BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Autobiography of Dr. Jacks
THIS is a book written with the most candid of pens.
Quo fir ut omnis Votirx. pateat velut: descripta tabella Vita sera's.
It is so frankly intimate, and goes down so honestly to ultimate things, that its effect on a reader who has read every line can only be expressed in the words of Oliver Twist," Please, Sir, I want some more." Or, to put the point more exactly, he is inevitably impelled to say, "Please, Sir, I want to talk to you, and to thresh out a number of things with you." If this review, as it proceeds, becomes an asking of questions, that is only a tribute—and the best of tributes— to the clear and ringing stimulus of a clear and frank confession of faith.
Autobiographies are difficult things. (Experto crede, which means, or is meant to mean, trust one who has tried—and failed.) You may either write about the men you have met and the things of which you have been part, and then you provide a concatenation of stories ; or you may write about yourself and the garden of your own soul. The latter is the finer way—far the finer ; but then you must have a self to write about, and you must have the gift . of self-knowledge. Dr. Jacks has chosen the finer way ; and he has both the self and the self-knowledge. He can see himself from inside himself : he can even criticise himself (as he does the self of the days in which he was Principal of Manchester College) with that inner and understanding criticism which goes to the very penetrale. (For please, Sir, it is not penetralium, is you write on one of your pages—giving a handle to those Oxford dons.) He belongs to the great autobiographers, who are a select company of about half a dozen, and he does so because he has an absolute candour about himself.
There is, he tells us, some buccaneering strain in his blood. (A great-grandfather called himself a privateer, but his great-grandson suspects that he concealed a pirate under this name.) He himself has been a buccaneer among ideas, sailing over a windy sunny sea, and accumulating treasures in his hold from Royce and Bergson and Spinoza (" reading between the lines," he calls it), which have loaded him deep in the water. The philosophy of man, and the Power above man (and in man), which he has gathered, is one of the most stimulating and sunny things of our times. It is not an articulated and systematic philosophy. It can combine a super- Augustinian pessimism about the State with a gallant and pugnacious spirit of patriotism. (And there, Sir, is one of the questions which one would gladly put to you and discuss with you.) It can make the Common Man the pivot of hope and the core of religion ; it can also say that, "judged by his present suicidal proceedings, homo insipiens damnatus would be a fitter title." But the author of the philosophy is greater than his. philosophy ; and it becomes a unity in him and in his own buoyant Person. It has life and blood and a tang—the life and blood and tang of a rich experience of life. Dr. Jacks sometimes calls himself a" peasant" in the course of his autobiography. He might also be called (will he forgive the name?) an elemental Englishman. He czI.II be at home among shepherds on Bredon and in the gracious society of Stanway. He is at home in the streets of Nottingham ; among the shipowners of Liverpool ; and among the men of busi- tess in Birmingham ; and even (if a little more dubiously) among he dons of Oxford. He is at home—and particularly at home— the United States of America and in the farms of Canada. And etywhere he rs experiencing, buccaneering, capturing ideas—and !ing a lively fusillade of his own ideas in the very moment of pture. Perhaps an unusual Englishman. Rut the good English- an is always unusual. The essential man who tells his story in this confession is the an who has been for forty years the Editor of the Hibbert 7ournal the man who has kept open house in that Journal (as he has :=Iys kept open house in his own mind) for a philosophy of man the Power above man and in man. He is a man "who would .1iant be," and who has been valiant—always fighting, and some- es losing, but always prepared, like the privateer Sir Andrew tin, to say:
Ile lay me downe and bleed a-while, And then Ile rise and fight again. An old contributor to the Hibbert Journal salutes his editor. He ventures to say to him, "This is a record of a pilgrim's progress which is worthy of his editor and of the old pilgrim." He could not say more. And he cannot say less. Postscript.—Dr. Jacks tells the story of a time, in 1909, when he took the chair for Keir Hardie at a fighting meeting, at which there was little speaking, in the Oxford Town Hall. Is it permissible for the reviewer to recall the fact that he too suddenly appeared on the platform, in the Proctor's robes he then wore, to plead for freedom of speech? He remembers a minister of the Crown, who was then a gay and ebullient undergraduate among the pugnacious audience, recalling the fact to his memory in later years. ERNEST BARKER.
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