cans,

watcher of its clouds, a friend of little springs and daisies. In a word or two, he carries us right into the heart of his rather wistful enjoyment of the countryside. But his human beings are hardly those of other people's experience — though none the worse for that, perhaps. In Madder the good are mostly imbecile — lovably so; and so are the bad—which is, come to think of it, less astonishing. Wipe out some black pages, take Mr. Powys's rustics without question, and their naïvetés and absurdities will tickle our sense of humor flatteringly. Solly, for instance, looking at the sky for the great gift that is to fall from Heaven on Madder, and finding guidance for life in stray sentences out of a history of the Ameri- his whole library, is a lovely spectacle. But we are muddle-headed if we speak of their kinship with Shakespeare's or with Hardy's rustics. In the first place, Mr. Powys does not use his for mere byplay; they are the central figures of the drama. But there is a great difference. His characters are Jonsonian rather, creatures of allegory, embodiments of qualities or of obsessions. The Reverend Mr. Tucker is Modesty; Solly is Innocence; Fred Pym throwing up his cap, his one expression of the joy of life, counting his sheep or anything else, his one mental effort, is Heavenly Foolishness. But Pym can love, and his is the tragic rôle in the drama. Miss Pettifer in Meanness, and Bugby is Black Lust. Yet so well are the shadows presented that they are passably like flesh-and-blood creatures. Indeed, with the exception of Miss Pettifer, made in a fit of spite, Mr. Powys seems first of all to have conceived them as such, and then taken out of them all the features that did not suit his purpose.

An uncomfortable book, which haunts by its beauty and its horror. Whether Mr. Powys be high moralist or victim of his obsession we do not presume yet to judge. Give him time, and, with his gifts, he may be trusted to be his own interpreter.

Humoresque, by Humbert Wolfe. London: Ernest Benn. 68.

[Manchester Guardian]

THE duality of Mr. Humbert Wolfe's poetic nature, which could be detected in The Unknown Goddess, his last book of serious verse, is still more palpable here. It may be said to be sym

But the lyric value of the best of it is beyond question; and the second-best serves to bring out that dual quality suggested by the dramatic apparatus a profound seriousness of thought and intensity of feeling set against a surface gayety and a toying with feeling and thought: There may be suffering in song as deep as silence, and the melody that seems only a trick of haunting words may keep

a tryst with pain beyond all lovers' dreams. Mr. Wolfe is an ironist, and a wit, of the Caroline order; but he is also a lyrist and a melodist; and his truer poetic self is not that which sounds the deeps of personality through metaphysical speculation, as in "The Incom municable Surd,' finely conceived though that poem is: it is rather that which imaginatively expresses it in the music of a mood, like the music of 'Resignation':

Listen! the wind is rising,

and the air is wild with leaves;
we have had our summer evenings;
now for October eves!

The great beech trees lean forward,
and strip like a diver. We
had better turn to the fire

and shut our minds to the sea,

where the ships of youth are running
close-hauled on the edge of the wind,
with all adventure before them,
and only the old behind.

BOOKS MENTIONED

HIRST, F. W., and ALLEN, J. E. British War Budgets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1926. 158.

Cat and Candle, by Palle Rosenkrantz. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926. $2.00.

BARON ROSENKRANTZ is a Dane. Perhaps neither his title nor his nationality should influence the reader, but there is always a certain social glamour about an aristocrat, and a certain intellectual prestige in being a Dane. Cat and Candle is readable and amusing largely on account of the ease with which it was written. The story is of slight importance; it deals with the love and financial adventures of two young friends. There is very little real cleverness in the book; yet if one were to assign it a place in fiction it would undoubtedly have to be classified among the sophisticated novels. One can easily imagine Baron Rosenkrantz in time becoming the Aldous Huxley of Denmark. It is unfortunate that one loses so much in the translation, for there are evidently many light touches in the original that put on considerable weight when transferred into English. There is one surprise that the American reader alone can enjoy we learn that in Denmark Red Grange is a homestead and not a superman.

Stepsons of France, by P. C. Wren. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1926. $2.00,

It is doing Captain Wren full justice to say that these seventeen stories are in the early some would say best - Kipling tradition, the Kipling of Soldiers Three; and the comparison, however enduring, must not depreciate the fresh vigor of this material. The Foreign Legion, with its potpourri of desperate and despairing men, its redhot campaigns in desert and jungle, its juicy Grand-Guignol cruelty, affords enough adventure for any strong palate. If the tales are more sanguinary and less subtle than their model (due perhaps to the absence of women gentle or otherwise from the Legion's posts), they are fully as versatile. Wide is their map, dramatic their portrayal of battles, murders, and sudden deaths, and romantic the circumstances that have driven each soldier to such oblivion. Captain Wren knows all the tricks of the Legion's trade; knows the little national traits and dialects that distinguish men black and white; knows best of all how to excite one's interest.

