SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1914. PAGE 617 618 618 619 620 throw his speculations on a world that reverences no golden mean, but only golden means, into the form of that urbane and graciously modulated discourse which enshrines for us the calm results of Athenian thought: "O Attic shape, fair attitude," what hast thou to do with the modern city's roaring ways? One is tempted, on learning Signor Ferrero's main subject and his method, to exclaim τὶ τοῦτο πρὸς τὸν Διόνυσον; but a very few pages set the doubt at rest, even after the first shock of discovering that in this Platonic dialogue we are to be much concerned with America and the aspirations of American millionaires and millionairesses! 623-625 Piquant enough certainly, more piquant still when the narrator is Signor Ferrero, who might seem the very last man qualified 626 by tradition and studies for the appreciation of his theme. WAR LITERATURE (Thoughts on the War; Papers for War Time) 620-621 621 -FICTION (Mrs. Martin's Man; The Veiled Life; The 622 625-626 THE revival of the Platonic Dialogue as a literary vehicle for the conveyance of modern thought is an experiment as perilous as it is fascinating. Landor and FitzGerald, in so far as they succeeded, were helped by their subject-matter, which was never far removed from classical antiquity. They harked back, as it were. Their themes might have been the themes of the Socratic group. Their speakers are informed by thought that is essentially a reflection of the ancient world. Landor's characters are often the ancients themselves. FitzGerald's young Cambridge men think and speak in terms of their classical studies. In so far as they touch the modern it is only as it is influenced by the ancient. More daring is he whose main concern is with modernity, who strives to set its bewildering complexity in a true relation towards the serenity and comparative simplicity of ancient thought. The turmoil of to-day recognizes no such saving maxim as undèv ayav. To adopt it would be to negative at one stroke the first article in the creed of the 66 hust ler," who believes that to impose any limit on his activities is to stultify activity itself. For him the "overmuch" does not exist. His maxim is not a temperate warning, but an audacious affirmation. He would, if he spoke the tongue of Plato, change μηδὲν ἄγαν into οὐδὲν ἅλις. It required, therefore, no little daring on Signor Ferrero's part when he chose to But the historian has been happy in his opportunity. Circumstances tore him from a ten-year-long absorption in Ancient Rome, and flung him, without warning, into the vortex of the two Americas. Such an experience can be understood at the full only by those who have known it themselves. It has in it something of the cataclysmic and the chaotic, and not until the pilgrim has again set his face eastward does he begin to realize what has happened to him, and that he has been confronted with the necessity of choice. "You cannot live tanari in the dialogue. The speaker plays astride of both worlds," says Dr. Mononly a small part in the action, but his little aside is vital to the argument. It poses the question, elaborated with infinite charm by surely the most wonderful ship's company that has sailed the Atlantic since Columbus. For this weighing of the souls of two worlds takes place on board the Cordova, a leisurely and philosophic steamboat ("the Ark of wisdom "one of the passengers called her) which bore Signor Ferrero back from Rio to Genoa. The claims of East and West, ancient and modern, their inter-relation and antagonism, are debated by representatives of the two cultures. If such a ship's company was in reality thrown together by madcap Chance, then she too had for the moment put on the helmet of Minerva. If it is ben trovato, then Signor Ferrero, though he will not have his book called a romance, shows excellent skill in one part at least of the novelist's craft the apt delineation of character and its just modification to the necessities of the argument. The persons represented are no crude types of the opposing principles. Paradox abounds in their composition. There are Latins pur sang, and Latins Americanized. The Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton of North America appear only by implication and reference, but they are there at full length. The battle-royal on the Latin-American side is led by the wonderful Alverighi, the universally learned Mammon-worshipper and iconoclast, a Mantuan (subtle irony !) by birth, who began life with a scholar's and a poet's dreams, but emigrated to the Argentine on the advice of an old professor who worshipped America, but knew it only on the map. By indomitable pluck and ability Alverighi grasped a sudden fortune, and, while he kept his intellectual interests alive, made no secret that his god was henceforth the Almighty Dollar. Of wealth he is insatiable. "The demon of America," says Cavalcanti, the Brazilian diplomatist with a fine old Florentine name, has entered into this son of a poor Italian professor." That is Alverighi in brief. On the first night out he startles the company with an assertion of the beauty of New York. It is the