These English !
Rough Islanders. By H. W. Nevinson. (Routledge. 7s. 6d.)
AT the opening of this skilful and ingenious book on the English, Mr. Nevinson quotes a French acquaintance who hated the English because they meant what they said and said what they meant. The reviewer heard a very able French politician, who certainly did not hate the English, complain bitterly of them that they had " no psychology." It was at the date of the first and perhaps too baldly candid account of the Battle of Jutland. " We know what the Germans are likely to mean ; but you never adopt the same line of thought twice." He was a more irritable critic of the school of the Frenchman who said that we were saved by our want of logic. All this indicates the infinite variety of the subject ; and it has attracted a vast number of writers, especially from abroad. One of them was published last week.
The authentic Englishman has evaded Mr. Nevinson, perhaps because there is none ; and he is quite sure that no foreigner can understand either us or the shades and colours of our elastic and diverse language. His book is not the less readable on that account. His clean and classical language, his knowledge of men and countries as well as of English and German literature, his long life of struggle for this and that less popular cause, help him at least to adorn all he touches. Ile is a great Englishman himself, and subdued to that he works in ; but he has sought spiritual homes in Germany, in English mining and shipping towns as well as at Shrewsbury and Christchurch ; and has not yet quite lost his nostalgia for Utopia. He has been an ardent War Correspondent and DS ardent a•humanitarian.
These diverse qualifications made him a lively but, it must be confessed, a very baffling critic. He discusses in turn the monarchy, the aristocracy, the squirearchy and the bourgeois (most grimly pictured in his son's illustration). In each case the satirist in Mr. Nevinson, disappointed that his England is not Utopia, opens the tale. Kings and squires are scathed with all the more effect because the satire is reticent. Then when you think that the acid has done its fell work, and no English- man, unless he is poor, has any character left, of a sudden the whole method and temper change. The satirist is replaced by a kindly guide who restores the features and bids you mark the sterling English quality of the country, its institutions and even its richer denizens. Mr. Nevinson is beaten by the Englishman just as her biographer was. beaten by Queen Victoria : that great little lady conquered Mr. Strachey as the Englishman—and especially woman—has conquered Mr. Nevinson—vietrix causa deis placuit, sed victa-catoni.
Mr. Nevinson was ever a Cato. But he goes' one better than Cato by enjoying the cause and character he himself has defeated.
The disappointment of the book—a good book nevertheless --is that there is too little Nevinson. We are fobbed off again and again with literary references whose excuse is that they are neatly dovetailed and tags of history that have no excuse. For example, if there is any one class in England with a common character, with a few qualities that dominate the rest, it is that of the farmer, yet we are vouchsafed the merest glimpse of him, and that through the eyes of "the Northern Fanner " of Tennyson, an excellent poem but hardly more actual than Hardy's yokels.
Indeed the only part of the book that is inadequate to the degree of a positive blemish is the account of the country People and some of their problems. The brief references to the eaclostires 'Roma farming standpoint are partial and lop-
sided—bad history as well as bitter. The labourer's fear of loss of house and job, if he should not bow to the squire, is an extinct political cliche, that has had no ground of general truth for several generations. The half confession of this at the conclusion does not excuse surrender to the temptation of a satiric outburst. The chief folly of politicians, especially of the more sinister school, is that they spend their best energies in the slaughter of already extinct evils. It is a fault from which a less prejudiced class, and especially historians with any knowledge of dates, ought to be exempt.
Apart from these occasional lapses, when caught in the prejudices of political and social warfare, Mr. Nevinson's appreciations reveal the breadth as well as the fineness of his critical gifts. What could be better than this description of an Anglican service in a Cathedral or ancient village church ?—
" The service is still correct and orderly, undemonstrative and conscientious, but he is now in the building that has served t he soots of so many English generations, and has grown from form to form like the race itself. He is hearing the actual words adapted from the older Latin used by Crammer or some other master of language in Shakespeare's century. Satire falls away. No matter how pom- pous the Dean or how unilluminated the preacher, satire falls away from one who since childhood has listened to those traditional words, and still follows the simple ritual as by instinct, standing, kneeling, and repeating the well-worn responses without effort. or consider- ation. Around him are the tombs of crusaders and women who passed on to him the torch of English life. Above his head droop the tattered flags of English regiments, inscribed with the names of remembered or forgotten battles. In the windows glow subdued or brilliant fragments of the glass left undestroyed by the barbaric incursions of his own race—his own equally with the priests and knights and the indistinguishable coffins under the grassy mounds outside. I do not know whether tradition alone can inspire reli- gion, but in such a scene and among such sounds the emotion of history and life-long association may be very deep."
That is literature, not eclectic prejudice. Such a passage as this, and, in very different vein, some of the experiences from his own far-flung life are worth as much as the potted history and political satire are worth little ; for they are of the stuff of truth out of which only is literature made.
Mr. Nevinson is perhaps best when he writes of English humour as he himself has heard it. " In Cologne just after the Armistice I saw an English soldier go up to a German child and say : ' Come 'ere, you square-headed little bastard of a bloody 'Un. I'm going to slit your bloody throat ! ' And the child, recognizing the idiom of a kindly heart, came up to receive the piece of chocolate. Here is English humour indeed. And why should a man who has such tales to tell deal out tags of anachronistic rubbish from veiled political pamphlets ?
WILLIAM BEACH TEEM-1S.
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