BOOKS.
THE GRENFELL TWINS!'
Fitexcers ANO RIVBRSDALB GlIBMFBLI, are happy in their bio- grapher. Mr. Buchan is happy in the subjects of his Memoir. A more delightful pair than these two happy, healthy, brave, high-spirited young Englishmen could not have been found in England. 'But if not in England, then nowhere in the world. Here, Heaven be praised, there have been thousands like them before, there are thousands like them now, there will be thousands like them in the future. They werethe true representatives of a very large seetion of our English youth, but they were quite the best of their type: They loved life, they enjoyed life, they did honour to life. Yet they lail it down for their country without a moment's hesitation or regret. If ever men went to their graves- like beds it was they. Yet it never occurred to them that the spirit they showed was anything remarkable or worthy ot special praise. They were always generously eager to find out and commend gallantry and all forms of goodness in others, but it never occurred to them to value these gifts in them- selves. In an age of posing they did not know what it was to pose. This innocence of attitude enabled them to offer them- selves with the most splendid beau geste ever made by noble young manhood. Yet so humble were they that had you told them all this they would have been utterly puzzled and surprised. They would have gone. to an encyclopaedia or dictionary and "swotted up" as they might have said what has genie meant. If they could not find it there, they would no all probability have asked their uncle, Lord Grenfell, or Lord Cromer, or some other great man whom they believed in what it was all about.
Clearly these boys were a good subject for any biographer, and just the subject for Mn John Buchan. He was devoted to the two young men himselt.as to many other members of their family. His, then, has been a congenial task. But congenial tasks in biographies do not always make good lives. Very often they make very bad ones. A congenial biographer is very apt to draw out of proportion, to labour his work, and in the end to give us a picture with a bulging head and spindle legs. Happily Mr. John Buohan has not been oppressed, but in- spired by his task. He has allowed full play to that deftness of touch, coupled with energy and enthusiasm, to which we are accustomed in his writings. Whether it be the history of the war, a book of travels, a biography, a novel, or a short story, Xt. Buchan always knows how to hook and land his reader. Though the last thing Mr. Buchan ever is is to be Preachified, the book before us is more like a French biography than an English one. It not only says the right things in the right way "rid in the right amount of space, but, what is even more 'to_ Portant, it leaves out all the things that ought to be left out, lime uses the knife as courageously as a great surgeon. When he 2ntions the South African War, he does not make us plod and Rieersdais Ores/off. By Jolla Buchan. London .Nelson. with him through heavy pages describing the whys and where- fores of that war. Even the Great War does not tempt him into a disquisition of the political rights and wrongs of the encounter. He never forgets that he is not writing a history of his-own time or a discourse on the human nature of man, but the story of two ardent and boyish knights-errant of modern times. He is not even tempted to illustrate his little book with short pen-pictures of the great men who bob up and down in the Twins' letters with all the delightful inconsequence of youth. He passes by all these things quite naturally and simply. Hie work is a long open letter to the public rather than a full-dress book. It is that which makes the twins live before us.
In a sense, however, Mr. Buchan's volume is a monumental work. If anyone, who is twenty-five to-day, fifty years hence wants to toll the new generation whet sort of people were the young men who laid down their liven for us in 1914, he will take down the book before us and declare that therein is to be found the araimi figure of the best young Englishmen of the war and pre-war epoch. Here we learn of what kind were the men who died in Flanders fields.
There is one thing which will strike the thoughtful reader at once in this attractive volume. Though possibly, nay probably, Mr. Buchan did not intend it, his book is an apologia for that education or, as its opponents would say, want of education which is bestowed upon the young Englishmen of the richer classes in our great schools Here is the raison &etre of that orderly barbarism, an it might be called, known as the English public school system. It would be quite easy for an unfriendly critic to go through the book and show from the twins' own months how poorly equipped they were after some six pars spent at the most expensive school in the world. They had learnt nothing so well as how to hunt to Eton beagles. They were, as they themselves would have sadly admitted, half illiterate. They had learnt neither Latin nor Greek, nor anything else thoroughly. Iii appearance they had very little to show for their schooling. But though the denouncer of our "preposterous system" could prove all this-so easily and apparently so forcibly, he would be utterly in the wrong. The Twine had learnt something at their school which was not only in itself far more predous than all book-learning, but which, curiously enough, gives the best foundation for true literary learning. What they got at school was the precious gift of character—the power to know themselvee and to know others ; to lead and to be led, to obey and command. They were without conceit. They were humble in mind and spirit. Yet they were never servile. They had acquired the most valuable of earthly things, the gift of knowing the true man from the false, or, as they would have said!'" the rotter " from "the good 'un-" If they had acquired an elegant knowledge of English literature, history, and bio- graphy, the power to read Guy de Maupassant or Anatole France accurately in the original and a competent knowledge of Rous- seau and Voltaire, what would it have availed them, compared to the knowledge of human motives and human nature acquired in the scuffle of the little republic by Thames side, a republic so joyous and so stern, so casual and so competent, so hardy yet so luxurious ? There are plenty of bad things as well as good things about Eton ; plenty of things to condemn as well as to praise ; plenty of things which might be done away with with advantage. But Eton's fault is not her inability to force upon young minds the kind of things which any man or boy who wishes to learn them may learn in half-an-hour's appli- cation from a five-shilling handbook.
