THE LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR PEARSON, BT., C.B.E.
By. Sidney Dark. (Hodder and Stoughton. 10s. Od. net.)
Having had twenty years of acquaintance with his subject, and at least ten .years of considerable intimacy, Mr. Dark has contrived a portrait of the late Sir Arthur Pearson which is at once frankly admiring and naively illuminating. The first half of the book—which divides naturally into two parts, journalism and St. Dunstan's—depicts for us a man of extraordinary energy, ambition, and self-confidence. The second half reveals the untiring philanthropist, an alter ego which unquestionably existed in Arthur Pearson all his life, though it was partially obscured by all the buying and selling in the newspaper market, the fever of advertisement, and the ephemeral plunges into politics in which his earlier years were spent. And as his best memorial must always be the great work he did for our soldiers and sailors blinded in the war, it is satisfactory that his biographer should have told in so great detail the story of the inception and development of the work at St. Dunstan's. When Pearson first heard that he was on the brink of total blindness, he is said to have exclaimed to his wife " I shall soon be blind, hilt I will never be a blind man ; I am going to be the blind man." The remark was characteristic of the speaker's attitude towards life ; and the practical outcome of the resolution thus expressed has laid an incalculable burden of gratitude upon thousands of his fellow-countrymen.
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