The Pope, by Jean Carrère. Translated by Arthur Chambers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926. $3.00.

THOSE who turn to this, the latest of M. Carrère's volumes, with the expectation of finding in it either a biography of the present incumbent of the throne of Saint Peter or a full account of the prerogatives and duties of the pontifical office will experience disappointment. With greater accuracy the author might have entitled his work, 'A Journalist's Historical Sketch of the Roman Question.' Long years of residence in Rome, full sympathy with the point of view of the Vatican, and excellent opportunities to sound influential quarters for expressions of opinion as the times have changed, make it possible for M. Carrère to write fully, if now and then tediously, upon the still unsolved question of the Pope's temporal power. Though written first of all for a French audience, American Catholics who wish to watch the development of the international affairs of the Holy See will find this book of interest. It is not, however, fully abreast of the times, as events since the latter months of 1923 find no mention.

The Kasidah, by Sir Richard Burton. Illustrated by John Kettelwell. New York: Brentano's, 1926. $2.00.

THIS is the first inexpensive edition of the longish reflective poem which Sir Richard Burton amused himself by writing in his intervals of leisure on his return from Mekka in 1854. By composing it five years before the appearance of Fitzgerald's Omar, Burton anticipated any charge of imitation, and indeed, similar as the Kasidah is to the tentmaker's Rubaiyat in philosophy, it is too remote from it in style to make any such anticipation necessary. Burton's atheism was in itself as weighty as Fitzgerald's, and his epicureanism as thoroughgoing, but he was not a poet and Fitzgerald was, and that difference tells the whole critical story of the two poems as poems. The Kasidah is too commonplace in style ever to give a reader the specific thrill of poetry, - 'Yet ah! that spring should vanish with the rose!' - but it is nevertheless the work of an extremely interesting man, and commands a certain attention simply as such. Fundamentalists are not advised to invest.

AFTER THE STRIKE IS OVER

MIDDLE- and upper-class England emerged from the general strike with an enlarged bump of self-complacency and immense admiration for Mr. Baldwin. Even journals politically opposed to the Premier hailed his attitude throughout the conflict, and above all immediately after its conclusion, with acclamation. The Liberal Nation and Athenæum said that Mr. Baldwin had 'consolidated his position as the most universally popular Prime Minister in British history,' and assured its readers that 'the spectacle of Mr. Baldwin wearing laurels is in no way disagreeable to us.' This did not prevent its picking flaws in the Government's handling of the strike and the settlement, but it represented a great concession from the organ of an Opposition Party. The Conservative Saturday Review spoke more in character when it asserted that 'the strike has greatly enhanced Mr. Baldwin's reputation and made his position in the Party impregnable.' Borrowing its figure from the cricket field, the Out

look, a paper of kindred sympathies, declared: 'Mr. Baldwin, by common consent, hardly made a mistake; he batted evenly on a fiery wicket, and was not out at the close'; and added more soberly elsewhere: 'Out of all this chaos the man who emerges with the most enhanced reputation is the Prime Minister. Mr. Baldwin has deserved well of the nation. Through the almost intolerable strain and stress of the last three weeks, he has kept both his head and his temper, and in doing so he has enabled the nation to do likewise.'

The New Statesman characterized the beginning of the strike as a victory of a Cabinet 'War Party,' headed by Mr. Winston Churchill, over the Prime Minister and Lord Birkenhead, who were fighting desperately for peace. The Premier 'was faced with the immediate resignation of seven of his colleagues, Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Bridgeman, Amery, “Jix,” Cunliffe-Lister, and one other of whose identity we are not sure,' — and finally yielded to the majority. 'He ought not to have given way, of course,

an utterly exhausted man who, having fought the trade-unions for days and nights, found himself called upon at the last moment to fight his own colleagues.' At any rate, the Prime Minister quickly recovered his footing, so that when the strike ended 'Mr. Baldwin had regained control of his Cabinet and had acquired so enormous a personal popularity in the country that he could afford to let all his colleagues resign if they wanted to. He took charge of affairs without consulting anybody, and without any Cabinet authorization - which would certainly not have been forthcoming from the fight-to-a-finish section - he declared peace and insisted upon peace.' Most laudatory of all, however, was the Spectator, which declared jubilantly that the one fact in regard to which all men were agreed was the preeminence of Mr. Baldwin. 'Without any calculation, without any ambitious intent, without any effort of selfcentred will, he has leapt into a position or rather the British people have taken him upon their shoulders and lifted him into a position - such as no Prime Minister has occupied since the days of William Pitt..

