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THE BOOK OF THE MONTH

Rough Justice, by C. E. Montague. London: Chatto and Windus; Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. $2.00. [Arthur Waugh in the Daily Telegraph] It is the simple truth that a new novel by Mr. C. E. Montague makes most of its competitors upon the bookstall look 'pretty poor stuff.' Not, of course, that it allows itself any concession to popular methods, or takes the easy way to a vast circulation. Quite the reverse. The Manchester school of prose if we may use the expression is neither glib nor familiar; it bears upon its crowded line the marks of the hammer and the graving tool; inevitably it must always be more acceptable to the fellow workman than to the casual customer. The material of the author's mind, in the same way, is remote from the common taste. It despises superficialities. It declines to be amused by the fatuities of the vulgar. It is steeped in a profound and passionate devotion to the best qualities in the national character, 'the sound England behind the flash mask,' the emblems of self-surrender and self-discipline that alone in those last years of trial 'have kept England from rotting.' An austere talent like Mr. Montague's invites a certain austerity in its admirers; it even requires a measure of indulgence, for its convictions may not always be the convictions of those who respect it most. But no one who values the high traditions of English fiction can ever doubt that this is a talent 'of the centre,' the zealously guarded gift of an artist who strives with every nerve in his body to see the life around him steadily and clearly, refusing to despair of the future even in the darkest hour of present confusion. There breathes throughout his work a valiant confidence in the holy spirit of man, a faith in man's eventual destiny, and a tender pity for the waste and wreckage of human effort. His is the big field of a big heart, the chivalrous and cheery call of a champion of the simple virtues.

Rough Justice, Mr. Montague's latest

novel, faces a problem that has been burning in the hearts of all thoughtful people for years past the problem of the break-up of that England which the middle-aged inherited, fairly sound and whole, from their fathers half a century ago. There is no eluding the fact - the old, prosperous, easy-going England is no more. It is a common fashion to say that the war ended it; but the beginning of the end was much earlier than that. Our author takes us back a little over thirty years, to the days of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' and The Yellow Book, when youth was breaking out in all directions, and the safety bicycle had made woman free of the road. 'All old and wornout things were being swept out of the way at a quite breathless pace'; and Auberon Garth was born into an atmosphere of oxygen and vitality. He was born into a goodly heritage as well. His father, who had been a cabinet minister, and was acclaimed a future premier, until his perplexing persistency in seeing all sides of a situation destroyed his value as a party politician, his father, the last of the old Conservatives, was lord of a Tudor chantry on a tidal reach of the Thames, and Auberon grew up with all the traditions of feudalism seething in his veins. His boyhood might, perhaps, have been lonely, but for his indomitable zest for life. For his mother died while he was still an infant, and the inveterate English restraint of their race choked in the utterance all attempted confidences between father and son. They were continually alive to a consuming desire to establish a closer relationship, but the habit of the race was too strong for them. So Auberon Bron, as he was called- was thrown back upon Molly, and she upon him, in a jolly, sexless, frank companionship. Molly was an orphan cousin, adopted by the Garths, three years older than Bron, and as true as steel. All day they shared their work and play together, tracked the herons, and unearthed the staves that Cæsar's soldiers had driven into the river-bed. Nature and

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romance were their daily bread, and every night Bron would cry through the door to Molly, 'Goo' night! Fun to-morrow!' And, when to-morrow's sun came, it brought a new adventure. "Tremendous!' cried Bron, as he raced across the lawn. It was the password of the chantry. Everything was 'tremendous,' and full of fun.

But the making of an Englishman means severance from home. 'A queer thing is the building up of decency.' First came the friends from round about: Colin March, who made fun of all their treasured tales; Claude Brabazon, who appropriated all their toys; and, above all, Victor Nevin, who 'sat there in his chair, putting his little smile on all the day nursery,' precociously clever, born to success, a little contemptuous of all who were less brilliant than himself. Bron was to learn from these, in different ways, and still more emphatically was he to learn at school, and at Oxford afterward, that an Englishman must not display his enthusiasm upon his sleeve; that, even if life is 'tremendous,' the wise man will not admit it; and that it is generally shameful to work, if one has the opportunity to play. By the time he had finished with Oxford, Bron had wasted most of his opportunities, unless to be a 'Rugger blue' be the summit of every man's desire. He had disappointed his father, and had allowed the brilliant Victor Nevin to carry off Molly into an ecstatic engagement. In fact, 'the education most highly reputed among the Englishry of Auberon's class had fairly completed its work on him.'