apple of a stimulating and courteous discord which lasts all the way to Genoa. Those who have approached New York from the sea early on a summer morning, when the skyscrapers swim in a golden haze; who have watched her towers in moonlight, or seen her in the dance of sub-tropical lightning, know what Alverighi meant. His paradox was the revenge of that early poetic impulse which he had bartered to Mammon. No one seems to have caught that point. He Enough that his challenge set the lists for this tourney on the high seas. lays about him merrily, and next evening, by invitation arising from another hinted heresy, he formally destroys' Hamlet.' Not since 'Wilhelm Meister' has the supreme tragedy been thus dissected in a philosophical novel, if Signor Ferrero will pardon the term. The battle is now fairly the New World a thing of beauty; the joined. The supposed hideous city of mighty drama of the Old a thing of shreds and patches! That is enough to set our philosophic mariners' brains in a ferment. All thoughts, all passions, all desires of both worlds pass in review. Alverighi seeks to prove the demon of America a god-the only god; Ferrero and Rossetti, the idealistic engineer, exorcise the demon; Cavalcanti and the Comtist, Admiral Guimarães of the Brazilian Navy, listen, and sometimes supply an individual and penetrating view or qualification to both sides, according to their lights. Rossetti and Ferrero stand for the Old World culture, and maintain its lasting efficacy against Alverighi's attack upon what he calls the intolerable tyranny of Europe. They seek for a criterion, they explore the infinite. Shock follows shock. Alverighi exalts the wealth-producing machine as the chief factor in scientific progress. Signora Ferrero, a specialist on the machine and its economic results, proves it a bandit-a cause, at length, of poverty. It seems at last that there is no criterion of absolute beauty or of good; even science is not exact. The Copernican system is no more absolutely true than the Ptolemaic. It is Rossetti who finally suggests a solution in a passage of wonderful beauty, delivered with fine symbolism as the ship enters the Straits of Gibraltar. At the best it is but a compromise, a doctrine of limitations, within which man must be content to find his account; but even so he may learn that there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, although he may nev er hope to apprehend them in the sum of their predicates. "This channel," says Rossetti, pointing to the Straits, "is the image of the human mind, itself the narrow channel of an infinite ocean." The Old World is vindicated, but Alverighi remains impenitent. He fades out of the discussion to prepare a report for a banking corporation. a year. Rumney's imagination so far that he was induced to join the Honourable Artillery Company. But he is at pains to explain to his reverend uncle in the country, whose protégé he was, that he has done so, not so much from a wish to be a soldier as from the hope of improving his health—an end In the underlying comedy of the dia- in which he was not disappointed. Never logue, the matrimonial perplexities of Mrs, was a more canny young man. If he inFeldmann, the New York millionairess, dulges in a dance, he is anxious to assure Signor Ferrero gives us, with a spice of mis- the world that "I have not suffered my chievous innuendo, an excellent little sub-money to dance out of my pocket by it, plot, which serves to expose the pathetic nor any deviation from my accustomed case of the American plutocrat turned art hour of retiring to my own bed-chamber.” connoisseur. It is a touch entirely of the But it was hard enough even so to live and New World, imposed on a literary form of save money as a clerk in London on 1007. the Old. But it is not inharmonious, and it serves its purpose better than direct analysis. Nor can it mar the Platonic spirit of the whole dialogue, which does not omit even its apologue, the delicious story of how Prometheus and Vulcan escaped to America, and did things there that shook Olympus and brought Jove to terms. the setting of the piece there is the right "I went down yesterday to the Piræus touch. The argument will always, we fear, leave the Alverighis of this world impenitent; but to the Ferreros and Rossettis this voyage of the Cordova north-eastwards will be a rediscovery of the immutable beauty and order of antiquity. The company on shipboard is good, for all its dialectic; charmingly human also, for it is even capable of picking a very agreeable quarrel with the Equator. In From the Old South Sea House: being 66 THE life-story told in this correspondence with peculiar fullness is mainly that of a North Country lad who came up to London from the Cumberland dales, worked in an office in the City, and returned with a small competence to farm the little estate on the shores of Ullswater, whence he had sprung. The period of Thomas Rumney's migration was about the same as that at which George Romney went to London from the Lake District. But though the painter did spell his name with a u " before he went south, there is nothing to show that he was related to the Rumneys of Gowbarrow. The employer