Swinburne, by Harold Nicolson. New English Men of Letters series. London and New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.25.

[Sir Edmund Gosse in the Sunday Times] Ir gives me no trouble to say without reserve that Mr. Nicolson has penetrated further into the mental constitution of the poet than any of us, his elders, who lived in the clash and flash of the phenomenon, were able to do. The paradox of criticism at the present moment is that certain productions in prose and verse that we looked upon fifty years ago as 'the most exciting thing that ever happened' appear to some members of the youthful generation 'almost unutterably dull.'

That Swinburne could ever be regarded as dull would in 1866 have sounded not more possible than that all the waters of the world should run dry. But the inconceivable has happened. There are large tracts of Swinburne that are like those rich Dutch pastures that the sea has overdriven they lie knee-deep in sand for ever and ever. I am myself guilty of some apostasy. I shall not be accused of insensibility to the magic of my friend when I frankly admit that the thought of reading 'A Midsummer Holiday' over again makes me physically faint. What has happened is that, while the elect have obstinately refused to admit the existence of these sandswept provinces, the outsiders have felt free to deny that the oases exist. Mr. Harold Nicolson now comes forward, with his delicately sane and ironic analysis, and justifies both convictions. Swinburne was an enchanting musician, and yet his performance could be as tiresome as that of a cow wailing for her lost calf.

In the process of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, Mr. Nicolson gives reasons for several innovations. He offers The Queen Mother a prominence it has never held before; he defends, examines, and explains Atalanta in Calydon with unprecedented fullness; and he gives great importance to the second Poems and Ballads. On the other hand, he ridicules the vast and cumbrous drama of Bothwell, differentiates sharply between the good and the bad in Songs before Sunrise, and, what will be found most surprising, relegates Poems and Ballads: First Series, on which the faith of the elders has been most passionately founded, to a relatively low position among its author's works. He thinks little of

Chastelard and less of "Tristram of Lyonesse,' while recognizing in them elements of permanent value. But in the 1866 volume he finds little that he thinks will retain respect, and this is perhaps the most questionable feature of his criticism That I should have lived to hear an admirer of Swinburne declare 'Dolores' and 'Hesperia' and 'Erotion' to be entirely devoid of 'durable interest'! These are indeed the whirligigs of fashion, but the worst whirligig of all is that I have to confess myself partly converted to Mr. Nicolson's opinion. Perhaps, however, in his revolt against these experiments, he hardly appreciates the technical beauty of the best of them, the way in which metre and verbiage and illustration are concentrated in a perfection of stimulus, as though a soda-water siphon should inconceivably spout flaming brandy. I think that Mr. Nicolson will revise the opinion that 'Dolores' is nothing but 'sadistic jingle,' but on the whole I am not prepared to defend very fiercely the poems we used to think so impassioned.

I should give a false idea of Mr. Nicolson's book if I represented it as destructive to the poet's reputation. On the contrary, its main feature of novelty is the firmness with which it divides the good from the bad, vigorously sweeping out of the field what is immaterial and selfimitative, concentrating attention on what is really important. To Mr. Nicolson, as much as to the early infatuated admirers, Swinburne is a man of letters of the highest importance, one of the great English poets of established and perennial fame. What, however, he aims at doing, and does with the exercise of an almost frigid irony, is to limit our approval to what is really first-rate, and to acknowledge with unprecedented candor that a great deal of what Swinburne published is third-rate or of no rate at all.

Some New Letters and Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Sanki Ichikawa. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1926. 3 yen.