By this time also the reader will have perceived what is coming. The war is the inevitable sifter of the situation. If, moreover, the reader knows Mr. Montague's earlier books, Disenchantment and Fiery Particles, he will anticipate in advance the pity, the terror, and the lambent human sympathy which rise and fall, like flames of intense emotion, throughout the second half of this deeply moving and earnestly sincere story. The old England, the one that was still feudal at heart, had come to her deathbed at last. She died hard, the glorious old jade'; and the tale of her death was never more impressively told than here.

Of course, all the characters go to the Front, except old Garth, the father, and he

dies before the war is over, his heart broken, and the greater part of his fortune offered and accepted as a free gift for the war chest of his beloved native land. Victor and Auberon enlist as privates, and the process of their training, with all its inextricable mixture of squalor and good-fellowship, is followed in vivid detail. The fortunes of the regiment are alive with surprises, but it is perhaps no great surprise to find that Claude Brabazon, the highwayman of the nursery, is soon covered with ribbons and decorations, or that Colin March, who never took anything seriously, becomes master of 'a cushy job,' far from the sound of machine-guns. There remain the two old rivals, Victor, the eloquent, the man of words, and Bron, the silent, the man of deeds, who are left to fight side by side, and to prove their mettle under the bitter yoke of trial. The fate of Victor is appalling, and the cup of his degradation complete. The worst punishment the war had to deal out was reserved for 'those who were too weak to bear as much as they had tried to bear for the sake of us all.' That, at any rate, was how Molly excused her man, when she came back at last, to a world maimed and twisted out of recognition, to a home impoverished and shortly to be abandoned, but at any rate to the compensation of a love that had weathered the storm, and was ready with courage for the future. 'Goo' night. Fun to-morrow.' The old, familiar English capacity for speeding sorrow like a parting guest, and for turning with a frolic welcome to the next adventure in the lists, having brought the country through the war, will doubtless see it through the peace as well. "Tremendous' - that is the watchword. The readiness is all.

[Times Literary Supplement]

MR. C. E. MONTAGUE'S work demands to be judged by none but the highest standard, and, so judged, Rough Justice must, we think, be classed among the brilliant failures. It is instinct with wit and poetry and generous anger, it contains some of the finest prose that Mr. Montague has written, and it has moments of great beauty and considerable dramatic power. But these things, grateful though one is for

them, do not suffice to make a satisfactory novel. This story of Auberon Garth - his birth, his childhood, his education, and his experience of the war is subtly tainted throughout by a hint of didacticism that one finds difficult to forgive in a novelist, however acceptable it may be from the author of a personal essay. Here we have, in effect, Disenchantment translated into terms of fiction and not improved in the process. When a moralist uses fiction as an instrument of castigation he takes the risk of presenting us with a set of attitudes instead of with a set of characters, and it is to this danger that Mr. Montague's art has succumbed. The people of his story fall too easily into two classes the people he loves and the people he cannot bear. Chief among the former are Bron himself, Molly his foster-sister, and Thomas Garth his father.

These are handled with an affection that is almost complacent, with a tenderness that more than once becomes sentimental. These, we are to understand, are the right sort of people, sensitive, simple-hearted, austerely devoted to duty; and to their number must be added such types as Corporal Cart, whose unadulterated goodness is rather tiresomely insisted upon. These are ideal beings, and their reactions to life are so uniformly admirable that one cannot believe them to have been made of flesh and blood.

England at war is the real theme of the book, and for this reason, as for others, one wishes that Mr. Montague had dealt more expeditiously with the childhood of his hero and heroine. The prelude is overlong, and its intrinsic value is dubious. The children are rendered less attractive than they might have been by a diligent, fond record of their 'quaint sayings,' phonetically spelled. This sentimentalism surprising in so gifted a writer is a radical defect in these early

chapters: no childish charm can survive such a phrase as 'lamps o' blooty,' the exclamation with which Bron, at a tender age, greets the sight of daffodils glowing in a twilit garden. From such things we turn Iwith relief to Colin March and Victor Nevin the first a creation of pure wit, the very voice of mockery, and the second a cruel study of just the kind of superior person, full of fine words, that Mr. Montague most despises. It cannot be said that Mr. Montague, who seems unable to create a complex and living character, is always fair to Victor Nevin, but at least he makes him the occasion for a clever piece of malicious portraiture and, later on, for a masterly piece of narrative. For Victor Nevin, Molly's betrothed, fails to translate his brave words into deeds; he is tricked, partly by his own weakness and partly by circumstances, into deserting from the army, and finally is caught and executed. The chapter in which the officer in charge of the firing party, a foul creature called Immals, relates to Auberon Garth the details of his friend's execution is one of the most dreadful and salutary things in modern literature.