of our Thomas was a West - India merchant who had his office in the South Sea House, whence most of these letters are dated. Charles Lamb's connexion therewith had terminated only a few years before this correspondence opens. For it was the period of the Napoleonic wars, and incidentally the young clerk benefited to some degree by the loans then floated by Pitt. In the whirligig of time we find ourselves reading of the days one hundred years ago when England was threatened with invasion, when the Bank was issuing onepound notes, and when the 3 per cent Consols had fallen below 50. This crisis in the nation's affairs impressed Mr. The Training of a Sovereign: an Abridged Selection from The Girlhood of Queen Victoria,' being Her Majesty's Diaries between the Years 1832 and 1840. Published by Authority of His Majesty the King. Edited by Viscount Esher. (John Murray, 5s. net.) THE work of bringing Queen Victoria's early diaries within the compass of a volume has been most judiciously done. We have compared The Training of a Sovereign' with the edition published two years ago, and we cannot discover any material omissions. The diaries have indeed gained, if anything, in interest through the suppression of some entries which were not of much importance. As the season of gift-books is at hand, we can thoroughly recommend this wellprinted and well-illustrated volume to those who wish to make Christmas presents to girls of from twelve to sixteen. Boys need not be excluded, for that matter, since it will teach them a good deal of history, even if its appeal is chiefly feminine. Older folk have probably read Queen Victoria's diaries already, but to those who have neglected to do so we can heartily commend them in their latest form. This correspondence, with its repetitions and insistence upon small things, enables us to form an idea how the thriftiest clerks lived and managed to save one hundred years ago. The example of an unsatisfactory curate of a brother, who ran through a good deal of money, and from whom Thomas found it hard to obtain the repayment of a loan of 81., no doubt encouraged him in his scheme of economy. But he was not ungenerous. He dispatched presents to his family in the North, in all of whom he maintained for twenty years a vivid interest-little presents of tea, sugar, oranges, and Lord Esher furnishes this volume with lemons (the last cost 6d. each), as well as an eloquent and courtier-like Preface, parcels of second-hand clothes. To judge extolling the British Monarchy and its from the amount of space devoted to the deep-rootedness in the hearts of the incident, the consignment of a codfish (it people. That is a sentiment to which we cost 8s. 6d.) by coach to his uncle and all gladly subscribe. But to make his patron for the celebration of his wedding-point he seems to us to depreciate unduly day was one of the chief events of his the early Hanoverian kings. George I. life. It is much enlarged upon, repeated, and George II., we are told, were relucemphasized, looked forward to, and fondly tant pawns in the hands of a junto of back upon, in his letters. politicians" and "unrecognized by their subjects." Now a fair reading of history goes to show that both of them were clever enough to surround themselves with ministers who suited them. Pitt forced himself, no doubt, upon George II., but only after he had fumed in Opposition or in subordinate posts for many years, and his conquest of the royal dislike was hardly more marked than Peel's entrance into the favour of Queen Victoria. Horace Walpole also teaches us that the glories of the last years of the reign of George II. reflected on the aged sovereign, even if the Great Commoner was the popular idol. His correctness meets with its due reward. He saves and makes a little money; his valuable uncle dies and leaves him 1,000l.; his brother dies, and he inherits the little estate at Watermillock. The object of all his labour and economy is achieved tooin part. When his salary is raised to 1307., at the age of 40 odd, he had begun to contemplate matrimony, and had applied to all his correspondents to recommend a prudent female, a “rich, steady, notable, and good-tempered lady." He has to admit that he and his sole friend in London, discussing the matter impartially, agree that "there are consequences attending matrimony that give us the horrors." As Esquire of Mellfell, he none the less took the plunge undaunted. The awakening was swift and tragic. This careful man, so prim, so precise, so methodical, within six months of his marriage has to record that "Mrs. R. and I had much talk about housekeeping arrangements, in which our opinions did not agree.' But the lady apparently triumphed, and he became notoriously henpecked. The volume concludes with this dolorous entry: Mrs. R. very much displeased at my going from home at all, and renders my return at times truly disagreeable." 