AN OUTLAW'S DIARY*
As one suspected from the pitch of her first volume describing the Karolyi regime, Miss Tormay has no further superlatives left for the real reign of terror that followed under Bela Kun. The first volume was itself so top-heavy with extremity of abuse as to produce no sort of serious effect on the reader's mind ; the second could not go further and keep within the limits of the English Dictionary. Miss Tormay writes as if every moment were the blackest in the history of the world, which is absurd ; and as a novelist she should know better. She must surely realize that there is no method of expression so inarticulate as the scream. We must, of course, make allowances for the state of mind of a woman of culture actually living through what we ourselves are only reading from an arm-chair ; but equally we should have thought that women of culture would have more restraint than to behave in this hysterical manner under any circumstances ; and even if to write as she does were comprehensible, to publish it without considerable revision is not. To regard a man as the enemy of one's country, to believe the worst of him under great
• .4n Ontlaw's Diary. Part 11. By Cecile Tormay. London Philip Allan; 112s. 6d. mt..' Etress, is one thing ; to blackguard him like a vendor of yellow street-libels, in cold print after a considerable lapse of time, as MSS Tormay did to the Count and Countess Karolyi in her last volume, is another and very different thing and cannot fail to disgust the reader, whatever allowances he may previously be inclined to make. After all, at its worst the Bolshevik regime in Budapest was not so cataclysmal as that in Russia, and the restraint of the average Russian refugee is in marked contrast to Miss Tormay's abuse : of such a pre- eminently aristocratic nation as the Magyar we should have expected something better. But let it not be thought that the present writer is trying to minimize the sufferings of that nation. Although he has not first-hand knowledge of the events described, he was in Budapest not very long afterwards, and conversed with many who suffered worse than Miss Tormay did : candidly, he was a great deal more impressed before he came to read Miss Tormay's diary than he is now. The. Hungarians probably possess a more efficient and cleverer propaganda service in foreign countries than any other nation. It is inconceivable how they could have been guilty of such an error of judgment as not to do their utmost to hinder the publication of this book, which cannot but lower the prestige of their country in English eyes.
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