Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

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.