AN UNCONVENTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ALL his life Mr. Candler has been a truant, because he knows more things are learned in truancy than ever the pedagogues can teach. Referring to the time when he was with the roops in Iraq, he says : " Life was the text here and history the commentary. In general the text is easier to find than the commentary. The ideal education might be defined as the system, or rather the influence, that develops the inclina- tion to look for it." Being denied such an education himself, he spent his days, entertainingly, in repairing the omission. Youth and the East is his own account of that performance ; and we do not believe we are being foolishly rash in according to it the welcome due to one of the best-written auto- biographies of the year. It is a delightful travel-book as well.
After Cambridge (since, apparently, it had to be either teaching or preaching) came St. Paul's, Darjeeling, " one of t he most important of those establishments for the sons of Englishmen and Eurasians who are denied an education at home." But Mr. Candler entered the profession without conviction. " Where does it lead to ? " Bangs had asked of Tubby : and dear old Tubby, dropping his voice to the bass of an undertaker, had replied, " The grave." Never- theless, there were compensations : Darjeeling, after all, was not Balham. Even in term-time one could follow the Himalayan bear to his feeding-grounds or drink tea with lamas ; and was there not a vacation of three months every year, taken " all at a go " ? Such casual things as earth- quakes were not without their educational bearing on impressionable Youth :— " The experience heightens one's sympathies with ephemera. After an earthquake one takes care that the spider which falls into one's bath is not sucked down the pipe ; and at breakfast ono carefully disengages a wasp from the honey, wipes its feet, and guides it to the open window. In fact, one becomes half a Buidhist."
The first vacation was spent in the Southern Shan States. To tear from its context the author's description of the Salween is impossible : it is a perfect example of how such things should be done—but seldom are. Mr. Candler was still very young at the time ; he cared more about the countryside than the men it sheltered ; and that golden promenade of the peacocks bit itself into his mind. Had he written of it there and then, he probably would have overflowed into purple patches ; as it is, the intervening years have given it a right perspective. It is with words as with all other impedimenta : and not the least of the lessons the author learnt on his second holiday, when he penetrated into the Burmese hinterland, was the advisability of travelling light.
At the end of three years he resigned his first post and came home. The adventurous do not travel as the crow flies.; and Mr. Candler made many a detour before he reached Dover. At Hilleh he and an American were entertained by Mahmouil Pasha. The pasha was all courtesy and flowers of speech ; but the American was a match for him :- " He kept the interpreter busy. He appeared greatly distressed at our host's hesitations about a return visit to the United States.
Tell him,' he said to the bewildered interpreter the last thing before we went to bed, we hope to see him round Brooklyn way, anyhow. I guess he'll feel good if he circulates some before he turns up his toes to the daisies.' " And never was there a home-coming that better proved the truth of the statement that the best of travelling is that you can come home again ; for the moon that shone over Dover pier was a link with Dumeir and the orange gardens of Jaffa, and "the physical and spiritual tranquillity of England" was the keener felt because scented gardens and terrorizing lamas were all behind him now. Another lesson was learned.
After a chase to Buenos Ayres in search of an employer (he came back again as cook's mate in a cattle ship) and a turn among the flesh-pots of Europe, " bear-leading a youth not much younger than myself," he undertook to educate the heir of the Rajah of Devagiri—a boy of ten, who never smiled or showed any emotion on the features that hung beneath his plum-coloured cap. Moreover, the Rajah's brother wrote plays, and it was impossible to escape attend- ance at their performance. " The bugs in the cracks of his chairs used to lie in wait for us : in their ease it was a genuine entertainment and they bit like fury—supplice ipouvantable." But if tutoring in Devagiri was dull and unprofitable, there came an ample reward when, in the cold weather, the duck and the snipe flew from the North. Then, says Mr. Candler, it was demi-Eden. One lesson, it appears, was never learned.
From schoolmaster to war correspondent seems an unlikely step. But such things may happen in a life lived in defiance of the trivial round. So the Daily Megaphone employed Mr. Candler to report from Tibet on the local wars there ; and he managed to achieve the best coup that any corres- pondent can transmit—" I carelessly received nine wounds," he says. Reaching England, he found himself adored by all from barbers to hall-porters. " Even editors franked my contributions with an introductory puff : ' Mr. 'F., the author of this thrilling story, who received nine wounds. . .
I was reminded of the clown's song in the old pantomime Oh, I loves a bit of slaughter, And the blood it flowed like water, At the drama as I went to when a boy.' " After so kaleidoscopic a life it is no wonder he corn, plains that the young men he met in the East during Armageddon had no wish to explore, " that they were too tired, and horizons only implied movement and discomfort and fatigue." That, however, is not quite fair on youth. He himself had a whole roving past to look back upon, when the War took him to the East again. The average man waE less fortunate. Moreover, he was a victim, most likely, of that very education Mr. Candler deplores ; only he had not yet had time to repair its omissions. Now, if he is still alive, probably he is too disillusioned to care.
C. HENRY WARREN.
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