[Edmund Blunden in the Japan Advertiser]

In the latest volume - if one is safe in calling any volume on Hearn 'the latest' - Professor Sanki Ichikawa, the philologist of Tokyo Imperial University, supplements the collection of Japanese Letters made by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetwors) and published in 1910. That collection includes principally the weightier and

showier correspondence of Hearn in Japan. Professor Ichikawa's gleanings are largely of a lighter kind, unconsidered trifles, notes, and brevities. One large collection now printed was addressed to Mr. Sentaro Nishida, who was a colleague of Hearn at Matsue and assisted him in many matters. These letters eighty-three in all- are simple in style, and usually insignificant in subject. Absences from school and the reasons, the 'exceptional' weather, likings for this or that master, distaste for somebody else, it is too kind of you' or 'it would be kind of you,' why people have red noses, what the new shoji cost these are some of the usual topics. Now and then, however, Hearn becomes drastic and releases a lively opinion, which is welcome to the reader of the book, even though it may annoy him violently. 'I want to see the military party in supreme power,' Hearn declares. Or, "There is not one Christian in the school. Of this I am only too glad.' Sometimes he is more tolerable in these moments of self-expression. 'After having been five years in Japan I confess I still cannot understand the Japanese at all; and you must have found many misapprehensions in what I write. Yet I am a writer and observer by profession.'

There is more spirit in the other extensive group of letters now brought to light the sixty or seventy written to Mr. Masanobu Otani, who was employed by Hearn to gather and supply facts on Japanese questions. Here Hearn says what he means with a precision and emphasis amounting to plain English-for example, ‘In short, you will have to write for me twelve or thirteen articles a year, some of which will require research, — under these conditions: No article, no money.' This is the good old way, and not the 'nice, good' style into which Hearn so often slides. One thinks of Byron's letters to his publisher for an instant; this, however, is too mighty an association for Hearn's epistolary work as a whole, and, despite a few vivacious paragraphs, even these letters to Mr. Otani are altogether only valuable to Hearn's most indefatigable 'fans.'

The Plough and the Stars: A Tragedy in Four
Acts, by Sean O'Casey. London and New
York: The Macmillan Company. $1.50.
[Morning Post]

The Plough and the Stars is concerned with the Easter Rebellion of 1916; and it is written with a familiar understanding of one who must have been concerned in that dire event. That the play should have been resented by a section of

the Dublin audience is not to be wondered at; for it is unsparing in its fidelity to truth. It is not written as a satire, but it becomes a satire simply by presenting things as they are in contrast with current high-flown pretenses. Exaggeration would make it a comedy; the absence of exaggeration leaves it a tragedy. And it will be just as moving when the memories of 1916, and the passions that were involved in the rebellion, are dead.

The Question Mark, by M. Jaeger. London and New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.00.

[The Nation and the Athenæum]

IN The Question Mark Miss Jaeger, a new but accomplished writer, relates how a bank clerk called Guy Martin is translated into London in the twenty-second century, and how he finds there the conventional Utopia compounded of green fields, silent airplanes, coupons, and a communal food supply. The machinery that runs this world is only vaguely sketched, with an assurance that it is foolproof and practically self-working; and the interest centres rather in psychological reactions to such a smoothly ordered world. For Guy soon discovers that Futuria is not Utopian in any but material affairs, being distressed by a new human problem: how to dispose of the leisure bestowed by prosperity - how to sublimate the energy that we dissipate to-day in keeping the wolf from the door. He finds that the Anglo-Utopians are split on this issue into two widely divergent types, called Normals and Intellectuals, and that poverty has been transferred from the economic to the mental plane. The Intellectuals find content in research, creation, and unhampered love; but the Normals can only work off their chronic excitement in exaggerated athleticism, extravagant fashions, and various sorts of emotional excess. This book is a disquieting, but wholesome, contribution to prospective history.

BOOKS MENTIONED

DUNSANY, LORD. The Charwoman's Shadow. London: Putnam's, 1926, 7s. 6d. A Dreamer's Tales. New York: The Modern Library, 95c. The King of Elfland's Daughter. New York: Putnam's, 1925, $2.00.

Oxford Book of English Prose. Chosen and edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. New York: Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1925. $3.75.