BOOKS MENTIONED

AUSTIN, BERTRAM, and LLOYD, W. FRANCIS. The Secret of High Wages. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926. 38. 6d. (See the Living Age, March 27, 1926.)

JENNINGS, H. S. Prometheus. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. $1.00.

MACKENZIE, COMPTON. Carnival. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912, $2.50. The Parson's Progress. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924, $2.50. The Passionate Elopement. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916, $1.50. Poor Relations. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920, $2.00. Sinister Street. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914, $2.50.

OUR OWN BOOKSHELF

Doughty Deeds, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham. New York: Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press, 1925. $3.75.

AMONG the many biographies written nowadays it is surprising that there are so many really good ones. And it is largely due to such men as Mr. Cunninghame Graham that modern biography can claim a position of such importance. Doughty Deeds is an excellent example of what a first-rate author can do with a slight subject. Mr. Graham, in this life of his eighteenth-century Scottish ancestor, who was both poet and politician, has only the weakest of threads from which to weave his narrative. So, lacking the tangible facts of Robert Graham of Gartmore's life, he collects what material he has and translates it into a light and humorous language of his own. One of the chief reasons why we can enjoy this book so fully is the fact that the author apparently was at no time bored by his subject. The past is so overcrowded with dutiful and exact biographies that a book like this stands out as an excellent sample of the new spirit that is entering into this type of literature.

The Dark Tower, by Francis Brett Young. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.00.

THIS is a tale of hereditary temperament set in the picturesque background of the Welsh border mountains. The author is deliberate in his search for the romantic. He achieves the bizarre. One regrets an ingenuity in the telling of the story that heightens its artificiality. In a novel the intrusions of the author are rarely grateful, since they only come between the reader and the characters presented. Not, however, that one at any time becomes intimate with Alaric Grosmont. There is much about him that can never be understood, for he is that now familiar figure of modern fiction, the Incoherent Egoist. His actions are caused by strange promptings of the soul, unrelated to common-sense. He is a mystic: he is a child. Such persons do not commend themselves to the ordinary reasonable reader. Therefore the author usually makes them as beautiful as. Greek gods. Mr. Young, on the contrary, has risked making his hero physically almost repulsive. Too grotesque to stir much sympathy, Alaric nevertheless blunders through the book in interesting fashion. One would be equally diverted by the antics of å monkey in the zoo. For one remains an outsider never achieving a personal introduction to the

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The Life of Benito Mussolini, by Marguerita G. Sarfatti. With a Preface by Benito Mussolini. Translated by Frederic Whyte. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1926. $5.00. THIS book, written from an ardent pro-Fascist standpoint by an enthusiastic admirer and former editorial associate of Benito Mussolini, possesses few of the characteristics of a serious historical document. But it is a lively and readable life of an exceedingly interesting man, written with a certain vivid persuasiveness that carries the reader with it. Moreover, both as a characterstudy and as a narrative of almost current events, the book throws much light on Italy's recent history, and is of great assistance in interpreting contemporary political conditions in that country.

George Westover, by Eden Phillpotts. New

York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $2.00. It is rarely that a novel is published to-day whose whole conception and style are completely uninfluenced by modern tendencies. The story opens in 1871, soon after Sir George Westover has retired from the Indian Civil Service, and is concerned with his struggles to live lavishly on a judge's pension. The author assumes that his readers will have a considerable knowledge of the political, social, and religious ideas current near the end of the eighteenth century. Those who have such knowledge will find this an interesting though uninspired tale, while others may enjoy some of the characters without being attracted by the book as a whole.

Disraeli and Gladstone, by D. C. Somervell. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926. $3.50.

AN admiration for both Disraeli and Gladstone is not the least of the qualifications which Mr. Somervell brought to the making of this pleasant book. A study of the interaction of two such men, the Radical aristocrat and the Tory Jew, gives a better picture of political life and ideas in the nineteenth century than any other method, particularly when the author has a bright and engaging style. A passion for mixed metaphors can be forgiven in the writer of an interesting and useful volume.

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