66 The book, in spite of some longueurs and much repetition, provides many humorous side-lights, and is valuable, too, from the point of view of economic history. The English throne, according to Lord Esher, has been placed " upon foundations so solid that the waves of modern scepticism and latter-day rationalism break vainly against it." With all due respect, we fail to see much connexion between republicanism and agnosticism, though for controversial purposes they are often included in the same anathema. Huxley and Tyndall were thoroughly loyal to the Throne, but they were far from orthodox. It is difficult to write anything fresh about Queen Victoria's diaries. The earlier entries have a certain constraint about them, because they were liable to be scrutinized by the eye of the Duchess of Kent. But the integrity of the young Princess's mind shines forth from every page, and the inference that her childhood, though secluded, was really less unhappy than the Queen afterwards | running down-as constituting, in the The Philosophy of Change. By H. Wildon Carr. (Macmillan & Co., 6s. net.) Henri Bergson: an Account of his Life and Philosophy. By Algot Ruhe and Nancy Margaret Paul. (Same publishers, 5s. net.) THE two books before us are the best of the more advanced, yet popular expositions of M. Bergson's philosophy that we have come across recently. Their interest for any one already acquainted with that philosophy lies in observations upon the M. Bergson's now familiar view of the brain and nervous system as focussing instruments which serve to mediate action in space and to exclude the unnecessary is well, and even convincingly, drawn out; but not so the subservience of consciousness to action, which is asserted again and ness to action, which is asserted again and again with a good deal of circumlocution, but without satisfactory grounds for believing it being adduced. Perhaps Dr. Wildon Carr regards it as implicit in the very statement, "Movement is original, and all else derived," and considers that, if this is demonstrated, that has been demonstrated also. But so far as individual experience goes, so far also as our untutored insight can penetrate into the history of mankind, it is action which, on the whole, appears to subserve consciousness; and a philosophy which allows to direct individual experience and intuition something of the force of witness to the real should provide for this error error it be) a His own view of God is pantheistic, and at the same time includes that idea which always seems to us to savour of the literary rather than the philosophical, and which was, indeed, once put forth crudely and forcibly by Mr. Bernard Shaw—the idea that we are making God as much as God is making us. If the onward sweep of life is considered to have sprung as movement from eternal rest, its sinking into rest again seems to follow, in conception, as a matter of course; nor is it difficult to account for the sinking back into rest of those individual centres of movement which form within it, and are shed from it as it pursues its course. But if we take movement to be original, and not derived, it is not, when one comes strictly to face the question, easy to imagine the beginning or the cause of degradation. If, on the old hypothesis, the beginning of life was a difficulty, on the new the beginning of death appears equally so. God in this theory as new and as explaining Dr. Wildon Carr acclaims the idea of everything. It seems to us to explain subtle differences in apprehension be- For the one view involves a different only one-half of existence, and to be by no tween the master and his most sympathetic and able disciples. These, however near they stand to him, represent the next stage of the movement he has initiated, and in their considered work the lines of strength, as well as the weak places of the doctrine, are apt to exhibit themselves. One outcome of Dr. Wildon Carr's argument is to arouse grave doubts as to whether M. Bergson and his adherents will for long find their theory of the vital impulse compatible with the commonly accepted theory of the direct evolution of all living forms from a primordial protoplasm : "The whole reality, the total activity, of life cannot be conceived as contained within the forms in which its present activity is manifested nor in the general form of that matter, protoplasm, by which it works. So confined we could never account for its duration nor for its continual creation. We must therefore conceive it as a great and continuous movement, manifesting itself in the individual forms it produces, as buds are formed on the stem of a tree. It is a movement the form of whose activity is shown in its tendency to concentrate and contract into a tension, in its turn to be relaxed in an extension, the type of which activity we each experience in our own life, which is very part of it." If we take this with the explanation of consciousness as tension, and as produced for the sake of action, and consider also that consciousness is to be thought of as occurring at the points where the freedom of the vital impulse and its stress are for the time being highest and most energetic; and if again we receive the explanation-endorsed as it is by physical science—that what we know as things are eventual actions," it is remarkably hard to conceive of the highest we know as coming last, not first. We seem to be required by the whole trend of the argument to conceive of the lower and lower