DISCOVERY 



93 



The author of this book has been successful in his 

 task, the heavy task of giving a clear and interesting 

 account of the chief events in the history' of Russia, from 

 the earliest times to the events of 1918, in a book of about 

 two hundred pages. His sources of information are 

 entirely Russian, drawn from the standard histories, 

 from newspapers and pamphlets, and from personal talk 

 with Russians during the war years, so that we get a 

 point of view expressed which is missing in many histories 

 and accounts of Russia. 



The larger portion of the book is devoted to the events 

 of the past twenty years, the troublous time of the late 

 Tsar, the Russo-Japanese War, the Great War, the 

 revolutionary movement, and the doings and misdeeds 

 of the Bolsheviks. Very interesting is the description 

 of how King Edward, by his tact and kindness, improved 

 the strained relations between Russia and ourselves 

 after the Japanese War. It is also pointed out what a 

 tragedy for Russia, as well as for ourselves, was the loss 

 of Lord Kitchener in the Hampshire. In the description 

 of the war and the revolutionary movement the author 

 is writing with first-hand knowledge, and one feels that 

 an accurate account is being given of much that has 

 hitherto been uncertain. 



The book is a plea for a sane interest in Russia. It 

 emphasises the fact that Russia is not just a political 

 problem, a country we praise to the heights one year, 

 and curse to the depths the next, but a country of Europe 

 with a language worth knowing, and a literature worth 

 reading, and a history and geography worth studying — 

 a big country in every way, whose present situation 

 and future possibilities deserve the attention of thinking 

 men. P. K. F. 



Poetry and Commonplace. By John Bailey. (Oxford 

 University Press, for British Academy, is. bd. 

 net.) 

 This is a quiet and pleasant essay, delivered to the 

 British Academy on November 26, 1919, on the rela- 

 tion of poetry to commonplace, using this word not 

 in the bad sense of what is " trite " and " obvious," 

 but in the better sense of " a great saying of universal 

 application." If poetry be granted to deal, above every- 

 thing else, with truth, then it must of course deal with 

 things which are most universal, which is precisely the 

 stuff of commonplace. The essayist points out that the 

 greatest poets are concerned not so much with creating 

 new ideas, and inventing new ways of expressing them- 

 selves, as in making poetry out of the things of ordinary 

 life, and out of truth which is old and known. They 

 have, of course, the power of invention, but side by side 

 with this, and of greater importance, is their power 

 of rediscovery. By rediscovery is meant not a new 

 I emphasis of the obvious, or an expatiation on a theme 

 'I with which everybody is familiar, but something which 

 I makes us see new truth and new beauty in old things, 

 and makes us not merely know these things, but have 

 ] that perception of them which Wordsworth called " the 

 ; breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." This relation 

 ] of poetry to commonplace is illustrated by examples 

 : from several of the great poets, especially by examples 

 from Wordsworth. Says the essayist, " He [Wordsworth] 

 lives to-day less by his original creative side, the side 

 ! of discovery sis I called it, than by his singular genius 

 > for rediscovery, by his gift for making the dry bones 

 of all sorts of commonplace live, the commonplaces of 

 life, of language, and of thought";" and again, "the 

 essential business of Wordsworth was to make a primrose 

 by a river's brim more than that to everyone who reads : 



to bring out the strangeness of the common, the interes- 

 tingness and newness and significance of the common- 

 place." 



The poetry of the Psalms, of Homer, Horace, Gray, 

 Meredith, Tennyson, and, coming to our own day, of 

 Mr. de la Mare, furnishes the essayist with further 

 illustrations of his theme. P. K. F. 



[CorU{nU£d on p. 94 



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CONGREGATION OF PLATO for the cultiva- 

 tion of the ancient virtues of Neoplatonism, and for the 

 development of a religion not in conflict with scientific 

 world-view. Lovers of Plato should send stamped 

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