Men and Cities
Special Correspondent. By Robert Bernays, M.P. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) MR. BERNAYS has travelled far, and observed widely and wisely. He travelled from Oxford, where he was President of the Union, into the offices of the Daily News and the Liberal Party. In 1930, when these two great institutions had lost their independent existence, he secured a roving commission to travel round the world. He returned in time to be swept into Parliament in October, 1931, rather unexpectedly, as a National Liberal. Since then he has visited many European countries in his capacity as Special Correspondent, stayed long enough in Denmark to realize that there is no foundation for the joke about the " gloomy Dane," failed in Germany to interview Herr Hitler, but saw Dr. l3riining and • visited a concentration camp, was in Austria, when Dr. Dollfuss was fired at last autumn, and pushed as far east, as Roumania. Nor are home polit:c3 neglected. Mr. Bernays has a sufficiently catholic mind to write sympathetically both of Mr. Winston Churchill and Sir Stafford Cripps, and to have a sincere admiration, salted with criticism, for Mr. Baldwin " always at his best when he is persuading the House of Commons to do nothing "—the man who always says the right thing and never does even the wrong one.
Sitting in his armchair with such a book, the reviewer is condemned perforce to the role of Little Jack Horner.
There are plenty of plums in this pudding. The pictures which Mr. Bernays draws are impressionistic and incom- plete. Sonic people might say that some of them are caricatures. But all of them have life and a certain touch of personal style. It is not easy to forget his picture of Sydney—" a mixture of Chatham and Cannes "—drawing on an inexhaustible fund of natural gaiety even in times of economic disaster. Nor will those who know differ from his diagnosis of what he calls " the tragedy of Australia " :
" There is no governing class with. its roots in the country. The dominant desire of the rich is to retire and settle in England. Until that happy time arrives they spend their surplus income on visits to England . . . The result is that Sydney society, even if it does interest itself in anything less ephemeral than racing and cricket, only talks about the last trip to England or the plans for the next."
Or, to jump suddenly from the Antipodes to Central Europe, take this description of the Slovaks as seen from a railway
train, " men with clerical black hats and slow eyes, looking as if they had stepped out of Chekhov as they herded into third-class carriages on their interminable visits to their relations "—a charming lightning sketch of the rather-better- to-do-than-his-neighbours peasant of the Carpathians in his Sunday best.
In European politics, Mr. Bernays' major interest is, naturally enough, in Germany ; and as the possessor of a Jewish name and a non-Aryan grandparent, he writes with particular sympathy and insight of the Jewish problem. His whole treatment of the internal situation in Germany is a model of well-balanced moderation. It is only in dealing with German foreign policy that he strikes what may seem to some an excessively alarmist note. Even in Germany he might have remembered his own observation in Roumania : " What these boys want is not to be soldiers, but to play at soldiers." But most significant of all, perhaps, is a story which he tells against himself after his return home :
" I had occasion in a restaurant, in conversation with a fellow politician, to say something rude about a Cabinet Minister. I found myself sinking my voice to a ridiculous whisper and looking furtively round to see whether anyone was listening. It was the result of six weeks' sojourn under dictatorships."
JOHN HALLETT.
Previous page
