BOOKS OF THE DAY

PAGE

Men and Things (Wilson Harris) .. .. 427 Methodism and Radicalism (A. P. Wadsworth) 428 Collective Insecurity (C. Delisle Burns) .. .. 428 The Omnicompetent State (The Dean of Chichester) 429 The Changing Scene (Derek Verschoyle) .. . . 429

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Jewels in the Moon (William Plomer)

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430

Forbidden Journey (Christopher Sykes) ..

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432

A Century Between (John Hayward) ..

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432

A Browning Handbook (E. E. Kellett) ..

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434 Fiction (E. B. C. Jones) ..

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MENS SANA

By. WILSON HARRIS SomE twenty or more years ago—it must indeed be all thirty years—Punch depicted very admirably the case of the agitated Liberal turning over the morning papers in his club smoking.. room, learning from The Times that under the leaders he venerated the prestige of the country was at a lower level abroad than it had been for a generation, from The Daily Telegraph that Mr. Lloyd George's land taxation proposals were plain and monstrous confiscation, from The Morning Post that duchesses would never consent to lick insurance stamps, and saved only from a rapidly impending apoplexy by the opportune arrival of the green Westminster, with Mr. J. A. Spender's leading article spread in dignified wide columns over its front page. Straightway everything was changed. The elements' rage, the fiend-voices that raved, dwindled, diminished, became a peace out of pain. Reason held sway ; calm logic prevailed ; Liberal doctrine stood vindicated. A land whose destinies were controlled by Liberal Ministers was seen once more to be the only land fit for Liberals (or indeed other and less enlightened mortals) to live in.

Today Mr. Spender plays the same indispensable role. But today it is against the terrors of thunder on the Left, not the Right, that he comes to reassure us. Thanks largely to men like Mr. Spender himself Conservatism in Great Britain has become Liberalised, and Liberal veterans, standing themselves where they always stood, see the House of Commons dominated by serried rows of silent Tories, and sections of the public Press by youthful and highly vocal Marxists. The latter seem for the moment to be the more in need of the correctives which the pen that indited the Westminster leaders forty years ago can administer still with undiminished vigour, clarity and conciseness. In his new volume, in which fresh material and earlier articles, making welcome re-emergence from files in which they have too long lain buried, form a congenial and well-proportioned companionship, Mr. Spender has a tilt at all of them—the " modern " poets, the smart reviewers, the impasSioned Marxians, who comprise the new intelligentsia of the Left. Perhaps, after all, tilt is hardly the expression, for Mr. Spender equips himself with no weapon so aggressive as a lance. He is the vir pietale gravis, and sapientia not less than pietate, who gazes with benevolent perplexity on antics and poses unknown to the more practical generation of which he is so distinguished a representative. Poetry ? But that was what Keats and Shelley and Homer wrote. How can the same word cover the unintelligible prose chopped into lines of differing length that figures in columns headed Poetry today ? And then painting. Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt painted. At least so it was thought: But if this post-Picasso genre is painting, then what Titian did was clearly something else. And Mr. Spender, in a cri de coeur with which I for one associate myself to the full, appeals for a new terminology that shall serve to distinguish such bewilder- ing incompatibles.

But that, in a sense, is by the way, though the theme runs through essay after essay on diverse subjects. Given capitalism, what outcome but war was possible ? So runs one of the rhetorical questions of the post-War scribes. Mr. Spender happens, unlike many of them, to have lived long enough before the War to watch it coming, and long enough after it to study all the official documents, British, German, Austrian, French, in which its hidden springs are revealed, and the legend that it was capitalism that plunged the world in

Men and Things. By J. A. Spender. (Cassell. los. 6d.) carnage gets short shrift at his hands. The origins of the War were many and complex. The latest date at which the study of them can begin is 1871. To present them concisely is a manifest virtue, but to over-simplify or over-abbreviate may be fatally misleading. It may well be doubted whether the subject could be treated more accurately, more adequately, with juster balance and with truer proportion than it is in the twenty-two pages of this volume occupied by the lecture the author delivered on it last year to Modern Greats men at Oxford. There could be no better introduction to that larger survey of the field which Mr. Spender himself gave us four years ago in his Fifty Years of Europe.

Mr. Spender, of course, is a convinced defender of Lord Grey's diplomacy. The first section of this volume is devoted to a gallery of portraits, in which Grey of Fallodon holds the foremost place, this particular sketch being obviously, indeed avowedly, written to recall the image of Grey the greatest of modem Foreign Ministers to any who, under the influence of Professor Trevelyan's admirable biography, may have fixed their eyes too exclusively on Grey the man. Where I find so little opportunity of differing from Mr. Spender I must make the most of what there is. Grey is quoted as having admitted that he was wrong in thinking Germany could control Austria, whereas it became clear later that she was being driven by Austria, and Mr. Spender seems rather to agree with him. But was she ever driven by Austria ? She deliberately gave Austria her head, and though the Kaiser did give one alarmed and fitful tug at the reins it is hard to think of a moment when Germany could be described as driven by her subsidiary partner.

Then, of course, there is the vexed question of the military conversations with France. Grey has, to my mind, in his Twenty-Five Years, fully vindicated his action in sanctioning their continuance when he took office in December, 1905, but Mr. Spender goes further than Grey himself in claiming that now that all the records are available "there is no trace in them of any material fact which was withheld from Cabinet or country," and (elsewhere) that "no one ever suggested that the Cabinet, if consulted, would, or could, have given a different answer than that which was given by the four Ministers" (the four who were cognisant of the conversations at the time- Campbell-Bannerman, Grey, Haldane and Asquith). The conversations themselves can hardly be regarded as other than a material fact, and they were certainly kept from the country from 1905 to 1914.. As to the Cabinet, both Morley and Loreburn were members of it. Can it be assumed that they would have acquiesced in the military conversations ? I find it hard, in view of subsequent events, to think so.

But these are points on which, though I suggest that Mr. Spender may be wrong, I admit that he may well be right. In dwelling on them I have deprived myself of space which might perhaps have been devoted more usefully to other features of this varied and absorbing volume—the portraits of Lord ICnollys and Lord Esher and Sir Alfred Keogh, the travel sketches, the brilliant parody of G. K. C., the single page (and that not filled) paying to the Unknown Warrior a tribute almost ideally fit. Part of the book is journalism, and it serves to show that between the best journalism and literature there is no dividing-line. The rest of it is literature uncontested, and all of it charged with that faith and sanity, that undaunted hope and unfailing competence, that has made its author an acknowledged touchstone by which lesser members of his profession may fitly test their failures and successes.