forms of life as thrown off in dispersion from the mid-movement, as 66 attitude from the other towards several facts and problems. Not less misty, as set forth by Dr. Carr, are the reasons which should induce one to hold that spirit not merely knows, but is duration. This mistiness is aggravated by a careless eagerness of style which, while it betrays rather charmingly how thoroughly the author has been captivated by the Bergsonian metaphysic, will prove confusing to an attentive reader who takes him as a first guide to it. We have marked several examples of this, and will cite the shortest: "The body is no more than the focus or point of our activity where it is inserted into reality." Taken as it stands, this implies that our activity otherwhere than at this point is not in reality, which is, of course, a contravention of one of the chief arguments of the book. Again, on p. 194 we read that "the impulse of life life that philosophy makes its special subject-matter is equally manifested in the lowest form of vegetable and animal existence as it is in the highest forms of intellectual and instinctive activity"; but coming to p. 196 we learn that "in our form is registered the greatest amount of free creative power which the vision extends." life impulse has yet evolved, so far as our No doubt a slight verbal alteration would here solve the contradiction, and if these were the only instances of this sort of slip they would not have been worth noting; but such blemishes are frequent enough to constitute a real hindrance in reading. Dr. Carr is not able to follow M. Bergson in his admission that from the account of the universe which this philosophy proposes. and free, the generator of both matter and emerges clearly the idea of God, Creator life....consequently a refutation of monism and of pantheism in general." means new, but to be an Occidental version -accommodated to the results of physical science, that is, with a bias rather towards intellect than towards intuition-of that Vishnu. When all the implications of which Hindu philosophy expresses as the theory have been worked out, and when the lines have been marked where it is opposed to our least controvertible certitude, and when the first glow of novelty has departed from it, we shall not be surprised to learn that, since by the terms of the theory failure of the vital impulse as such is hardly to be conceived, a counter-impulse has been invoked-an Occidental Shiva the Destroyer. Where there are two, there is always a shadowy third, and in the end Brahma will loom in the background. We are not suggesting that this will be the course of M. Bergson's own thought. His admission of the possibility of transcendence even goes to make that doubtful. But if Dr. Carr's interpretation, with this difference in it, to which many will be prone, is allowed to work itself out, it seems to us that we shall get a nearer approach to Oriental philosophy than we have yet had in the West. We would not by any means give our readers the impression that Dr. Carr's book is negligible as an account of M. Bergson's philosophy; it is full and stimulating, and should prove of real use. The work of M. Algot Ruhe and Miss Paul is an adaptation in English of the recent work in Swedish of M. Ruhe. It is a more formal and weighty, and also more nearly exhaustive, outline than that made by Dr. Carr. Differences between the two also occur. Thus, to give an easy instance, M. Ruhe takes the view that instinct and intelligence, separate as they now are, had their beginnings near to one another, while Dr. Carr, in his rather sweeping way, declares more than once that they are utterly opposed. One of the most useful chapters in M. Ruhe's book is the first, on M. Bergson's life and personality. We may note, however, that the authors are in error in placing in 1912 the philosopher's visit to London, when he delivered the lectures on 'The Nature of the Soul' at University College; it occurred in the previous year. This chapter contains valuable extracts from early writings of M. Bergson's, not easily accessible in England, which add not a little to our knowledge of his outlook. In particular, they throw some light upon what remains generally in shadow-the relations of the "centres of indetermination " that we are towards one another, as these appear to him. M. Bergson in a reply to Father de Tonquédec, S.J., says that he is not sure that he will ever publish anything upon the problem of ethics; that he will do so only if he attains to results which appear to him equally clearly demonstrable with those on other problems set out in his other books. The more one familiarizes oneself with M. Bergson's scheme of the universe, the more one is aware of the ragged edges, so to put it, which this omission leaves. At the conclusion of the study we are now considering it is an excellent piece of work-M. Algot Ruhe hazards the statement that "Life has devised a sign telling us when our activity is fully and successfully shown; the sign is joy." He distinguishes joy from pleasure, and states that it points out the direction in which the driving force is urging us....It is the mark of an uprising from within of new life and