Traitors
The Meaning of Treason. By Rebecca West. (Macmillan. 18s.) ONE of the few questionable things about this superlative and terrible book is its title. As a gallery of pen-portraits of men convicted
of treason it could hardly be surpassed, and it is perlehps the most satisfactory essay in the reporting of criminal trials yet to be found in English journalism. But no one who reads it will emerge from the emotional ordeal one penny the wiser about the meaning of treason, impossible though it is to skip a page or a line or a comma of Rebecca West's fascinating prose.
For this, if blame there be, she has partly the nature of things and partly her own brilliance of perspicacity and evocation to blame. Treason, in the first place, is essentially an individual crime, not to be generalised. It cannot be defined by simply inverting the mean- ing of loyalty, which is a communal virtue of like-minded people ; for the traitor does not, by the act of exiling himself from the like- minded communion of the loyal, thereby become in any other respect like any other traitor. Every traitor, as this book all too movingly shows, is utterly unlike every other traitor in everything but the mere act of treason. Judas Iscariot and Simon Peter both betrayed Christ. William Joyce and Dr. Nunn May both betrayed England. But they had nothing else in common.
The claim to expound the meaning of treason is refuted by the very force and sureness of Rebecca West's writing. Each one of the characters in the successive dramas is drawn so frighteningly in the round, so distinct and real and individually convincing, that the im- possibility of fitting them into any common pattern called treason is made manifest. The rogues' gallery shows no common features, even within the classifications invented for the purpose. Yet the book is compelled by its chosen terms of reference to generalise, because it is written with a moral and a purpose. The moral is simple and plain, and can seldom have been more beautifully put: " to be a traitor is most miserable." The purpose is to prove that those convicted of treason were rightly convicted and their punish- ment just ; and that, at present, is less certain.
Our enemies have not been slow to take advantage of our English tendency towards the injustice of weak mercy ; and Rebecca West was not alone in fearing at one time that guilty men would escape justice because victory would obliterate the memory of their crimes. Her purpose is clearest in the account of Joyce's life and trial, which is the longest and most important part of the book. Pains are taken to refute the view. that Joyce should not have been executed ; both the legal and the moral case are exhaustively analysed in prose of great vigour and beauty. But one point is overlooked. Treason, as here interpreted, is unlike murder in being a capital crime for which a less than capital punishment can alternatively be imposed. In other words, there are degrees of treason ; but there arc no degrees of death by hanging. That is why some people were con- scientious!,y horrified at the execution of a man against whom even one out of five eminent Law Lords thought the Crown's case un- proven. This single dissentient voice, which ought perhaps to have proved the overwhelming minority, is mentioned only in passing, and the limpid movement of the narrative glides imperceptibly over it.
The Meaning of Treason is, in fact, for all its easy reading, a hard book. It has the hard brilliance of a diamond, the hard incisiveness of the guillotine, the hard humanity of untempted loyalty. It is not unjust, but it is uncompromising. It will allow, perhaps, in the case of John Amery that nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it ; but for every thousand readers (and there will be many thousands) who learn here that his life was indefensible there will hardly be ten who will read between the lines, as they should, that his end was fine. There are men alive today whose moral guilt was greater ; and if they arc protected from the pen of this incomparable journalist by the law of libel, then there might at least be something still to be said for the old adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum: which means, in this context, de mortuis nil. Instead, Rebecca West has succeeded scrupulously, disturbingly, definitively in doing what noble and humane minds have warned us not to do at all : she has used every man after his desert. And who should
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