Review of Reviews, 2012/96. 



The Reviews Reviewed. 



91 



THE NATIONAL REVIEW. 



The principal articles in the National Review hav- 

 ing been noticed elsewhere, there remain an amusing 

 article on " The Humours of Parish Visiting," by a 

 country clergyman in the North of England apparently, 

 who advises young clergymen to note down the good 

 things which occur in their everyday life, and thus 

 preserve them; a collection of "thoughts" by the 

 Queen of Roumania, with some of which it is hard to 

 agree, though others are good aphorisms; and Mr. A. 

 Maurice Low's discussion of American affairs, in which 

 he bears out a writer in Blackwood's as to the thor- 

 ough arousing of the American people ta the dangers 

 of bossism. Books and articles of all sorts exposing 

 fraud in high places have been eagerly devoured, in- 

 stead of, as at one time, contemned and spat upon. 

 If, he says, the American people have at last really 

 come to see the dangers of their political system, and 

 to make bossism in the future impossible, we are 

 about to have a new Declaration of Independence, 

 and the 1908 Presidential election will mean more 

 than any preceding one. Without saying that Presi- 

 dent Roosevelt is losing his popularity, Mr. Low thinks 

 that his popularity rests on an insecure foundation, 

 and that men will now probably be asking themselves 

 whether it is entirely justified. 



In his article on " The Uses of History." originally 

 delivered before the Students' Historical Society of 

 Edinburgh, Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey cautions us against 

 allowing ourselves to be " history-ridden," leaning on 

 historical precedents so much as never to dare to make 

 a forward move lest someone should be able to prove 

 that some State had tried the same thing in the past 

 and failed. One great use of history is to prevent us 

 falling victims to pessimism. " Could anything be 

 more pessimistic than the picture of England which 

 Wordsworth drew . . . three years before Trafalgar?" 



sonation of Mammon seated upon huge money-bags and 

 adored by crowds of prostrate worshippers, is much 

 more effective. The Anna, evidently bent on rousing 

 the American conscience to the enormities practised by 

 monopolies, drives home its Collectivist policy. 



THE ARENA. 



The December number is above the average. Mr. 

 Frank Vrooman's story of the U.S. Agricultural De- 

 partment has been retold elsewhere. The President of 

 Ruskin University. Mr. George McA. Miller, contri- 

 butes a suggestive study of the Economics of Moses, 

 and shows how the Jewish law dealt with the peren- 

 nial problem of land and tools. The worker was to be 

 expropriated from neither tools nor land. Theodore 

 Shroeder states his evolution of marriage ideals. He 

 glories in the freedom of Greece. According to his 

 account, the nameless vice in which Plato indulged 

 made him a misogynist, and his misogyny was baptised 

 with religious authority by the Christian religion, 

 which became the frenzy of monasticisni. and led to 

 the complete subjection of woman as a chattel slave. 

 Through the influence of Plato's sexual inversion, de- 

 stroyed motherhood as a right and made it a duty. 

 The practical outcome of this somewhat imaginative 

 rendering of history is a plea for the economic inde- 

 pendence of woman, and a legalised, easy-dissoluble 

 monogamy. F. M. Nba tells the story of General San 

 Martin, the Washington of South America. Mr. 

 Flower illustrates the achievements of De Mar, a 

 cartoonist of contemporaneous history, samples of 

 whose genius are given. The battle with monopoly is 

 carried on vigorously in papers on the reign of Graft 

 in Milwaukee and on the economic struggle in Colo- 

 rado, as well as in fiction. A ediastlv picture of the 

 modern crucifixion represents Uncle Sam stretched 

 upon a cross of "corporations and trusts." with the 

 Stars and Stripes as loincloth, the Constitution of the 

 United States impaled as superscription, etc. The 

 effect will repel rather than attract religious feeling. 

 The sum-worshippers, representing a. porcine iniper- 



THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW. 



Tin* Independent "Review for January is chiefly not- 

 able for Sir Thomas Barclay's warning to our anti- 

 Germans that, if they wish to be friends with France, 

 they must be friends with Germany ; and for the two 

 papers on State preparation for motherhood, all notic- 

 ed separately. 



CHESTERTON ON SHAW. 



Mr. G. K. Chesterton's note on Mr. Bernard Shaw 

 concludes with the following interesting comparison 

 with Tolstoy. He says: — 



Perhaps the best way of noting 1 the fundamental fallacy 

 in Mr. Shaw's intellectual Puritanism may be found if 

 we compare him with Tolstoy. The difference, of course, 

 is obvious. Tolstoy says that certain things should not 

 exist; Shaw merely that they should not be idealised. A 

 story like " Peace and War " says in effect : " Have no ar- 

 mies." A play like "Arms and the Man" says in effect: 

 " Have armies, but do not admire them." A story like The 

 Kreutzer Sonata," sa.vs in effect: " Have no sexual love." A 

 play like " The Philanderer " says in effe'-' " Have love, but 

 not romantic love. Have love, but do nox, love it." Tolstoy 

 takes war and love, and openly demands that they should 

 be destroyed. Shaw is more modest, and is quite content 

 if they are desecrated. But the profound practical weak- 

 ness which runs through the whole of his practical philo- 

 sophy is simply this: that if these things are to be real 

 at all, they must be romantic. An unromantic lover would 

 simply cease to be a lover; a perfectly reasonable soldier 

 would simply run away. If we are really going to abolish 

 the poetry of these things witli Mr. Shaw, we should be 

 infinitely more practical if we went the full length of 

 Tolstoy, and abolished the things themselves. But all tin-; 

 is only a part of that weird austerity and perfection of 

 Mr. Shaw's mind, of which I spoke at the beginning. In 

 his diet, he is too healthy for this world. In his politics, 

 he is too practical for this world. 



A CRITICISM OF SWINBURNE. 

 C. C. Michaelides writes on Mr. Swinburne and the 

 sea. His general criticism runs as follows : — 



In England Mr. Swinburne lias conspicuously accustomed 

 us to a swirl of words, whose distinctness is eclipsed by 

 impetuous metre, and whose primitive sense is often drown- 

 ed in the sonority of their various and splendid melody. 



The predominance of his feeling for rhythm of form, and, 

 correlatively. for flux and reflux as images of life, has 

 made his command of passing sensations more conspicuous 

 than the fixity of his thought. And, at times, both sen- 

 sation and thought are marred by blind passion, till 

 meaning and truth are lost in strained violence. He has 

 little power of dealing with the complexities of life, except 

 as nature reflects his own moods: the facts resist his in- 

 tensely personal tendency to curb them to his emphatic 

 sense of rhythm, till his verse is, so to speak, driven at a 

 tangent to the stubborn rook of actuality, and spends itself 

 in a dithyramb of empty images. 



oTHKl! ARTICLES. 

 E. D. Morel, writing on the Congo problem, traces 

 tho responsibility for all the horrors to the King of 

 the Belgians. He insists that the European Powers 

 must intervene to relieve him of functions which he 

 has so hideously abused. He presses on England to 

 take the initiative. Mr. II. N. Brailsford argues that 

 the apparent coercion of the Sultan is really a vic- 

 tory of Turkish inaction. Europeans, he insists, must 

 wield executive authority over the gendarmerie, and 

 control the administration. The first miner, dealing 

 with the Government and its opportunities, gives a 

 fairly strong progressive programme, and insists. 

 "Capitalist demagogy can only be defeated by a 

 Genuine democracy that is led by clear thinkers. 'Let 

 Brain democratic he King of the Roost.' We are com- 

 ing out of the age of unconscious evolution into the 

 age of conscious race-building." 