power of life made actual in the man himself." Nothing is offered in support of this, not so much as a definition of joy. The problem of pain, which for actual intuition lies so close to the problem of consciousness, without a true solution of which, indeed, the problem of consciousness will itself hardly be solved, is but cursorily touched on. This follows naturally from the refusal to consider ethics; but M. Bergson's doctrine of the vital impulse and of spirit as duration seems to us urgently to require a revision of current accounts of the real nature and function of pain; to be in fact, in the last resort, without it. cases. There is even a sort of monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, because he was a great lover of spirals, and, moreover, a left-handed man, which had a peculiar effect upon his drawing. The contrast of right-hand and left-hand spirals, like that of right and left hands, is found in many fields-a distinction only to be made plain by intuition, as Kant pointed out long ago-and is one of the causes (according to the author) why the wilder species of horned animals attain the straighter spirals, which supply a strong weapon of defence, while the domestic species seem to have them merely for ornament. This curious speculation cannot, however, be made plain here, for it requires the illustrations which tell at a glance what takes pages to explain. The book is not logically put together, and much of it comes from scattered articles contributed to The Field-a fine newspaper for country gentlemen; but we fear most of them would find it difficult to follow the author's subtle arguments and mathematical explanations. He has a theory, too, of the aesthetic beauty of Nature, which is best stated in an Appendix criticizing Mr. Colman's 'Curves of Life.' We are not at all convinced by his assertion that the beauty of Nature consists in deviations from purely mathematical figures, or his reasons for it. Thus the simplest spiral is the so-called "logarithmic spiral," in which all lines drawn from the centre make equal angles with the curve. The lovely nautilus shell which he reproduces adheres very closely, but not completely, to this curve. Surely it is more likely that we admire it because it approaches so nearly to the mathematical curve than that we admire it for deviating from it. Mr. Cook thinks that even in professedly rectangular architecture, such as the Parthenon, our admiration is obtained by its slight and calculated deviations from the true right lines. Here we join issue, for it is fairly certain that, in the lower line of the pediment, the depression was intended to remedy a false impression that the line was curved upwards, and make it seem to the eye a straight line. The beauties of the Parthe non unconvincing The Curves of Life. By Theodore Andrea Cook. (Constable & Co., 12s. 6d. net.) We find this fascinating book very difficult to review. It covers an enormous field, and deals with problems in zoology, botany, conchology, anatomy, not to speak of human arts, and pursues through them all the idea that "spirality," to use a horrid word, is one of the great principles of Nature, and, like all such principles, is used for adding not only strength, but also beauty to various objects, such as human bones, climbing plants, beasts' horns, and even Renaissance staircases. As far as the illustrations go nothing can be better. There are lovely pictures all through the book of beautiful shells, and antelopes' horns, and spiral stair were fully recognized by many centuries of men who never knew any thing about these subtle curves, but who assumed the lines to be perfectly straight. That was surely the impression Ictinus meant to produce. He also knew that, without deceiving the eye, it could not be produced. Anything he did was, therefore, quite consistent with the belief that ideal beauty of form was only attained in mathematical figures, and that was the opinion of Aristotle. But, according to Mr. Cook is divergence from mathematical accuracy, "the essential principle of life and growth and it is this divergence which gives the Parthenon its living beauty. For the essential principle of life and growth is constant variation from the rigid type. No tree grows all its branches at the same angle with the stem," &c. In all these cases in Nature there is no conscious plan from which they are variations, and the deviations are obvious. Esthetic beauty is not so easily described. In one age, viz., that of the Renaissance formal gardens with circles and squares made as accurately as possible, trees clipped into strict forms such things were thought beautiful. Then came an age when irregularity, both in the landscapes of Nature and of art, became the object of admiration. But we cannot hold that deviation, as such, is the law of beauty. Readers of moderate mathematical attainments will wonder at the vast importance in Nature Mr. Cook attributes to the number 1.61803398875, but into this most interesting demonstration we cannot follow him. We think it better to insist with him on the extraordinary frequency and beauty of spirals in every realm of Nature-perhaps from the clusters of nebula that