A CHAPTER IN MODERN CHIVALRY., More Changes More Chances. By
Henry W. Nevinson. (Nisbet. 158. net.) TIIE quixotic ardour of Mr. Nevinson's purpose has given seek grace to his work that it is lifted into that:lamer atmosphere where even social and political philosophies, as Sir Arthur Ruiner-Couch said a while ago about something else, can be made one with holiness. Readers who usually find themselves most antipathetic to the causes for which this distinguished journalist, war correspondent; and man of letters has been a ready 'and unwearied fighter will therefore be strangely affected by his autobiographical volumes. The second of them, More .Changes More .Chances, covers the noisy and turbulent period_ between the close of the South African struggle and the beginning of the European war. It is a fOrthright narra- tive, and in plain and widest yet always incisive prose Mr. Nevinson directly associates himself with the most vital' rind significant events in post-Victorian history.
In speaking of the author as a defender of the weak and Oppressed we have to pick our phrases carefully. For, expressly and with pleasant irony, he disavows in his preface that he is the champion of all lost causes, as a fellow-journalist designated him, attributing to him " a noble thirst for fighting forlorn battles." In a spirit of exultation which is very pardonable Mr. Nevinson points out that he has never wasted his time upon any lost cause, and indeed " almost every cause for which I have contended has already been won." He refers us to Greece and Macedonia, which two countries have both been "almost entirely released" from Turkish domin- ance; to South Africa, where the Boers now unite with Britain as an almost independent State ; to Russia, where Much of his heart is, and where (for" good or ill ") the Tsardorn he detested has been overthrown ; to Britain itself, where Woman Suffrage is established, and women sit in Parliament ; and, finally, away to San Thome and Printipe, from which notorious slave-spots thousands of black labourers have been repatriated and the worst evils of slavery abolished.
If Mr. Nevinson's energy was spent more in one serviee than another, it 'was in this investigation and exposure of the conditions under which native labour userit.te.be reermited for certain of the cocoa plantations of 'West Central Africa. He relates the circumstances, with such modesty that we hardly realize what a magnificent feat of chivalry he acconi- plished. Every step he took through the dark forests was beset with peril, and not only were whitened bones and wooden shackles strewn along the trail to warn the too inquisitive stranger, but stories were told to him of others who, on the eve of returning to Europe with the intention of exposing the hideous traffic, had been found dead or, as in one instance, 'escaped death only by discovering in time the pounded glass that had been' sprinkled deliberately' in a helping of soup. Incidentally,, the geographical cOnditions of the surrounding eatintiy gave Mr. Nevinson is a Man-of -letters the Opportimity of showing-what sensitive and at the same time ruthless prose he is capable of. "Nature has here said:(he begins); ',Look, I will display all my powers Of eV% I will do the Viirst I can. I will give querulous mankind something to whine about. I will silence the silliness that prattles of "this beautiful :Then he proceeds to describe how, along the Gold Coast, "she took stinking slime and for hundreds of miles she laid down the mangrove swamps that never -dry, and covered them with deadly growths that rot under their own darkness. The gee that washes the grey roots with its tides she filled with sharks, and into umneastund miles of ooze she crowded mud-fish that run like lizards and colourless crabs, and long worms with innumerable feet, and pale slugs, and crocodiles with eyes like stones. Where the slime at last ended, and a man might stand without sinking to the waist, she set a forest impenetrable to tha sun and air, and bound the trunks together into a solid tangle of spikes and thorns and suckers. Into this forest she put deadly serpents and envenomed spiders, obscene reptiles, and scorpions as large as a woman's foot. Then over swamp and forest alike, she blew dense clouds of flies and every kind of poisonous insect—the fever gnat, the gnat that gives blackwater, compared with which malaria counts as health, the speck of life that makes a man swell like a bulbous tree, and the speck that sends him to the grave by a few months' sleep through madness. Savage ants alio to tear his flesh as with red-hot pincers she poured upon the land in countless hordes, and ticks to suck his blood, and craw-craw to drive him frantic, and, in the sandy places, many millions of invisible jiggers to burrow into his toes and rot them away."
But neither the nightmare horrors of Nature nor the mon- strous deeds of men in war and peace—the reader is pretty well inured to them by the time he has ended the bookH
have shattered Mr. Nevinson's optimistic faith in " this glory called life." His poignant and beautiful valedictory includes referenee to the fact that five of his best friends have passed
nway within six recent months—Massingham, Morel, William Archer, Cecil Sharp, and Lord Pentland—Mr. Nevinson's pen-portraits of these and the other men and women with whom lie has worked or fought against are always memorable.
"I have no right," is his comment, "to expect a much longer existence in this beautiful world or among my variegated and sometimes delightful fellow-men and other animals."
And he thanks whatever gods May be that year by year the vision has grown only the more splendid, while year by year he has heard only more clearly the still sad mimic Of humanity.
In spite of all that man has done to strip the earth of her wild beauty, to me she is still new every morning, and mare beautiful with every night." Journalists with only a fiftieth part of Mr. Nevinson's experience have become unpleasantly cynical as a consequence of their disillusionment. There is plenty of disillusionment in Mr. Nevinson's ciperience, but not the least hint of cynicism has crept into More Changes More Chances, for all that the book is full of irony and sometimes
indignantly ironic humour. Cynic-pesterei readers will be grateful to him for this, almost as much as they will be for the fact that he has made an authentic and noble contribution to the history of the by no means peaceful early twentieth- century period which lay between' a war and 'a war.
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