Edward Thomas
World Without End. By Helen Thomas. (Heinemann, 6s.)
EDWARD THOMAS'S friends will find this sequel to As it Was; full of interest, and it is better written. In accordance with his principles of veracity, Mrs. Thomas does not hide the strain of his neurasthenia which yielded neither to psychical nor physical treatment. He also suffered the misfortune of scarcely making both ends meet on literary work and yet not obtaining the succes d'estime that he deserved during his life both as a poet and an essayist. On the other hand, he was not at all cut out to be a Civil Servant, which was the only alternative to the work of a literary free-lance.
Mrs. Thomas brings out most of his good qualities except perhaps the humour of his talk, which increased up to the time of his death. What principally emerges is her loyal and affectionate acceptance of the hardships imposed on domestic life by Edward Thomas's fastidious and sometimes rather wayward notions of finance. Still, his neurasthenia would always have been a handicap in any walk of life and he was at least able to write " on the top of his vitality " and without regarding his work as " vaguely honorific," to quote two of his own phrases in a conversation with the present writer on the rewards of literature.
It is a pity that neither Mrs. Thomas nor one of his friends made any record of his talk. Unfortunately, contemporaries rarely do so ; but if he had lived to his natural span some younger Boswell might have reaped a rich harvest, though he would have had to walk many miles to get the
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