represent myriads of worlds to the smallest shell that is found upon the seashore. Nor is there any doubt that this mathematical form is acknowledged by countless beings in countless ways as a form of beauty of a high order. It is Mr. Cook's great merit to have brought together and illustrated beautifully prominent specimens of these harmonious variations in Nature. WAR LITERATURE. AMONG the more striking comments on the great conflict of to-day is 'Thoughts on the War,' reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement, for the issue of the majority of which we frankly envy it. If our remarks on Mr. Clutton-Brock's articles been before us in recognizing the greatly are mostly critical, it is because others have preponderating amount they contain of fine and helpful thought. Our curiosity as to their nature had already been stirred when we received them in a collected form from Messrs. Methuen. Even then we only dipped into the opening articles at odd times, and it was not until we reached p. 32 that we read page after page without cessation, realizing at the end what a change had been wrought in our opinion of the little book. It is with real regret that we turn back to the opening chapters to comment on some statements they contain. In his Preface the author seems almost to apologize for the article The Illusions of War.' Never did anything, in our opinion, need it less. In the second article, On the National Conscience,' the author would make a difference between lack of conscience and stupidity, where they seem to us to coincide. We should argue that an enlightened self-interest Thoughts on the War. By A. Clutton-Brock. From The Times' Literary Supplement. (Methuen & Co., ls. net.) ་ Papers for War Time :— No. 7. The War Spirit in our National Life. By A. Herbert Gray. (Milford, 2d.) No. 8. Christian Conduct in War Time. By W. H. Moberly. (Same publisher and price.) does exist, not only in individuals in every nation, but also in the corporate spirit of at least one nation-Belgium. We may perhaps tersely controvert Mr. CluttonBrock's distinctions between the attitude of individuals and nations by affirming that individuals get the nation they deserve a warning particularly necessary to democracy. We may agree that the inhuman doctrine that morality does not exist for a state has been preached by German intellectuals, and we may even assert that this doctrine has temporarily been imposed to a large extent upon the German people by politicians. But it remains to be seen whether we shall not ultimately prove as mistaken in believing politicians to have deadened the moral spirit of Germany as some were in thinking that such a fate had befallen England. As to Mr. Clutton-Brock's argument on p. 21, that Germany has been deprived of enlightenment by "a power not of this world," we surmise that the sort of "cleverness "" the Germans have aimed at is very much of this world, and is, unhappily, not confined to one nation. He suspects the materialist of doubting whether our own Government has acted in the national interest. The Athenæum has more than once already commented on the fact that for once honour and selfinterest (to use the latter word in its lowest meaning) are one, and in consequence Germany is fighting a united people. The writer of this booklet thinks that "it does immediately pay to turn a nation into a wonderful fighting machine." But have not the consequences of Germany's action proved the contrary? With relief we reach our last criticism. In spite of Mr. Clutton-Brock, we shall continue to expect divine justice to be our ally in earthly battle-fields; we shall not consider our faith worthless because we profit by it, humanly speaking. "What good man," says Sophocles, "is not his own friend?" Failure, however, will not make us abandon our beliefs. We are tempted to quote all the good things we have marked, but, as we have said, others have been before us in doing so, and we would not spoil the reading of all that follows p. 32 by alluding to a part of it only. Mr. Gray, in No. 7 of "Papers for War Time,' ," has, we think, hit on the reason why men go to war with a certain sense of relief: "War, even with its horrors, is a rather cleaner thing than some of the other methods of commercial strife that have become common in late years. So soon as the nation realizes the responsibility which is brought home in the latter part of the same sentence "and war, be it never so horrible, is the inevitable and certain fruit of the order of things we have believed in "-the war will have delivered its greatest message for us. So long as financiers and merchants are proud of the "business perspicacity" which is still bringing them in big profits, won without effort or with a minimum of effort so long as the nation is still bestowing the silence of acquiescence on those who make "corners " in the things our soldiers must have, and give preference to those who pay most and need leastwe may well fear the result of too easy a victory. Many a man who has hitherto feared ridicule more than death itself can now change his way of life in conformity with "the highest in the land," who have set aside flummery and wasteful