THE SUSSEX DOWNS.* AN author who writes on Sussex dares

a good deal when he names his book The Spirit of the Downs; perhaps still more when he defines his first chapter, and asks his readers to share with him " The Spell of the Spirit," or, if not to share it, at least to understand it. There the difficulties begin. But Mr. Beckett has no difficulties. He finds himself in the Spirit at once. He is out on a March morning ; the Spirit comes to him on the wings of the south-west wind ; he drinks " great draughts of the champagne air of the hills " ; he feels the springy turf under him, and he runs "near a mile in sheer delight." This is very well, and ought to mean the real thing somewhere ; but we are not sure that the real thing shows itself quite where Mr. Beckett intends it to show. He converses with the Spirit, and he receives the Spirit's gift, which the Spirit explains. It is "the power of interpreting the commonplace." The man who receives it " will return to his toil, but his spirit is freed and dwells, as he works, on the joy of the new days he has found ; and always, when he may, he lays his work aside and comes to the Downs to feel again the full flavour of his freedom and to enjoy the delights of commonplace things." That in itself is no bad interpretation of what, for want of a better phrase, we may call one of the more easily known senses of the open Downs. But it does not interpret other senses. We think, for instance, of Mrs. Marriott Watson's poem " On the Downs "; the Downs " when the day grows old " "The Downs are peopled then ; Fugitive, low-brewed men

Start from the slopes around,

Over the murky ground Crouching they run with rough-wrought bow and spear, Now seen, now hid, they rise and disappear,

Lost in the gloom again."

Those haunting lines certainly interpret much more than the mere connnonplace. Kr. Beckett sees and hears Briton and Roman too. But his vision is different ; he looks down on the Roman road crossing the Downs by Bignor, and his chapter describing what he sees begins with the close cataloguing of the furniture and architecture of a pro-praetor's palace, and swerves suddenly into a detailed conversation between two living Romans pacing the tessellated floor. This is a little difficult to follow. But Mr. Beckett explains in his preface that it is his way to take bypaths, and we may wait, if we please, till be comes back. It is less justifiable to wrap up a long and intricate history of the town of Lewes in the disguise of a conversation between the author and an imaginary person whom he describes variously as " The Old • The Spirit of the Downs. By Arthur Beokett. With 20 Illustrations in Colour by Stanley Inchbold. London ; Methuen. and Co. [10s. 6d. net.]

Man " and " The Ancient." We like Mr. Beckett better when he really does what he tells us in his introduction he set out to do,—when he walks from village to village through the open Downland, talking to shepherds and carters and tramps. We come nearer " the Spirit " of Downland villages when we read of country soup made of buff fungus, and puff- balls named " Satan's snuff-boxes," and truffles hunted with dogs and pointed sticks. One of Mr. Beckett's friends speaks of a man whom his father knew "what uster sniff 'em out with his own nose." Truffle-bunting, we gather, is an industry that refuses to be revived. Country fare in Down- land is simple enough, but even that has changed ; the new generation eats more sumptuously than the old. " They doant know what work be," you learn. In the old days they had no more than "a bit of fat pork fur brakfust, an' bren- cheese fur dinner, 'cept 'twere harvest-time." Now they are luxurious with beef, mutton, pudding, and holidays, " same as if they were gents." But the favourite dish is cold boiled cablyage saturated with vinegar. With this diet and with beer in sufficient quantities the Sussex peasant lives well. Beer, indeed, enters very largely into the outlook upon the world of the Downland village. Some of the best Sussex songs are the old drinking songs. Here is a toast with a real lilt to it :—

" Our maid she would a-hunting go,

She'd never a horse to ride ; She mounted on her master's boar, And spurred him on the side.

Chink ! chink ! chink ! the bridle went, As she rode o'er the Downs.

So here's unto our maiden's health, Drink round, my boys, drink round !"

We wonder that Mr. Beckett was not tempted to quote from more modern writers of Sussex songs,—from Mr. Hilaire Belloc's "Sussex Drinking Song," for instance, or from the haunting stanzas of "The South Country," with its lines as bare and plain as the Downs themselves :—

" I never get between the pines,

But I smell the Sussex air, Nor I never come on a belt of sand But my home is there ; And along the sky the line of the Downs

So noble and so bare."

Some of the country stories told to Mr. Beckett are the best things in the book. Here and there we wish that he had followed his narrator more closely and had given us the story exactly as he heard it. He tells us, for instance, a story which he calls " Godiva of Slindon." It is a tale of Betsy Thorpe and her lover Will Garland, who had the ill-luck to cross the path of smugglers. Garland was sentenced to be lashed naked across Slindon Common, and the girl took his punish- ment on herself, to save him without his knowledge. Mr. Beckett, however, reassures the anxious ; he has altered the tale so as to avoid offending the most punctilious reader. He does not seem to see that, altered, the story is valueless. A. more attractive story is the legend of the White Way Ghost. The ghost was a white dog which belonged to a young man who was set upon by footpads and killed on the road. The robbers buried him in a field close by, and the dog came back to howl over the grave ; then they killed the dog. Every seven years the little white terrier used to travel by the White Way Road, and any man who saw the ghost met with misfortune immediately. The last man who saw it broke his leg two days afterwards. Then on a lucky day White Way Road was widened, the young man's skeleton was found, and the white dog walked no more This is an Alfriston story, and there are fine roystering stories of the Alfriston gang of smugglers. Even now, if we may believe Mr. Beckett, there are methods of landing tobacco on the Sussex coast which would not be approved by the Excise. There is the right ring in the hints and whispers of Mr. Beckett's modern Sussex longshoreman.

The book is illustrated by a number of coloured drawings by Mr. Stanley Inchbold. Some are better than others. We like the cold quiet of "Alfriston—Clover Harvest," and there is a sense of space and salt water about " Beach), Head." But the frontispiece, surely, has an impossible sunset. The sun sinking behind a line of hills could hardly lighten the slopes which face the artist looking at the sun.