Mr. Baldwin, in his short civil war, like Lincoln in the three years' agony of the American Republic, had a double allegiance to fulfill his allegiance to the country as a whole, and his allegiance to his own side and his principles.' A contributor wrote elsewhere in the same journal: 'It is clearly the Prime Minister first, the rest nowhere. Mr. Baldwin has gone from strength to strength. England has found in him her Abraham Lincoln. An infinite patience, a perfect courage, a calm and steadiness quite complete - here withhere without hyperbole and exaggeration was a "pilot who weathered the storm."'

England's self-complacency, which

was rather whimsically focused on the humorous good-nature with which the people as a whole encountered a tremendous domestic crisis. Never was the nation's faith in democracy shaken for a single moment. Never was there an instant's praying for a Mussolini. Several references were made to the fact that more blood was shed and more people were arrested in Paris during the Royalist riots on Jeanne d'Arc Day, which occurred almost simultaneously with the climax of the strike in England, 'than in the whole of Great Britain.' Although the offices of the Daily Mail, the most belligerently antiLabor newspaper of the moment, and those of the British Worker, the fiery champion of the trade-unions, were only a few doors apart, and immense crowds gathered outside their buildings to watch their operations, the people 'were as peaceable as lambs.' In Wellington Street, where the British Gazette-the Government's provocative news-sheet was published, other crowds gathered regularly and watched the volunteers bringing in huge rolls of paper for the presses and hurrying away with the truckloads of printed papers. Here likewise 'there were hoots, of course; there was quite an amount of jeering and comic advice to those who were carting and shifting the paper. But there was never the slightest hint of an ugly situation.'

Again, the buses whose windows had been smashed when passing through some of the rougher quarters of the city ran thereafter with the empty frames boarded over and chalked announcements printed on them, such as 'Emergency Exit,' or 'Aerated Bus Company' - a play upon the Aerated Bread Company's chain restaurants all over London. The special constables, of course, received their share of spoofing. One of them, who bore down

upon a child pushing a small wheelbarrow on the sidewalk and ordered him to join the rest of the traffic in the roadway, was greeted with the retort: 'Garn awye! I seen a real 'un.'

Our own Will Rogers, who chanced to be in London, said in an interview to the Daily Mail: "The longer the strike, the calmer grew the calm. I got excited following your calm up. The calmer you got, the more excited I got. The strikers I found to be patriotic Englishmen, as unwilling for disorder as any.'

Of course, this struggle, like every such conflict, had its pathetic or appealing aspects. Some of these were recorded by Evelyn Sharp in a 'Diary of the Strike' published in the New Leader, a Labor weekly. Such was the account of over sixty railmen known to one of the writer's friends, whose pensions were due to begin the following month, but who 'risked everything and came out "to stand by the miners"

this in pleasing contrast to the schoolboys of the middle class, who seemed to have invaded London in their best clothes in order to rush around in other people's motor cars.' The strikers simply derided the precautions of the Government, as when one open-air speaker, pointing to the

barricades erected around the Smithfield Market, described them to his hearers as 'not to keep you and me from looting the meat, comrades, but to keep the sausages from running away.' Among the amusing contrasts was a line of empty lorries escorted by police entering the market just when a man emerged pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with sides of beef and trundled his cargo down the street to his shop, unguarded and unmolested. Witness, also, the following entry from this diary:

Sunday, May 9. This morning early, a lorry full of 'specials,' under an inspector, arrived at a spot in a strike area where tram

lines were being repaired, and proceeded to remove loose rails and heaps of stones. The inspector explained to a bystander that this was being done for fear of their being used as -preweapons. The strikers who looked on sumably the people who would wield the weapons but for the wise forethought of our rulers hugely enjoyed the spectacle of these amateur navvies, who must have resembled Walter Crane's pictures of the horny-handed, except that, according to my informant, they wore gloves. A church in the same neighborhood was crammed to overflowing, this evening, with strikers and their families. The Socialist vicar preached magnificently about God and Mammon; and a Litany of Intercession for everybody, including strikers, employers, and police, was responded to with commendable impartiality, I thought, under the circum

stances.

We are forced to form our opinion of the termination of the strike principally from sources unsympathetic to its leaders. The Saturday Review thus summarizes the reasons which decided the Trades Union Council to end the battle with dramatic suddenness. 'Justice Astbury's judgment weighed heavily with them, and, together with Sir John Simon's speech, made them fear legal action for damages. Equally operative in helping them to a decision was consideration of the consequences of calling up their "second line." Either there would have been a poor response, and the movement would have cracked, or there would have been a solid response, in which case the consequences might have been appalling. For the second line included postal, telegraph, and telephone hands, and power and light workers, and without any of these services the country would indeed have been plunged in chaos.' The Spectator characterized the official report of the visit at which the Labor leaders surrendered to the Premier as 'strangely interesting reading.' 'The Prime Minister did not beat