Holland House and Pembroke Lodge, Bowood in the days of its greatness, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston, the Duke and Disraeli, Rogers, Tom Moore and his wife, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the whole Victorian galaxy. She has danced with the Prince Consort, and found him rather cross; she has heard Tom Moore sing, and seen him weep at his own music; she has helped entertain Garibaldi, and dined with Macaulay. She was not, however, impressed by that pundit, found his monologue a bore, and agreed with Sydney Smith when he said, "very gravely, towards the end of dinner, 'Macaulay, when I'm dead, you'll be sorry you never heard me talk.'" That is something; and here is another thing equally good. When Lord John was about to take John Bright down to stay at Woburn, "a candid friend" wrote to the Duke of Bedford, "Hope you'll count your spoons." Here, once more, is a glimpse into the manners of that stately place, about 1840:

Many were the happy Christmases we spent at Woburn. I remember, to
our huge delight, we were allowed to help throw mutton chops out of
the dining-room window for whoever cared to pick them up. I think
that custom died out. When I was a child each guest was provided with
a piece of paper in which to wrap up an eatable for people waiting
outside.

God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations!

No doubt that was as good a way of doing it as any. But such flowers grow rarely in Lady Georgiana's garden, which is indeed something of a _hortus siccus_ where names and dates have to stand for more than they will bear. "I remember Mr. Kingslake coming down to Pembroke Lodge sometimes; I don't think he had then begun his _History_. He was always very agreeable." So much for _Eothen_. "In connection with William Warburton, I remember Mr. Matthew Arnold, for he was a great friend of my brother-in-law's, and a comrade in the inspection of schools." And so much for him. Of Dickens we get something more. "In the evening, I remember, he was conspicuous, owing to wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white." Disraeli, too, expatiated in shirts. "Though he talked incessantly, I remember best his shirt front, which was made of white book-muslin over a very bright rose-coloured foundation, which shone through it." The temptation to stick pins into it must have been severe.

With these grains the reader must be satisfied, and with such powers of evolution as he possesses may extract, no doubt, some more. Here is one of Lady Holland, too good to be passed over. She proposed leaving to Lord John Russell, and did in fact leave him, an estate in Kennington--where the Oval now is. Lord John would only accept it for life, urging the claims of the son and daughter of the house. "I hate my son; I don't like my daughter," said the great lady, and settled it.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM. (Revised Edition, Extended to 1920.) By SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB. Longmans. 21_s._

Twenty-five years ago Trade Unionism was vaguely apprehended in the polite world as a growing force in industry, useful to the working-class and even legitimate if kept within proper bounds. Wise employers recognised its value and treated with it; the unenlightened fought against it or accepted it with a bad grace. Many even of its friends and allies, the Socialists--and not a few of these were themselves Trade Unionists--rated it very low, as being, in fact, a mere "palliative of the Capitalist system." To-day it is safe to assert that there is no institution in the country which bulks larger in the public eye than the Trade Union movement. In numbers, wealth, solidarity, and power it has developed out of all recognition. Its leaders sit and bargain on equal terms with Ministers of the Crown, take their places on public committees and Royal Commissions as of right, even threaten, amid the angry protests of adversaries who were once their masters, to destroy the foundations of the established social order. The aims and activities of the Trade Unions vie with the "crime wave" for first place in the columns of the newspapers; they are discussed in trains and clubs and drawing-rooms. And, in short, the organisation, which but a few years since was regarded as a more or less private affair of workmen and their employers, now appears as the biggest problem that the State has to face--as something that may even, as many will have it, supersede the State itself.

It is hardly necessary, in these circumstances, to dilate on the importance of a new edition, containing an account of the developments during the last thirty years, of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's _History of Trade Unionism_. When the book appeared in 1894 it was welcomed not only by intelligent minds in the working-class, but by all students of social history, abroad as well as in this country, as a remarkable piece of work; it took its place, and has kept its place, as a classic. Yet it had a far smaller public than it deserved; by 1911 under 10,000 copies had been sold. Of this new volume no less than 19,000 copies in a special edition have been bought by Trade Unionists before publication--a notable sign of the times. We have called this edition a new volume--and that it certainly is, for not only have Mr. and Mrs. Webb revised the work throughout and at some points slightly amplified it, but they have added three chapters, covering actually some two hundred and fifty pages.