Royal Highness, by Thomas Mann. Translated by A. Cecil Curtis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50.

IT is no easy lot to be born of royal blood. It means a lonely life, a life of pomp and artificial splendor in which one must not taste the wine or smell the roses. It is a lofty calling. Such is the burden of this novel, told with a wealth of descriptive details and of carefully chosen incidents that make the picture complete. Out of it emerges the Prince, naïve, charming, and occasionally pathetic. He is drawn with a temperate realism that happily avoids the excesses to which psychological impressionism has carried so many modern writers. There is nothing unusual about the plot - but then it is doubtful whether there are any new plots under the sun. One regrets that the American dollar cannot be for Europe what it is for this story, the deus ex machina that brings a happy dénouement. But money cures no ills unless used properly, and European budgets are not encouraging in this respect. Implicit in the gift that was Imma Spoelmann's dowry is the guiding genius of her father's business acumen. Only this could make the gift of any permanent value. However hard his lot, the Prince is at least highly fortunate in a marriage that brings him beauty, wealth, and wisdom, the three cardinal requisites of royalty.

Beatrice, by Arthur Schnitzler. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926. $1.50.

To the numerous readers who delighted in Fräulein Else the publication in America of Schnitzler's Beatrice will bring renewed admiration of the author. Although the method that Schnitzler uses in presenting the soul of his heroine, Beatrice, is not quite as photographic as that used in Fräulein Else, it will to many seem more artistic. Schnitzler shows us a woman confronted by the problem how to save her son from the wiles of an adventurous baroness. The treatment of mother love is so entirely different from that of Mary Carr and D. W. Griffith that one hardly recognizes it as the same emotion. Schnitzler presents a situation of frank sentiment that rarely if ever slops over into sentimentalism. The book has many qualities that one finds in a Dostoevskii

novel. But Schnitzler has the great wisdom to make his book no longer than is absolutely necessary. In Beatrice he once more shows himself to be one of the few really important contemporary writers. Among the many psychological novelists there is, perhaps, none other who quite so skillfully avoids the professional affectation so very blatant in 'human documents.'

Swinburne, by Harold Nicolson. English Men of Letters series. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.25.

THE new English Men of Letters series, under the editorship of J. C. Squire, has started off promisingly with this volume on Swinburne. The author of a searching and subtle study of Tennyson, Mr. Nicolson has both the psychological insight and the complementary literary knowledge to write well of Swinburne. It is on the psychological rather than on the critical side that this book is chiefly interesting. Perhaps there is not much more to be said at this moment about Swinburne as a writer, and what Mr. Nicolson does say is on the whole just and discreet. One may quarrel with his judgment of particular poems, of 'Anactoria,' for example,

- but scarcely with his general estimate. His ' analysis' of Swinburne as a man is the real contribution of the book: no one has yet stated so clearly the basic conflict in Swinburne's personality between his impulse to self-assertion and his impulse to self-abnegation, or shown so conclusively the effect this conflict had on his work.

Who's Who in China, edited by M. C. Powell. Third edition. Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925. $8 Mexican.

THIS Octavo volume of more than a thousand pages, and containing well toward half that number of biographies of prominent living Chinamen, is an unusually valuable and timely contribution to our knowledge of Oriental affairs. An appendix contains a directory of American returned students, which, while presumably not complete, presents an impressive picture of the part the United States has played in China's recent cultural changes.