extravagance. We owe a special word of thanks to Mr. Gray for what he has said concerning the "Militant" section of the Woman Suffrage movement. A review of My Own Story,' by Mrs. Pankhurst, was already in type when we read his words. In that notice we had expressed so exactly his opinion that we feel he has taken off our hands the necessity for criticism. No. 8 in the same series, by Mr. Moberly, shows perhaps a better sense of what modern Christianity really means than has before been realized. We doubt whether Mr. Milford can ever deserve more highly of the public than he does by issuing at so reasonable a price these tracts for the times. Mary Russell Mitford: Correspondence with Charles Boner and John Ruskin. Edited by Elizabeth Lee. (T. Fisher Unwin, 10s. 6d. net.) Or the eighty odd letters printed in this book more than three-fourths were written to Charles Boner during the last ten years of Miss Mitford's life; the remainder, numbering under a score, to Ruskin and his father. Boner died in 1870, and in the following year his 'Memoirs and Letters were published in two volumes, in the first of which were contained the letters that are now reprinted, a fact which Miss Lee mentions in a note to her Introduction, without, however, giving any explanation why they are now a second time presented to the public. It may be that the original work has become so scarce as to be practically unobtainable, although no statement to that effect is made. Only the Ruskin letters, it would appear, are "printed here for the first time by the kind permission of Mrs. Arthur Severn." During the period covered by these pages Miss Mitford was a woman of leisure, a circumstance favourable to the production of good correspondence. Bulwer Lytton once said that letter-writers should be idle men," a saying undoubtedly true, though not remarkably original. 66 Before the date of her first letter printed in the present collection (December, 1845) most of Miss Mitford's literary work had been done that work of which she was so ill-judging a critic. In an unpublished letter, one of over sixty such not yet dipped in printers' ink, she writes : trade. If ever you see any of them on the stage you will feel this. They are essentially acting plays." On the latter the iniquity of oblivion has, not blindly, scattered her poppies, while the sketches of rural character and scenery, are read and enjoyed. 'Our Village' still keeps its place in the affections of the general reader, and at the same time retains the admiration of the critic; but the plays-' Rienzi,' which held the boards of Drury Lane for over thirty nights; Charles and Cromwell,' Foscari, Fiesco,' Otto,' and their like who remembers or has an opportunity of seeing them now? ' 66 It is not, however, with Mary Russell Mitford as an author or as a dramatist that we are at present concerned, but full justice has not been done to her, one solely as a letter-writer. In this respect awkward, scattered way in which the reason being, as Miss Lee observes, the letters available have been published." The chief sources are The Life of Mary 3 vols., 1870; Letters of Mary Russell Russell Mitford,' edited by L'Estrange, Mitford,' edited by Chorley, 2 vols., 1872; and The Friendships of Mary Russell 1882. In addition, other letters are to be Mitford,' edited by L'Estrange, 2 vols., found in Mrs. Browning's published letters found in Mrs. Browning's published letters 6 and The Life of William Harness.' in Fields's Yesterdays with Authors.' Further, there are close upon fifty printed Then there are unpublished ones, viz., the sixty odd letters previously referred to, and others which are to be found in the autograph collections of various dealers. We agree with Miss Lee that "it would be rendering good service to English Literature [for literature Mary Mitford's letters unquestionably are] and to Miss Mitford to make a selection of the most characteristic letters, following a chronological arrangement, and to place them together in a single volume." For a considerable portion of the time during which the letters to Charles Boner and the Ruskins were written Mary Mitford was a chronic invalid; but her interest in the things which occupied her thoughts-the villages of Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield in Berkshire, in which she lived for so long; the joys, the sorrows, and daily lives of her neighbours, rich and poor; her books, a constant source of inspiration, comfort, and delight; the many friends who were prompted to visit her by admiration of her literary productions, and, when they had made her acquaintance, by love for the author of them all these circumstances proved no small alleviation of her sufferings, which were borne with placid resignation. Her concentration in literary matters was almost exceeded by her idolatrous reverence for the character of Louis Napoleon. The charm of her letters lies in this variety of interests. They also reveal a delightful, warm-hearted, helpful, and sympathetic personality in which one forgives an occasional lack of critical acumen. Miss Lee's Introduction is pleasantly written, and the narrative with which she links the various letters is helpful. |