THE editors of the Times have not hitherto been brilliant. Delane was a man of sound judgment, of wide knowledge, shrewd in his estimation of other men. Chenery was a scholar of great learning. Buckle added to his gift of being able in a very short time to tear the heart out of any problem set before him, an acquaintance with all the prominent people of the day, which was of service to the columns of the paper. Geoffrey Dawson took a wider view of world affairs than his predecessors for the reason that he had seen more of the world than they. But none of these editors could have been called brilliant.

Now the Times comes under the direction of a journalist who cannot be spoken of without this epithet. He has been a brilliant foreign correspondent. He is a brilliant writer. Hitherto it has been a tradition of the Times that the editor should not write himself. His task has been to inspire and guide the pens of his leader-writers. This tradition will now, we must hope, be broken. If Mr. Wickham Steed ceased to write the loss would be great indeed.

For not only is he apt to put what he knows into illuminating form-it is the extent of what he knows that makes his contributions to journalism and to literature so valuable and, indeed, unique. He has an astonishing acquaintance with statesmen every

where. If you had managed to conceal yourself in his room at the Times office while he was foreign editor, you might have watched a procession of men who were making history, and you might have heard Wickham Steed talk to them each in his own tongue. His command of languages is again I must use the word, no other epithet suffices-brilliant. He writes in French just as easily as he expresses himself in English. I have heard him make a speech in Italian so happily phrased and so fervid in sentiment that he set an Italian audience shouting in his praise. German he speaks with complete ease, and he can introduce those slight differences which distinguish the German spoken in Vienna from the speech of Germany proper.

Hidden behind your screen in his room you would have listened to conversations upon many aspects of foreign policy, upon many events which had already set the world talking, or which were in the future to figure as 'best news.' About all the subjects which came up you would have remarked Mr. Steed's authoritative pronouncements, and you would further have noticed that his visitors accepted his authority. It has never, I think, happened before that an Englishman's acquaintance with Continental questions has been admitted by Continental statesmen and publicists to be so ample and so accurate as to make his

opinions almost final. Upon many matters this admission has been made, this high tribute offered to the judgment of Mr. Steed.

That he has spent all his journalistic life in the service of the Times has certainly been of service to him. He has always had a serious public to address, and he has known that many readers of his dispatches would be able to criticize them with the firsthand knowledge. He took up a great tradition when he became a foreign correspondent, and he has always worthily upheld it. He found that special sources of information were open to correspondents of the Times. That conferred a certain distinction upon him. In return, he very soon began to add distinction to the paper by the value of his information and the soundness of his views.

His first regular appointment was that of assistant in Berlin. He was given this in 1896. Then he was a young man of twenty-five. The son of a country solicitor in Suffolk, he had decided for himself that he would prefer foreign universities to Oxford or Cambridge. He was eager for knowledge rather than 'a good time.' He felt sure that he could fit himself for such a life as that of which he dreamed, far better in France or in Germany than at home. So, after a spell of private secretaryship to a Suffolk M.P., Sir Cuthbert Quilter, he went to Jena University, and flung himself with the energy that marks all he does, and all he has ever done, into philological studies.

From Jena he migrated after a time to Berlin, where he continued to attend classes at the university, and then he determined to finish up in Paris, at the Sorbonne. By this time he had gained what he set out to acquirefamiliarity with languages, an effective mental gymnastic, a knowledge of

Continental politics. He was ready to begin his career. Chance threw in his way the opportunity to do a useful and important piece of work for the Times. He did it so capably that he was offered an engagement. This was just such an opening as he sought. He went to Berlin, and in one year so amply proved his ability and devotion to the paper that when the position of correspondent in Rome fell vacanthe was chosen to fill it.

In Rome he remained for five years. In spite of his youth he very quickly gained a position of authority. How did he manage this? Quite simply. He studied every question of the day with the closest attention. He went into its historical connection with other questions. He talked to everyone within reach who had any first-hand knowledge bearing upon it. Not so simple after all, you say. For some men, no. But Wickham Steed was not a man who cared for sport or games in the open air. He had simple tastes and, on the whole, preferred working to playing. He had not, and never has, found time to get married. Therefore, it came easily to him to follow the precept: 'With all thy getting get understanding.' And so he soon got authority as well.

When last year he undertook, for Lord Northcliffe's Department, the management of British propaganda against Austria, and went on a mission to Rome to persuade the Italian Government that it would be politic for the Allies to support the subject races of Austria in their efforts toward independence, he was treated in Rome as if he were an Ambassador. That, by the way, is a rôle which he would fill to admiration. He has the right appearance. Tall and strikingly handsome, with wavy gray hair and a small pointed beard, he looks distinguished in any company. His

which he employed for hastening the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire accounted in large measure for the rapidity of its collapse.