Now that the British general strike, into which the country seems to have muddled rather than plunged, and which both parties have conducted with an eye on the next general election as well as the immediate industrial issue, has dwindled to a prosaic medley of dispersed negotiations between employers and workers, the Transatlantic world has returned to its chronic preoccupation with currency crises at home and trade problems abroad. Economics is trumps at the European card table, although unruly, unpredictable, and apparently irrational emotional impulses continue to unsettle both domestic and foreign politics. Rather broad hints have appeared in English journals, as well as in our cable dispatches, to the effect that the British strike was precipitated by a flash of temper at the midnight meeting of the Cabinet, whose members grew impatient at the time taken by the Labor representatives to agree upon the precise wording of a formula already accepted in principle, and resented the snap strike, unauthorized by the tradeunion leaders, that occurred at the

Daily Mail office. Mr. Luther's Cabinet has been overthrown in Germany over what seems to an outsider a largely sentimental question as to what colors shall fly over German consulates. Pilsudski's last adventure in Poland, though ultimately due to deeper causes, was probably prompted by personal piques and jealousies. Italian Fascism seems to be largely an emotional phenomenon, and France and Spain would hardly be fighting in the Rif if questions of prestige, rather than more substantial issues, were not at stake there.

Nevertheless, Europe's economic rehabilitation is her first and foremost concern. Late in April a committee of experts appointed by the League of Nations met in Geneva to prepare the way for a world economic conference. Such gatherings are principally opinion-making affairs, to be sure, but then opinion is something in the world. Two basic questions will come before the proposed conference the control and allotment of raw materials in the international market, and the removal of artificial trade barriers between na

tions. The policy of self-sufficiency, of restricting trade with one's neighbors, which was in such high repute immediately after the war, has admittedly broken down in Europe. A Continental Customs Union is not yet an actual issue, but the pendulum of business and political opinion abroad is beginning to swing toward freer trade, after its recent plunge in the ultra-protectionist direction. Professor Cassel, the Swedish economist, argues in a widely quoted article: 'Countries have suffered from depression and unemployment and have done everything in their power to protect themselves against foreign competition, with the result that depression has become still worse, whereupon new protective measures have been resorted to. . . . People now begin to see the necessity of military disarmament, but equally urgent is disarmament in international trade policy.' England, of course, has been groping, though cautiously and deviously, toward a new protection, but if British wages are to be lowered and that seems to be in the air after the strike the country's fiscal policies must aim to make the cost of living as low as possible.

At the conference which it is proposed to hold, Italy, backed by other countries that are short on raw materials and colonies, will doubtless plead for compulsory world distribution of raw materials. Even nations well endowed with natural resources, like the United States, experience unpleasant scarcities at times, as we have witnessed recently in case of rubber, nitrates, and other essential industrial commodities. Through its appellate jurisdiction over the mandated territories, the League exercises some concrete authority here; and should Germany become a member, additional weight may be thrown into the scales in favor of far-reaching arrangements for

the international allotment of certain colonial commodities.

But the most spectacular economic issue facing Europe at the moment is the currency collapse in France, Belgium, Poland, several of the newer and smaller States, less markedly in Italy, Italy, and somewhat disguised in Russia. The tumbling of francs, lire, zloty, chervontsy, dinars, and the rest, can be explained by a dozen causes, but the most popular one abroad, and therefore the most important psychologically, is Uncle Sam's insistence upon collecting what Europe owes him. Auguste Gauvain, editor of Journal des Débats, puts this argument in a nutshell. After explaining that England is obliged to exact enough from her debtors to pay her obligations to America, he exclaims: "To the United States, therefore, flow all the gold and bills of exchange of Europe-in other words, the products of the labor of Europe's workers. Victors and vanquished have become tributaries to America, who is the only beneficiary of the war. The collapse of the French and the Belgian francs within the past few days is the result of England's violent struggle to keep the sovereign on a par with the dollar. Struck to the very heart of her economic life by a general strike of revolutionary intention, Great Britain has been able to keep the pound at par only by buying dollars with her francs and her lire. That is why, contrary to the general prediction of the exchanges, the agreement between Beranger and Mellon at Washington has not steadied the franc, any more than the settlement of the Belgian debt to the United States and the stabilization of the franc of that country has prevented her money from falling. The dollar is king.'

This is not the universal opinion, however. The London Statist analyzes the setbacks to currency reconstruction in France, Belgium, Poland, and