ILL-TIMED COMMENT
WHAT Mr. Dennis offers is not a conu-nentary on the Coronation of King George VI, or on Coronations in general, but on the Coronation of King Edward VIII. He had written the greater part of it by last December, and instead of deciding to reduce its length a little and add a chapter on King George VI he unhappily decided to let it stand and add a chapter on the abdication instead. The result is that the volume as it stands consists of four admirable chapters on kingship in the last hundred years, the republic-versus-monarchy issue and the office and functions of a king, with one equally admirable on the actual coronation ceremony, a completely irrelevant chapter on " All the Other Edwards," a largely irrelevant study of King Edward VIII and an abdication chapter which makes the publication of the book, despite the virtues with which it opens, profoundly unfortunate.
If the Coronation may properly be seized as the occasion for raking over every dead ember of the abdication controversy, for characterising one of the chief personalities concerned as " an itinerant shop-soiled twice-divorcée with two ex- husbands living," for enumerating among the King's sup- porters " an unstable ambitious politician, flitter from party to party, extreme reactionary, himself the first-fruit of the first famous snob-dollar marriage ; ' half an alien and wholly undesirable' as once was said . . . Lord Rotherbrook. Lord Beavermere. A highbrow writer or two, famous loose-livers " ; if a moment when thousands of Americans have crossed the Atlantic for the Coronation is fitly chosen for offensive attacks on " the Invaders " . . . " as a rule no credit to the great country they had exploited and deserted nor to the one in which they now were roysterinft. and ruling "—then, and only then, is Mr. Dennis to be'congratulated on his latest volume.
The feature of the abdication episode which history will rightly emphasise as outstanding was not the tragedy of King Edward's conflict between his duty and his affections, nor the faultless handling of the situation by the Prime Minister, but the restraint and decency with which the nation silently took its leave of one king and hailed another and set its face to the future. Mr. Dennis has chosen another and not a better way.
H. W. H.
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