The increase of Trade Union membership has been, as everyone knows, enormous. In 1892, after more than two centuries of growth, the number of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom was not much over a million and a half. At the outbreak of the war it was under four millions; at the present moment it is above six millions--perhaps nearer seven than six--and includes "probably as many as 60 per cent. of all the adult manual working wage-earners." But what is of peculiar interest to note is the increase in certain industries and among certain sections of the community. The organisation of "unskilled labour" has in the last few years been prodigious, and so also has that of women of all sorts from the "braincombers in the learned professions" to domestic servants and the chief "hands" in the sweated trades. The female membership of Trade Unions, which in the year before the war was in round figures 361,000, has risen now to over three-quarters of a million, and it is still rising. Very remarkable also is the increasing organisation of the "black-coated proletariat"--civil servants, clerks, managers, supervisors, technicians, and the rest. This, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb rightly insist, is an important indication of the lines on which industry is likely to be shaped in the future. But with this vast growth of numbers, and a corresponding growth of amalgamation and federation, there has been singularly little change in the central machinery of the movement. The weakest point, indeed, is at the top. The Trades Union Congress, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb put it, "remains, as we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour." Its executive body, the Parliamentary Committee, does not provide that "general staff" which the movement badly needs, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb's criticism both of this and of the whole question of what may be called the Trade Unions' "civil service" is very much to the front.

The history of Trade Unionism in this century, however, is by no means exhausted by the records of its membership and organisation. Side by side with this it has won an enhanced status, and not the least interesting of the three new chapters is devoted to an account of this achievement. Mr. and Mrs. Webb give us an elaborate criticism of the famous Taff Vale judgment; they discuss the Osborne case and the Trade Union Act of 1913, the relations of the Unions and the Government during and after the war. And last, but not least, they describe the "revolution in thought," the influence of Syndicalist and of Guild Socialist theories in shaping the demand for "self-government in industry" and in determining the attitude of the workman to strikes and Parliamentary action.

The final chapter deals with the political side--the rise of the Labour Party, from its stormy birth just over twenty years ago, to the new era which opened for it at the election of 1918. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have much friendly criticism to offer on the subject of the present political organisation of the Labour movement. It suffers, they observe, not merely from a lack of "Party loyalty" on the part of Trade Unionists, but also from a confusion of central machinery. It suffers too (some say these are its chief shortcomings) from a failure to develop a staff of trained political officers and from a scarcity of trained Parliamentary representatives. But these weaknesses, we suppose, are on the way to be remedied, if the Party as a whole, as well as its leaders, is alive to them.

The reader is not to look in this history, as its authors remark, for any argued judgment on the validity of Trade Union assumptions or ultimate ideals. Nevertheless, what little they have to say on this hand is of profound interest. "The object and purpose of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations, and politically in the Labour Party," they warn us, "is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours. It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of Society, by the elimination, from the nation's industries and services, of the Capitalist profit-maker, and the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by owning." What form in that reconstructed Society is the organisation of industry to take? Mr. and Mrs. Webb expect to see "the supreme authority in each industry or service vested, not in the workers as such, but in the community as a whole.... The management of industry ... will not be the sole sphere of either producers or consumers, but is clearly destined to be distributed between them--the actual direction and decision being shared between the representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society on the one hand and those of the community in Co-operative Society, Municipality, or National Government on the other." They do not see eye to eye in every detail with the Guild Socialist. But still less do they see eye to eye with that fabulous monster who stalks through the writings and speeches both of Revolutionaries and Conservatives--the bureaucratic Fabian Webb, harbinger of the Servile State! There may be some, we suppose, who will find a less "detached" outlook in this volume than in the original edition. If there is a difference of outlook, it is natural enough, for Mr. and Mrs. Webb are more "inside" the Labour movement now than they were in 1894, and their judgments and criticisms must inevitably show a subtle difference of tone. But this is not to accuse them of undue partiality. No man can write an "impartial" history that is worth reading of his own time and his own friends. And we need not regret that Mr. and Mrs. Webb, in their detailed descriptions, for example, of the great railway strike or the miners' dispute of last year, put the workmen's case confidently and strongly since they see it as their own case also and that of the nation. The appearance of these three new chapters, we do not hesitate to say, constitutes an event in the world of politics and of letters. The _History of Trade Unionism_ will remain, as it has been, a work which every student of industry and every man of affairs must read and re-read and inwardly digest.

