BOOKS OF THE DAY

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Georgian Adventure (Wyndham Lewis) . . . . 553 The Sodialist Case (Prof. Lionel Robbins) . . . . 554 Australia and-the Depression (H. V. Hodson) .. . . 554 One' Man's Scotland (Janet Adam Smith) .. • • =555 Ancient. Egypt. Speaks (Christopher Sykes) . . . . ,. 555

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First Personalities (Desmond Hawkins) . . • •

556

The Diary of a Country Priest (John Hayward) . . 556 A Date With a Duchess and Other Stories (Graham

Greene) . . .. .. . . • • 557 Fiction (Forrest Reid) . . • •

558 REBEL AND- ROYALIST

By WYNDHAM LEWIS

THIS Goigian Adventure is far better than its name. Alisad= ventures would be a. better title, and truer to life—to all life. It

is told with a positively alarming zest. Indeed, it is written almost as if for a wager. It reads as though some one had bet Mr. Jerrold (in one of his many clubs) 'that he could not write a Life without a dull line in it. Here is a man with the tempera-. ment of the Olympic athlete or golf finalist. This " Life " is not a life, it is a trophy ! It is not an autobiography, it is a scintillating Marathon. The sardonic champion breasts the tape in the G.H.Q. at Salamanca, as fresh as when he started, about the time of the Diamond Jubilee. It is a great perform- ance. When one lays it down one instinctively bursts into a cheer.

In his concluding pages Mr. Jerrold reveals the fact that the Civil War in Spain is largely his doing—he is responsible for Franco. One is not in the least surprised—one would have been surprised, by that time, had this not been the case. Such is the spirit of the book 'throughout. There is no great event for which Mr. Jerrold has not been indirectly responsible, it

transpires—not excepting the Diamond Jubilee, since both his great grandfathers co-operated in the creation of Victorian- ism, shoulder to shoulder with Dickens, Barry Cornwall,

Thackeray, Macready and the rest of them.

Although broadminded in politics, how is it, I wonder, that reading these pages makes me feel so uncomfortably " left- wing " ? For though I ended up with an 'involuntary cheer, this interrupted only for a moment the humming of the " Inter- nationale," which had been proceeding for some time, equally in spite of myself. And, of course, the more narrow-minded reader will just see red, long before he has done. Yet why should this be so ? For actually this book, the wisecracks apart, is one long cry of revolt.

I know that to hear the autobiography of this outstanding "-rightwing polemist " described as a long cry of revolt will surprise many people. Yet that is what it is—a series of rebellious tirades. of : (i) the regimental officer against Brass Hat leadership ; (2) of the Catholic against the puritan majority ; (3) of the public school " prizeman " against the sporting Rugbeian system ; (4) of the political journalist against the politician ; (5) of the publisher against the book-racket. It is not one rebel but a hundred rebels that you meet beneath this clatter of clubmanesque epigram.

Here, for instance, is Mr. Jerrold the civil servant. The War is just over, and- Mr. Jerrold is in the Food Ministry: I ought, I suppose, to have been profoundly grateful for being alive . . . I had become part of that vast busy machine of modern government, which has no cares because it is omnipotent . . . which enjoys power without responsibility and exercises authority without being required to bring the gifts of leadership. I under- stood at last what it must mean to, be on the staff of a great army . . . how inevitably matters of life and death must become a part of the acafleinic routine, counters in a professional exercise.

Or again, Mr. Jerrold as regimental officer. He has re- turned, 'disabled by wounds, to train others to go and make

England fit for heroes to live in :

It was January, 1918, before I returned to duty, and England in 1918 was a strange land. The witch doctors had lost their magic. . . . No one had anything to offer us in the way of help or even advice. But it was no longer our war we had to win. That is the bitter truth that lies at the heart of the agony and disillusion of the post-War period, even -to - this :day. . . . The world was already, in January, I9x8, in , open revolt against the old order. Mutinies in France, mutinies in Italy, revolution in Russia, open dissension between the Government arid the Generals &Vowing the long agony of Passchendaele, where tactics foolish' to the point of criminality had wasted thousands upon thousands of lives.

So it is in whatever role we encounter Mr. Jerrold. We find him invariably up in arms against authority. I do not believe that even the Pope would be immune from his mordant discontent.- Georgian Adventure. The Autobiography of Douglas Jerrold. (Collins. 15s.) , Why then should this revoke give one that " leftwing 4 feeling so persistently ? It is", of course, because Mr. Jerrold does not draw the necessary conclusions from his passionate

discontents: You find him at one moment providing you with a hundred excellent reasons why people should refuse to go on being made fools of—or made corpses of, the same thing.

Next moment you find him arm in arm with the very gentlemen who are most liable to do those things. This sharp-witted appellant before the bar of dunderheaded Injustice is not con- sistent.

Mr. Jerrold knows how he should act, according to his re- bellious premises, and yet acts differently—for one feels that he is conscious that his conservatism is in the sharpest contra- diction with his tragic experience of what conservatism can do. His dilemma seems to be this : that the opposite of conservatism has been accountable for some pretty ghastly things as well. But, since two blacks do not make one white, in spite of all that one feels uncomfortable.

He quotes Mr. R. H. Mottram as saying : " The English, . . . being a slow-witted people, delayed passing their judge- ment on the conduct of their leaders until 1926. And then, having passed their judgement, forbore, with characteristic good humour (which might also be regarded as a fundamental lack of intellectual integrity) from giving effect to it." But Mr. Jerrold proceeds at once to say that he has not told this story " as an endorsement of the preposterous legend that ' the people ' were ' tricked ' into a capitalist war." No ! It is the people who make wars, in spite of the politicians. " War is not a sentence of death passed by the politicians on the people, but a vote of no-confidence passed on the politicians by the people."

Since many of us feel that a " vote of no-confidence " of this spurious order is about to be cast once more (or that the politi- cians are preparing to say that as the people no longer have much confidence in them a big war is indicated—it is the people's wish), it is difficult to read these words without discomfort. Or again, here is the sort of passage that makes me uneasy to the point of queasiness :

The War began . . . outside Buckingham Palace on the night of August 4th. The same crowd that cheered the King on that memorable occasion would have been demonstrating angrily outside the House of Commons if Mr. Asquith or Sir Edward Grey had not shown themselves to be . . . men of courage and integrity.

But here is another passage, taken at random, which is as tonic as the other was mischievously trite :

Practising Catholics were not allowed a century ago to own any property exceeding £5 in value. These things were done in England from the days of Cromwell in the name of enlightened progress, and differ in no way from the results of the doctrines of totalitarianism. Persecution is always vile, and the English record of persecution, from the days of Henry VIII to the days of . . the Black-and-tans, is particularly nauseating because it has been accompanied by a consistent output of high moral sentiment on the part of the persecutors.. . . Unfortunately (the victims) have occasionally hit back, a thing which Englishmen seldom forgive.

That's a bit more to the point, isn't it ? There speaks the true Mr. Jerrold, it is my belief. And one of the results of extreme bigotry is that you provoke the evasive and the trite. Perhaps, too, the result of restricting people for too long to a £5 quota causes them to exaggerate the attractiveness of the " privileged classes."

You can see from what I have said that Mr. Jerrold's auto- biography will provide much food for thought, but I have not given the impression, I hope, that it is over-burdened with beastly problems. On the contrary,- it is an entertainment of a high order, Mr. Jerrold producing out of his high-hat bon mot after ban mot in bewildering succession. If it is an important docnment historically, the historic pill is everywhere coated with a delectable wit.