Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

i

Certain books which have seemed not to drop naturally into the scheme of my other chapters are to be discussed in this; but that does not mean an entire lack of relation among them. I shall first say something about books dealing with Europe; then something about books on American subjects. Both these groups are mainly of an historical character. There will then remain for our attention a few books of a somewhat diverse but distinctive character.

Easily the most important of the European studies is promised in a two-volume work by the Earl of Birkenhead with the title, The Inner History of British Politics, 1906-1922, to appear early in 1925. The author first came to general attention as Frederick E. Smith, an Ulster lawyer. As Sir Frederick E. Smith he was Attorney-General under Mr. Lloyd George and later, as Viscount Birkenhead, he was Lord High Chancellor. When he retired from office with Lloyd George he was made an Earl. With Sir Andrew Carson, he was generally held to have been responsible for the gun-running in Ulster when an Irish civil war seemed in prospect in 1914; and he does not disclaim the rôle.[90] On this and other accounts he is in some quarters one of the best-hated men in British public life.

But he is also one of the most direct, uncompromising and candid. He is also much more open in his disillusion than most English public men have ventured to be—or actually were. None of the rosy colors of Mr. Lloyd George’s auroral intellect have any place in Birkenhead’s thinking. His literary style is the somewhat encumbered one of the lawyer; but if it is a little tortuous, it is precise, and leaves his meaning not vague. His “Inner History” of events between 1906 and 1922 will be most bitterly attacked, as biased, partial, misrepresentative of men and purposes. But the reader will do well to form his own judgment; and in any event it will be necessary to wring from the attacks, as you wring water from a cloth, the large amount of emotionalism with which they are certain to be saturated.

Birkenhead has, of course, certain advantages in preparing his work. Lloyd George has spoken in one book[91] and Asquith has given his account of the pre-war period.[92] Various other actors in the striking political events that began just before the Asquith Ministry and continued until Mr. Lloyd George’s defeat have been heard from. The material at Birkenhead’s disposal is far more complete than the record of history so entirely contemporary has ever been.

Arthur Hamilton Gibbs is a brother of Philip Gibbs and of Cosmo Hamilton.[93] At the beginning of the war he was just out of hospital and had gone home to England to recuperate his strength. He was under a strict injunction not to ride a horse for six months. In one month he had enlisted as a private in the British Army and was training as a cavalryman. After service in France he was commissioned, eventually becoming Major Gibbs. He also saw a long period of that morale-destroying inaction which was the lot of certain units sent to the Bulgarian front. His final period, in France, coincided with the great German drive of March, 1918.

Out of this experience he wrote a book, Gun Fodder, published in 1919, when the world, in sheer reaction, wouldn’t look at a war book. Yet Arthur Symons called Gun Fodder one of the six best books about the war. And people on this side, like Christopher Morley, who have a faculty for personally discovering the exceptional book, read it and talked about it. When Gun Fodder was republished this year (1924) it took its place as one of the very few books of war experience that will last—that have lasted—for more than the war’s own hour.

It is the only war book I shall bring to your notice; but there are one or two after-war books which deserve your attention. The Awakening of Italy: The Fascista Regeneration, by Luigi Villari, will of course actively interest those who may have read the chapter on Italy in Charles H. Sherrill’s The Purple or the Red[94] but many will go to it directly in an effort to grasp the significance of Mussolini and Fascism. They will find a singularly clear and even luminous account, as little encumbered with unfamiliar detail as a full account can be. But they will also find a story full of drama, yet told without any of the rhetoric or verbal excess and floridity which one might expect in a book on Italian politics written by an Italian. Villari is frankly an admirer and partisan of Fascism, and his opinion of Mussolini as a great leader is plain-spoken; but he is neither a mere enthusiast nor an indiscriminating historian. The defects of Fascism he records as he sees them. He does not contend that there are not grave problems ahead of Italy. But, as he says, “the mass of the people, both among the educated classes and the ignorant, are more interested in results than in theories, and no one who compares the state of Italy today with that of the days before Fascismo’s advent to power can for a moment deny the enormous improvement in every field. ‘Ora si vive,’ the people say, ‘mentre prima non si viveva piu.’ (‘Now we live, whereas before life was not possible.’)... One has the feeling that the country is really moving forward rapidly and surely, and shaking off the shackles of the bad traditions by which it had been bound for centuries.”

The Prime Ministry of Ramsay MacDonald in Great Britain makes particularly timely An Outline of the British Labor Movement, by Paul Blanshard. This is a short history, just what its title states, an “outline” conveying exactly what the American reader desires to know about the British Labor Party. The author is a young American with training in the field of social and political study. His book was written from material gained in England and its authenticity is attested in the introduction provided for it by Arthur Henderson, the Labor leader.

Tons of books have been written about Russia and sovietism; yet I expect there will be general agreement with me when I say that only one other man (now dead) was so qualified to write on the subject as Leon Trotzky. There can certainly be no denying the high interest of Leon Trotzky’s Problems of Life. The Soviet Minister of War gives a pretty complete view of the new Russia from the inside. It will possibly come as a surprise that the new Russia is more interested in home life, recreations, literature and the arts than in economics and politics. From the viewpoint of Trotzky, the foundation of the home rests on the mutual attachment of husband and wife—as always—but must be secured by the liberation of both in economic directions. Most especially must the wife and mother be aided by communal kitchens and relief from the effective slavery of cooking, washing, and other ordeals by fire and water. The ten chapters of Problems of Life are discussions of the problems deemed vital in Russian reconstruction. Such chapter titles as “Not by Politics Alone Does Man Thrive,” “Reconstruction Requires Introspection,” “From the Old Family to the New,” and “Mind and Little Things” give the angle of vision.