MY SECOND COUNTRY (FRANCE). By ROBERT DELL. Lane. 7_s._ 6_d._

This study of the people and institutions and spirit of France is in a class apart from the volumes of "impressions" of foreign lands with which "week-enders" and passing travellers are prone to favour us. "France," says Mr. Dell, "has been my home for more than twelve years, but it was already my second country long before I went to live there. Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my affections." It is with an intimate knowledge, therefore, as well as with a profound sympathy that he discusses the many phases of French life. But his book is by no means a mere panegyric. He is throughout candid and critical--often bitterly critical. He exposes ruthlessly the undemocratic character of the "Democratic Administration," the impotence of Parliament, the demoralising influence of small property, the evils of the _petit bourgeois_ spirit, the avarice and egotism of the _grande bourgeoisie_. How far his view of all these things is a just one will be a matter of controversy. Some may say he is violently prejudiced; no one, after reading this book, could deny that many of his judgments are biased. In the final chapters there is really no pretence of impartiality; he argues his case and "maintains his propositions," like Doctor Pancrace in the play, _Pugnis et calcibus, unguibus et rostro_. Mr. Dell is a Socialist, but not an "Etatiste"; he is a "libertine" and a revolutionary, with an equal dislike of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. And his feelings in this matter are so strong that we may venture to doubt his predictions as to how the Revolution will come. For the rest, Mr. Dell is a determined Rationalist. "La France de Voltaire et de Montesquieu," he says with M. Anatole France, "celle-là est la grande, la vraie France." For "religious" France he has no use--neither for "irreligious" orthodoxy, nor political Catholicism, nor Modernism. Bergsonism, too, he holds to be a baneful influence, as reactionary as the Church which eschews it. But the old superstitions and the new philosophies, he believes, are losing their hold; "the spirit of the true France is coming into its own again, and the young intellect of France is returning to the rationalism of Voltaire." In all this, and much else, he may be wrong, but he has given us a book that is at any rate profoundly interesting.

RUSSIA IN RULE AND MISRULE. By Brigadier C. R. BALLARD, C.B., C.M.G., with a Foreword by General SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON. Murray. 6_s._ net.

This is a curious and nondescript book. Beginning as a history of Russia from the earliest times, it ends rather as the impressions of a soldier who, attached to the Eastern front during the war, saw something of the Russian revolution. It is a soldier's book, breezy, untrammelled by literary and historical conventions, and distinguished by a direct simplicity which disarms criticism. The General gives an interesting account of what happened subsequently to the revolution; but his account often gives only one out of many views of the facts. Thus his chapter on the Kornilov incident is, as he states, merely a summary of Kerenski's book, and cannot therefore be accepted without considerable reserves. On pages 214-216 he gives ten outstanding facts about the Bolshevik _régime_ "which can be proved over and over again if proof be required." We should like to see the General's proof of the first sentence in his tenth "fact," namely, that "there are no elections of any kind...." The General has also succeeded in adding a new complication to the already complicated problem of the spelling of Russian names. The gentleman whose name we have seen spelt variously by other writers Cheidze, Chheidze, and Tshcheidze appears in his book as Cheidsi.

THE PEACE IN THE MAKING. By H. WILSON HARRIS. Swarthmore Press. 6_s._ net.

It would be unfair to compare Mr. Harris's book with Mr. Keynes's, though it covers something of the same ground. Mr. Keynes is analytic and, in the end, constructive, and his subject is the rebuilding of a ruined Europe. Mr. Harris is historical and reminiscent. Like a good journalist--and it is unnecessary to say how good a journalist he is--he tells us how they made the peace rather than what kind of a peace they made and should have made. It is true that in telling us the story of peace-making at Paris he does tell us also what kind of peace they made. In fact his book has a distinct value as a clear summary of the terms eventually hammered out by the three Great Powers and accepted by Germany. But the angle of Mr. Harris's approach to his subject is that of the journalistic historian. The result is a very readable and interesting book. Putting ourselves into Mr. Harris's skilful hands, we are enabled to see, through the various journalistic spectroscopes, something of what took place behind the shuttered and curtained council chamber of the Big Four, which in effect was a Big Three.