If Eton closed men's minds to our literature and our history, to the glorious record of the English mind and tongue, who wouldnot welcome herdestruction ? We would not leave a, stone standing round School yard, or down the exiguous meanderings of Keate's Lane. But Eton never has done that and never will do that. It is much more true to say that the is a truer guardian of English letters and of the authentic spirit of literature than her opponents. One of the advantages of not teaching the English classics is that it prevents schoolmasters and school classes and divisions spoiling English for those who as boys hate the classics, but as men low them. How many checks have flushed and hearte beaten in a tumult of gladness andeurprise as they were swept down the tide of " Endymion "—a shining river of their own exploration I Had they been put upon it in a safety tub directed by a careful and intelligent master, how they would have hated instead of worshipped the sacred and noble stream!
We must, however, leave readers of Mr. Buchan's book to find out for themselves the proof of our assertions. We svill
only say that we guarantee that it is held sequestered in the Twins' lives, letters and talk. Education for character rather than for knowledge was entirely justified in the Twins. The fousdaticn was solid, end they built upon it themselves.
And now a word on the lighter side of Mr. Buchan's book. The boys' letters show them full of wit, vivacity, and goodness of heart, with a real love of literature and a real thirst for know- ledge. It is the most vulgar of vulgarisms to suppose that because a man or a boy loves riding to hounds and is "mad keen" en shooting and fishing, he will therefore care nothing for literature. It is far truer to say that such proficiencies will stimulate, not check, the love of letters. The brothers were devoted to each other, and as one was in a cavalry regiment in India and the other was in business in the City, and they
v, rote constant letters to each other, we get delightful peeps into their minds and way of life.
As Mrs. Asquith is so much before the public, it may amuse car readers to see Riv. Grenfell's account of a big house-party where he met, among others, the Asquith& The place was Hatfield, the time the week of the formation of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's new Ministry, December 5th, 1905 :— " Wed nesday.—Most of the party went up to London, except Four of us who shot partridges. I should have done better if I had thrown my gun at the birds instead of shooting at them. At dinner I took in Miss Asquith. Afterwards I had a long yam v. it h Hugh Cecil about polities. He told me that what generally happened was that you visited the working man and employed She finest arguments for about half an hour, and the only reply you got was, 'Oh yes, I quite understand. You have been very well educated, and I don't believe a word you say.' Alter dinner we did a sort of dumb mambo acting, and I talked politics with Miss Asquith, who is extremely clever, and, of course, full of politics. In the smoking-room Asquith and H. Cecil dis- cussed the various bishops ! . . . I made great pals with Mrs. Asquith. I do not know if you know her, but she is an absolute clinker. She dressed up as a Spanish dancer, and did a pas Beta before us all. What will people say in about twenty years when they hear this ! The leading lady of the Govern- ment dancing a pas sad, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer looked on ! Hugh Cecil said he thought he had dislocated the inner organs of his body from laughter. . . . Mrs. Asquith told me that Asquith had had a terrible two days. The Liberals, having been out for ten years, of course owe honours to a great number of people. Innumerable people had called on him and implored him to give them something—men whose whole lives have been given up to working for the party, and now there is nothing for them. This to some of them meant a career finished."
The account of the beginning of the war and of how the Twins respectively met the death they feared so little for all their joyousness must be left to our readers. In spite of the tears that must be shed for a loss so great, we will not speak of their lives as thrown away. That they were not. The gain to England was far greater than the loss.
The book taken as a whole is a happy book, and we are quieted not saddened, by the story of those who wore their youth like a sower.
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