A Lawyer's Notebook
A Lawyer's Notebook. Anonymous. (Seeker. 5s.) ALTHOUGH the author of this book has for professional reasons veiled his identity with anonymity, all those who are privileged to know him will recognize the personality that inspires these bedside jottings and some of those who are not. For the author is a " character " in the old sense of the word, whose fame has spread beyond the immediate circle in which he has for thirty years moved in an unvarying habit.
The author is a Rationalist, was once a Socialist, has moved in advanced circles and known most of the advanced thinkers of his time. Yet in certain aspects he might stand as a model for an old-world English gentleman standing defiantly erect among the ruins of progressive anarchy that surround him. His habits, it has been said, are unvarying ; they are also old-fashioned. Take his food and drink ; no whisky and no cocktails ; a joint followed by tart and cream for Sunday's dinner ; a late luncheon on week-days of shellfish, to which he takes his own Moselle and port in a little shop in Chancery Lane. Take the man himself, genial, good-tempered, whimsical, outspoken ; good at talking but as good at listening ; able to consort with case and opportunity with all sorts and conditions of his fellows. He has a genius for friendship—with men ; he is essentially a man's man—wide knowledge, culture, practical experi- ence, horse-sense and a capacity for expressing the lot in witty, pertinent and occasionally astringent comment. Bence the present book, which consists of the gleanings of the comments made over the last thirty year.;.
And, finally, take the opinions in the book. Arc they the opinions of a progressive ? On the contrary the author can scarcely keep his pen from belabouring progress. The main count in his indictment is that progress substitutes the cheap standardized product in men and things for the true individual. For nearly thirty years he smoked a cheap Mexican cigar costing less than sixpence. " They were suddenly wiped out. They are still being made in Mexico ; but they are not sold here because they do not compete with the more tasteless and insipid type of cigar that is made by quick American methods. You do not let your leaf mature in the sun as it used to do, but put it into some kind of oven. Thus the world moves." The instance is typical of the movement which has presented the present reviewer with a breakfast of stale Grimsby mackerel at a fishing resort on the Welsh coast, and ruined his fruit on a country farm with cream which had first travelled to London, there been preserved, and thence returned to the farm of origin to be consumed by its visitors out of tins; typical, in fact, of what the author means by progress.
Progress consists, he tells us, " of buying more and more useless and unnecessary commodities." It is accused of so spoon-feeding the citizens of modern communities with a standard diet of education, news and views that they become more sheep-like in their uniformity even than soldiers, of substituting stock paragraphs manufactured to order for individual opinions, (the account of the process by which the clear, logical lines of an original idea are blurred and weakened for presentation in the popular Press, so that, wrapped in wool and sweetened with saccharine, it may cause neither thought nor offence to the readers, is admirable) —r-nd advertisement for literatures to such a disabling extent that, if it continues at the present rate, it will render " human existence quite impossible within the next fifty years."
He hates the Labour Party, execrates Trade Unions, admires Eton, thinks Public Schools over-criticized, praises a legal training. No, decidedly not a progressive ! I hope that he is not right in thinking that life will become im- possible for the intelligent in fifty years. If I thought he was, I should go at once to join him in that inn of his " where one gets real food and wine," the " one little oasis of indi- viduality " in a world of progress. In fact, I am not sure I shall not do so, anyway ; his talk is too good to be missed, even if the world is not coming to an end.
C. E. M. Joan.
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