LEAGUES OF NATIONS. By ELIZABETH YORK. Swarthmore Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is a useful book for those who wish to study the long and slow development of the idea of a League of Nations. The author begins with the idea of a League in ancient Greece and traces it through Dante, the "Grand Design," Grotius, Penn, Saint Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham to Alexander I. of Russia and the Holy Alliance. The value of the book is considerably enhanced by its careful documentation, and by the fact that it gives us a translation of the text of many of the schemes and "covenants" which are not easily obtainable by the ordinary reader.

THE NEW OUTLOOK. By LORD ROBERT CECIL, M.P. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.

This brochure has a double claim to interest all who concern themselves with politics. In the first place it is a remarkable revelation of the advancing spirit of democracy, of the new social conscience and widening outlook of our time. For here we have a Cecil, the type of the grand seigneurial family of high Tory traditions, calmly--or rather enthusiastically--offering us a political programme that a few years ago would have been greeted as wildly Jacobin. In the second place the views of Lord Robert derive a peculiar importance from the position which he occupies to-day in the public estimation. His high personal character, his idealism, and his ability single him out among the members of his Party--if indeed he can be said in the present political confusion to be of a Party. He gives us here half-a-dozen short essays dealing with the League of Nations, the industrial problem, finance, the reform of Parliament, and the Irish question. His practical proposals under each of these heads will not commend themselves to everyone in all their details, but none will fail to admire the generous and constructive spirit which underlies them. Those who are pessimistic about foreign affairs may well wish that we had more men of this stamp to put Europe on its feet again. Those who are exercised about the situation at home will look anxiously for the next step of this aristocrat among the democrats.

EMPIRE AND COMMERCE IN AFRICA. By L. WOOLF. Labour Research Department and Allen & Unwin. 20_s._ net.

Mr. Woolf's object in this work is to answer the question: "What has been the result and what the lessons of the application of the power and machinery of the European State to Africa?" He examines very carefully and critically the history of the organisation of the British, French, and German Colonies in North and East Africa, as well as the Belgian Congo. The results both for Europe and for the natives he finds on the whole to be evil. The future, if we are to continue the old policy of economic imperialism, offers no better prospect. There is hope in the League of Nations, but for the mandatory system, as proposed, Mr. Woolf has no enthusiasm. To make the League effective and beneficent its forms and duties must be restated and clearly defined. The book is one which ought to be read by all who are interested not merely in African affairs but in the Colonial policies of the European Powers.

ANTHROPOLOGY

ARCHAIC ENGLAND. By HAROLD BAYLEY. London: Chapman & Hall. 1919. Medium 8vo. pp. 894. 25_s._ net.

The publishers' announcement informs us that "Mr. Harold Bayley by his graduated studies in Elizabethan Literature, Symbolism, and the Renaissance has established his position as an original and interesting thinker." Again, on its paper wrapper the present work is styled, "this profound and far-reaching contribution to English Archæology." If a pill were to be puffed in this way the inference might be drawn that the interested party did not belong to the medical profession. By parity of reasoning one conjectured before opening the book that Mr. Bayley was not versed in the gentle tradition of the archæological fraternity. But to read the introduction almost disarms the critic. Mr. Bayley cannot, he confesses, afford to emulate the Oxford tutor, described in a novel of Mr. Stephen McKenna, who set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic, and thirty years later had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. He complains that his literary hobbies have necessarily to be indulged more or less furtively in restaurants and railway-trains. Nevertheless he tries "to keep on as good terms as may be with the exacting Muses of History, Mythology, Archæology, Philosophy, Religion, Romance, Symbolism, Numismatics, Folklore, and Etymology." Thus circumstances have forced him to become a literary "hustler"; and, since self-advertisement is germane to the hustling temper, and moreover in this case is quite undisguised and naïve, it may almost be forgiven.

Not that Mr. Bayley wants to be forgiven. It would seem that the hustling and the hard-hitting tendencies are naturally akin. For the philologists have attacked him on account of another book. Consequently, in this book he pulverises the philologists one and all; there is nothing left of them. Nor do the anthropologists come off any better. Even sex does not protect them. Miss Jane Harrison, for instance, was rash enough to say that gods evolve from choral dances and similar ceremonies, herein but following the common opinion that in the development of religion ritual is prior to dogma. Mr. Bayley will have none of it. "The theory here assumed," he exclaims, "grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals." How can a reviewer proceed to deal with Mr. Bayley's views without trepidation? _Fænum habet in cornu._