22 OCTOBER 1932, Page 38

A Tour of Time and Place

A. G. STRONG.

By L.

THE books here listed take us over wide tracts of time and place, and, as on some. of the journey our luggage will be uncommonly heavy, we may as well begin with something light and entertaining. It is always pleasant to see a writer at work upon a theme which happily engages all his qualities. Public Faces extends Mr. Harold Nicolson, giving full scope for his wit, his urbanity, and his intimate and peculiar knowledge of politics and diplomacy.

" The Cabinet, fourteen months ago, had been informed by the greatest British physicist that the Livingstone alloy rendered probable, or at least possible, the construction of an atomic bomb. The possession of the Alm Saad concession gave us a monopoly of this alloy : it thereby, as Bullinger had pointed out, placed us in solo possession of the greatest engine of destruction ever known to man.

" The Cabinet, when faced with this proffered omnipotence, had recoiled in fear. True it was that their acute distaste for the bomb (the way they had all winced—even Boothby had winced— when Professor Narteagle had so gently murmured ' New York ') did credit to their humanity, to their state of civilization. Yet this was no ostensible excuse. The Cabinet, undeniably, had shirked the issue."

Great Britain in the year of grace 1939 was already highly unpopular abroad, and the knowledge that she possessed a means of exterminating the other Powers of the world did not tend to endear her to them any further. The consequences, political, diplomatic, and personal, of such a situation are material after Mr. Nicolson's own heart, and he exploits it to the full. Public Faces is first class of its kind, written with virtuosity and enjoyment. In his descriptions of such prosaic ritual as taking a bath, Mr. Nicolson can almost compete with Arnold Bennett.

From these rumours of future wars Col. Hanbury-Sparrow brings us back to the actualities of the last. He is less con- cerned with the events of war than with their effect upon morale and character. His contention that courage comes as a result of discipline and is imposed upon men by a gradual drilling of their reflexes is disputable ; but his analysis of fear is masterly, and his complete candour and honesty, whether in describing his own feelings or those of others, make this one of the most valuable war books that I have read.

Herr Broch's trilogy is vast in its aim and conception. There are three novels in The Sleepwalkers, but slightly connected in plot, and each dealing with a single man. The first sleepwalker, the " Romantic," is Lieutenant Joachim von Pasenow, who in 1888 sowed his wild oats, turned in disgust from Ruzena when lie found she had other lovers, and entered on a loveless marriage with Elisabeth. The most striking part of this story is Herr Broch's ironical demon- stration of how clear, and how completely wrong, was Joachim's solution of his problems. The " Anarchist" is August Esch, whose business dealings and whose loves are followed with the same strange sense of detachment. Herr Broch's sympathy for his characters is distant and professional, like that of a surgeon for his patient. He observes, in withholding details of a certain event :

" How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself."

Such detachment has its advantages, but it is hardly calculated to rouse enthusiasm in the average reader. The "Realist " of the third volume is Hugenau of Alsace, a man who definitely- knows what he wants, whether it is to desert from the army, to buy up a newspaper, or to commit a murder. Here Herr Broch gives his theorizings full play. There are chapters headed " Disintegration of Values " and others " The Story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin," one of which apparently needs to be told in verse. The Sleepwalkers is too large and too indigestible for the ordinary fiction review. It may be too large for the ordinary fiction reader, but there is no doubt as to Herr Broch's powers, his painstaking theorizings and

lucidity, and the enormous seope'of his work, _ _ _

M. Barbusse's celebrated novel, while it also attempts a general survey in particular instances, uses a different technique and is much easier to read. The teller of the story is a young man in a Paris hotel, who finds that he can see into the next room through a hole in the wall. Emotional, excitable, unstable in his theories, he sees through the symbolic aperture a representative section of the life of his time. Scene follows scene with an almost uncanny vividness, and the cumulative effect is more than impressive. Particularly haunting are the description of the birth of the child, the scene between the dying man and the woman he loves, and the scene, most terrible of all, in which a priest tries to force the dying man to make his submission to the Roman Church. These individual scenes are woven together by the reactions of the narrator to what he sees, and the whole is a book which is unusually hard to classify or to describe, but which will not easily be forgotten.

Signor Svevo's Senility suffered neglect for some years after its publication, until he showed it to a young Irishman who was teaching him English. The Irishman was Mr. James Joyce, whose brother, Mr. Stanislaus Joyce, contributes a preface to this volume. Though first published in 1898, the story does not " date." It is big, stead fast, and told with a power which puts it among the permanent fiction of our time. The actual plot runs on familiar lines. Emilio Brentani, who lives in Trieste with Amalia his sister, falls in love with Angiolina. He tries to blind himself to her profession, and to educate her. Even when he sees her bedroom hung with men's photographs, he persists, transferring his hopes of her improvement religion. The story goes its inevitable way, Emilio breaking with her, returning to her, quarrelling again, and so on. It is not till Amalia falls ill and dies—she is a poor grey little creature who keeps his house and is hopelessly in love with his friend the sculptor—that Emilio comes to his senses and calls Angiolina what he ought to have called her a great deal earlier. Later, when he grows older and looks back on the affair, Angiolina comes to stand for " all that was noble in his thought and vision during that period of his life." Signor Svevo tells his story objectively, with a minimum of comment and theorizing, an economy which gives him a distinct advan- tage over Herr Broch and even over M. Barbusse.

Lastly, Miss Rose Macaulay. Her great achievement in They Were Defeated is not so much that she has lightly blended with her romantic story a deal of learning as that she has succeeded in presenting historical characters without any distortion and has yet made them integral and proportionate parts of the whole. Thus her Herrick, her Suckling, and her Cowley, though they are the men themselves, are as subservient to Miss Macaulay's artistic needs as any characters of fiction could be ; and this is perhaps the rarest achievement of the historical writer. They Were Defeated opens in Dean. Prior church, where Robert Herrick is preaching a harvest sermon to his restive congregation ; and it pursues, with complete conviction, an account of Herrick's surroundings and his neighbours in Devonshire, of Cambridge, and of all the political and religious troubles of the year 1640. Dr. Conybeare, a neighbour of Herrick's, is ahead of his times and protects a supposed witch from the villagers. Finding it better to leave Dean Prior, he takes his beautiful daughter Julian to visit her brother Kit at Cambridge. Herrick goes with them. At Cambridge they meet Milton, Cowley, Cleveland, and Henry More, see Comas performed, and hear of Cromwell, Strafford, and all the high doings of the time. Herrick knows the value of his own poems, and is inclined to be peevish because no one. not even his friend Sir John Suckling, fully appreciates them. Dr. Conybeare, in defiance of convention, has brought Julian up to be learned. She attends More's lectures, and worships Cowley and Cleveland. Cleveland, who scoffs at her book learning and her poems, falls in love with her but will not marry her. The end is tragedy, but a postscript takes us back to Herrick, whom for some time we have rather missed. They Were Defeated is a great book, with a charm which makes affection predominate over respect, and which will ensure that it is taken down often from the shelves, and read, and read again.