That is both tenderly and prettily said. Tom Coutts, in his marriage as in other things, knew what he was about.
THE TURKS IN EUROPE. By W. E. D. Allen. Murray. 10s. 6d. net.
"La Turquie est le pays classique du massacres," it has been truly said.... "Son historie se résume à ceci: pillages, meurtres, vols, concussions—sur toutes les échilles—révoltes, insurrections, répercussions, guerres étrangères, guerres civiles, révolutions, contre-révolutions, séditions, mutineries." All these things are the theme of Mr. Allen's interesting and well-written sketch of the Turkish power, from the rise of Osman in the thirteenth century down to the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913. Mr. Allen does not, however, confine himself to a mere record of horrors. He contrives throughout his book to draw in a few lines the characters of the chief actors in the drama, and, especially in the later chapters, to expose the policies, European and Turkish, which have created and complicated the long nightmare of the Near East. Many of our troubles of the last forty years are attributed by him to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the triumph of Lord Beaconsfield's policy. It was a treaty concluded, he says, "in a spirit of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics, and in open contempt of the right of civilised peoples to determine their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded between rival Imperialist States." A few years later the "grim raw races" in the Balkans were again in a savage ferment, and we could enjoy "the spectacle of the heads of the civilised world, in their palaces in the capitals of Europe, setting those same 'grim raw races' to kill." Mr. Allen in his narrative of this later period does not spare his criticism of the diabolic diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna, of the brilliant cunning of their agents in Turkey—and notably Baron Marschal von Bieberstein.
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. By Alfred W. Pollard. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3s. net.
In this little volume, one of a series called Messages of the Saints, Mr. Pollard has re-told the ever-fascinating story of St. Catherine, Siena's fourteenth-century saint. "In the present sketch," says the author, "there is nothing original, save possibly its point of view and (I believe) the chapter on St. Catherine's book."
Its point of view is that of an ardent if critical admirer of St. Catherine, and full justice is done to what after all are the qualities which made of her not only the most lovable, but perhaps the most amazing of saintly women. Amor vincit omnia is the motto which springs to the mind as most fit for Catherine of Siena. In an age of cruelty she is love personified. It was love for her fellow-creatures, concern for their immortal welfare, that led her, a poor ignorant "little bit of a woman," to face with the simplicity of a child and the wisdom born of simplicity princes and popes, and force them, not to her own will, but to what she conceived to be the Will of God.
To all who have lived long enough in Siena, Catherine becomes a living personality. So real indeed that it would scarcely be surprising to meet her one evening at dusk in that long steep street—still the street of the tanners—where six hundred years ago she walked with her lantern on her way to the sick and dying during the plague. In Siena one is apt to forget that St. Catherine was a figure in politics and the composer of a book about which the learned dispute. Still, on the day of her festival the townsfolk sing the "Praise of Catherine," to them merely the tanner's daughter who, greatly to the glory of their beautiful little city, somehow became a saint.
Mr. Pollard's chapter on the Libro della Divina Dottrina, the treatise said to have been dictated by St. Catherine while in a trance, is valuable because it summarises typical pronouncements of the mystic upon the various stages of the soul in its pilgrimage towards a spiritual goal.
As a revelation of the subconscious self, if for no other reason, St. Catherine's book has its own intense interest. Those who are already familiar with her story may, by the help of Mr. Pollard's pleasant sketch, refresh their memory of its details, and to those who are not it should, as he hopes, prove a stimulating introduction to the life of a wonderful woman.