i8 
LAND & WATER 
Books to Read 
By Lucien Oldcrshaw 
Uctober 12, 1910 
SOME impatient critics have been worrying them- 
selves, ahnost from the beginning of tlie war, 
about its effect on our Htcrature. Sucli specula- 
tion is even more premature than peace talk. 
Tiie national spirit is at the moment expressing itself 
in action. That such action will express itself in a litera- 
ture worthy of it, it were as faithless to doubt as to doubt 
of final victory. For those who read the signs aright we 
have as abundant evidence of the former as of the latter, 
but to expect the full epic of achievement now is like 
reckoning the spirits of victory before victory has been 
won. Meanwhile we are concerned with the songs that 
cheer us on our way, the literary recreation of a nation 
in arms and the spade work of those whom years or 
other considerations ha\'e withdrawn from active par- 
ticipation in the strife but who are preparing the foimda- 
tions for the reconstruction that must follow this debacle 
of civilisation. Such books are being abundantly pub- 
lished and are being eagerly read. 
***** 
What English literature has lost by the war is more 
obvious at the moment than what it has gained. The 
credit side of the account is not yet opened, but the 
debit side contain the names of Rupert Brooke, the poet, 
and Harold Chapin, the dramatist. It is impossible 
in reading of the death of those two gallant young men 
to avoid some such feeling as Mr. William Archer had 
on witnessing the memorial performance of Chapin's one- 
act plays. "It filled me with a sort of dumb rage to 
think tiiat such rare promise had been extinguished, on 
the threshold of fulfilment, by the brute hazard of the 
battlefield." And yet . . I have been reading Harold 
Chapin's War Letters, just published by Mr. John Lane 
(5s. net.), and I fancy that he would have agreed that 
there is more gain than loss in such a. glorious death. 
***** 
Harold Chapin the " American citizen who died for 
England at Loos on September 26th, 1915," has left a 
literary memorial in his plays, especially in those 
plays, such as " It's the Poor that 'Elps the Poor," in 
which he shewed singular power of understanding and 
sympathy wholly cleac of sentimentality. But this 
personal memorial of his war-letters, chiefly addressed 
to his mother, his wife and his little son, was quite worth 
while. We are not ashamed, as we might have been 
before the war, to be admitted to such intimacies as these, 
and it is an education to get to know this man in such 
an environment, to share his keen interest in his training 
as a private in the R.A.M.C, and to follow him to France, 
always intent on the service he was giving and the cause 
he had at heart, to the end on the fateful battlefield of 
Loos. Such letters have on the personal side a cumula- 
tive effect which cannot be reproduced in extracts, but 
here are two pieces of advice to his people at home, con- 
stantly repeated in different forms, which show Chapin's 
insight into the situation as it was in the summer of 
.i<)i5. " Don't listen to peace talk yet, discourage it if 
j'ou can. Nothing makes us madder out here. . . . 
No peace until we are on top please." " I hope you are 
giving up all subscribing to charities and buying War 
Loan instead. I'm sick of these charities. . . . They 
aim — feebly at making war endurable. The War Loan 
is to end it. Subscribe to that and nothing else. It's 
the only thing that'll be any use." 
***** 
No peace talk even yet ! But that is not to say that 
W(! should not be prepared when peace-talk comes. 
When our plenipotentiaries travel congress-wards they 
will no doubt carry in their baggage a copy of Col. Sir 
Thomas H. Holdich's valuable work, Political Fron- 
tiers and Boundary Makini^ " (Macmillan and Co., los.). 
I would say just that they also might make it part of 
their mental equipment beforehand and in order to do 
so might remedy the one defect of the book by making an 
index for it. Sir Thomas has probably had more ex- 
pt^rience of boundary and other geographical commis- 
sion^ than any nian living, and his practical work has 
extended from the Afghan frontier in the East to the 
Argjntine-Chile boundary in the West. His work is 
therefore not merely theoretical. He deals with the 
demarcation as well as the definition or delimitations of 
a boundary and is able to show how vague and careless 
delimitation may hamper the work of demarcation and 
how most frontier disputes have arisen during the latter 
stage of boundary-making owing to uninstructed work in 
the preliminary stage. Even on such hackneyed subjects 
as that of sea-frontiers he has fresh and illuminating \iews 
and his book is as valuable for the student of historical 
geography as for the practical statesman. The out- 
standing moral of his book for the latter is that a bound- 
ary should be where possible a barrier and, though he 
does not at all neglect ethnographical and political con- 
•siderations, he lays a particular stress which is worth 
consideration at this moment on the geographical asp* ct 
of the problem. Thus in a valuable chapter on the 
general problems of frontier making, he urges in con- 
clusion : " If political considerations which embody 
the various factors which make up the people's will are 
comparatively weak, then let us have a frontief which 
can claim the merit of being geographically strong." 
If we seek relaxation from the more poignant aspects 
of the war and the problems of after the war that refuse 
entirely to look after themselves, we shall find many good 
novels with which to entertain ourselves. Everyone at 
the moment is reading, or has read, Mr. Britling Sees It 
Through (Cassell and Co., 6s.), in which Mr. H. G. 
Wells describes a middle-class Englishman caught in the 
whirlpool of the war. It is certainly an astonishingly 
faitliful picture of what we have all seen and experienced 
during the past two years, written with that detached 
power of observation that is one of its author's most 
uncanny qiiahties. I do not know that it is altogether 
a relaxation to read such a book, but it is wonderfully 
and fearfully clever. I have got more enjoyment and 
more inspiration from the less able but still very promis- 
ing book of a new novelist writer, an old and familiar 
name. I refer to The Machine by Mr. Hugh F. Spender 
(Eveleigh Nash, 5s. net.) 
♦ ♦ Sj! ♦ ♦ 
Mr. Spender here gives us a study of a j'oung man of 
the new generation from.Oxford who, gradually awakening 
to the humbug, as he finds it, of party politics before the 
war is completely roused and left wide awake and dis- 
illusioned when the clash of arms comes. There are 
marks of the prentice hand in the book, but it is an honest 
and shrewd and, what is more important in a novel, an 
interesting piece of work. Another Oxford novel which 
I have enjoyed, though I approached it with misgiving 
and reluctance, is Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Lady 
Connie. Most novels of undergraduate life at Oxford are 
unsatisfactory, chiefly because their authors take imder- 
graduates as seriously as they take themselves, ai\d 
tr^at them as the men of the world they are only playing 
at being. Verdant Green is still the most perfect 
picture of University life, with ))erhaps some chapters of 
Henry Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn, and Mr. E. F. 
Benson's, The Babe, B.A. as valuable appendices. 
Mrs. Humphrey Ward has remarkable gifts of familiarising 
certain kinds of social atmosphere and some parts of her 
picture of Oxford in the now remote daj's when North 
Oxford and the married Don were first beginning 
to transform University society are remarkably life- 
like. But her undergraduates, especially her Ouida-osque 
hero, " strong, clamant, self-centred, arrogant, deter- 
mined," and her lively episode of the ducking in a thinly 
disguised " Mercury," belong to the regions of pure 
imagination. From the point of view of a good story, 
however, this does not matter, and Mrs. Ward's book may 
be recommended for similar reasons to that of the tea 
which recalls " the delicious China blends of thirty years 
ago." It makes one yoimg again to read this tale of 
highly artificial passion transformed into something very 
like reality by a highly accomplished story teller. 