In Paris Mr. Steed is pointed out as one of the most distinguished figures at the Peace Conference. He is consulted by the most eminent of British and foreign statesmen. In every capital he is recognized as one of the most

The Landmark

notable Englishmen of our time. It is good, not only for the Times, but for England, that such a man should be at the head of those who conduct our greatest newspaper. He will enlarge the traditions of the post; he will bring it more into accord with the conditions of the new age which is opening and in the shaping of which he has now so prominent a part to play.

In a succession of useful books Mrs. Tallentyre has made the intellectual life of France in the middle of the eighteenth century her province. She has given particular attention to Voltaire and his circle, and now she translates a selection from his letters. The correspondence of Voltaire is a very serious matter; it fills eighteen thick volumes in the familiar edition of his works, and eighty years ago 8,000 of his letters were known to be in existence. Many hundreds have turned up since then, and nobody can pretend to have read them all.

Mrs. Tallentyre, who has probably read more of them than anyone else, becomes our cicerone in the corridors of this bewildering palace, and translates eighty-four letters for our satisfaction. This is quite enough for the general reader, who, however, may as well be warned that this is only about one per cent of what Mrs. Tallentyre might have done if she had been des

*Voltaire in His Letters. Being a Selection from His Correspondence. Translated by S. G. Tallentyre. Murray, 120.

perately disposed. Voltaire is one of the big things of the world; he is like the Vatican or the Kremlin; however assiduously we visit him, we can never really explore his recesses. We must be grateful to a guide who will take us over a few of the show-rooms.

Voltaire is one of the great letterwriters of the world, and easily first among those of France in the eighteenth century. In his spontaneous and vehement letters we see the complete ascendancy of a new spirit. By the time we reach them the seventeenth century is finally over and done with. The last traces of the 'precious' style have evaporated, and not the least grain of the Rambouillet musk perfumes the envelope.

The sovereign quality of Voltaire's letters is the dry light of their intellectual sincerity; even when the writer is up to his elbows in intrigue, and his eyes are twinkling with duplicity like will-o'-the-wisps, he is absolutely natural. We must not look here for imagination as we find it in the letters of

Mme. de Sevigné. But the agitation of Voltaire's spirit is reflected throughout and every sentence gives an instantaneous snapshot of his mood. If Voltaire is merry, the letter laughs; if he is angry, it storms; if he is sly it wheedles. The volumes of his correspondence, not boiled down by his translator, are tremendous in their bulk, but they offer a commentary on Voltaire's rich and variegated life which we could not afford to see curtailed. The courage of the man in those days of espionage was wonderful. In 1759 Voltaire remarked (in an epistle which Mrs. Tallentyre does not give) that the art of letterwriting, which in his youth had been the painting of the heart, the consolation of absence, and the language of truth, had been destroyed by the censorship, which unsealed private correspondence. He added: 'One dares no longer to think by post.' But we wonder how much more audacious he could have managed to be had no censorship existed.

The character of Voltaire is not appreciated by those who neglect his correspondence. He is less sarcastic in his private letters than in his public pamphlets, more delicate and easy, less venomous and less virulent in his criticism of social abuses. We get to know a Voltaire who is almost lovable, or at least (not to exaggerate) extremely likable. He is found to be very gay, as befits the writer of so many tragedies. This bright side of him was not appreciated when the trend of European politics put Voltaire's polemical writings out of fashion. In England the excessive sarcasm of his style early raised against him the prejudice of which Cowper was a leading exponent. That 'maniacal Calvinist and coddled poet,' as Byron calls him, attacked Voltaire as 'the bane of thousands born' in 1782; by an irony of circumstances there are sides upon

which no two letter-writers are now seen to approach one another more closely than Voltaire and Cowper. To each at his best is appropriate the delightful phrase of Anatole France: 'The pen runs and laughs under his fingers.'

To blame a good book for what it does not contain is a stupid mode of reviewing it. I will not fall into that error, for Mrs. Tallentyre knows her Voltaire as well as I know him, and better too. But I will venture - by way of conversation, not of blameto point out that she cites not a single example of Voltaire's correspondence with his two most intimate private friends, the Rouen magistrates, Cideville and Formont. Formont, though excellent, was a little dry, perhaps, a little trop philosophe, but Le Cornier de Cideville, who had been Voltaire's schoolfellow at the Collège Louis le Grand, was a charming comrade, simple and loyal, enthusiastic and responsive. Till half through their lives, Cideville was the recipient of more letters from Voltaire then anyone else, more than even the unworthy Thieriot. To my private taste, Voltaire shows himself nowhere more attractive than in his eager, unaffected letters to Cideville, who was only estranged from his old friend, on a religious question, toward the end of their long lives. I wish Mrs. Tallentyre had translated the extraordinarily important letter of June, 1731, to the authors of the Nouvelliste du Parnasse, showing Voltaire's keen interest in all that concerns the technique of poetry. Finally, I cannot account for the complete absence of the Présidente de Bernières.

To such objections if objections they can be called the reply would doubtless be that the translator was not appealing to students of the character of Voltaire or to persons familiar with his works; but to a class of readers