Lost this ribbon in her flight;
Rosette of the twilight sky,
Waft to me Love's lullaby!"
(the note of exclamation is Tony's), says, "Anyone who can write songs like that ought to write an opera," you realise that her heart is sounder than her pretty head. Anyway Tony, who needed no encouragement, wrote his opera and landed a ten-thousand dollar prize for same, together with the daughter of the millionaire, who began to see, no doubt, that there might be something in poetry after all.
Indian Studies (HUTCHINSON) one may call a work partly descriptive and historical, partly also polemic. Its author, General Sir O'MOORE CARAGH, V.C. (and so many other letters of honour that there is hardly room for them on the title page), writes with the powerful authority of forty years' Indian service, five of them as Commander-in-Chief. His book is, in compressed form, a survey of the Indian Empire that deserves the epithet "exhaustive"; history, races, religious castes and forms of local government are all intimately surveyed; the chapters on the India Office and (especially) the army in India will command wide attention both among experts and the general public. Naturally the word "experts" brings me to the controversial side of the subject, the much discussed Montagu-Chelmsford Report, concerning which the late C.-in-C. holds views that might fairly be described as pronounced. Where authorities differ the honest reviewer can but record impartially. Really we have here the old antagonism between the upholder of one school of Imperial thought, fortified by many years' experience of it's successful application, and the theories of a newer and more experimental age. Without attempting a judgment on its conclusions, I can safely agree with the publishers that this is a book that "will be read with special interest in military, diplomatic and Government circles"; also—my own postscript—more vociferously debated in certain club smoking-rooms than almost any volume of recent years.
A "Literary Note" thoughtfully inserted in the fly-leaves of The Elstones (HUTCHINSON) informs me that it will "make a strong appeal to all those who have experienced the suffering caused by religious conflict." It is not entirely because it has been my lot to escape the ordeal in question that Miss ISABEL C. CLARKE'S latest book failed to make the promised appeal. She takes two hundred and odd pages of peculiarly eye-racking type to convert the Elstone family to Catholicism without indicating in any way how or why her solemn puppets are inspired to change their beliefs. Now and again a completely nebulous cleric happens along to perform the necessary function of receiving a moribund neophyte into the Church; otherwise the conversion appears to take place as it were by spontaneous combustion and not as the result of any visible proselytising agency. However the Elstones bear no resemblance to real human beings—you can hardly expect it of people called Ierne and Magali and Ivo and Elvidia and names like that—so perhaps it doesn't matter how they came to see the great light. The important thing obviously from the authoress's point of view is to get them into the fold; and good Catholics who look at the end rather than the means may enjoy The Elstones. As a novel it will try them hard.
