Mr. Hugh F. Spender in The Banner describes a revolution in England, organised by the League of Youth, backed by the People's Army, and inspired by Helen Hart, daughter of a millionaire, who has a bias against the landed gentry. Most elderly people in the book come in for a good deal of facetiousness directed against their ponderously old-fashioned views. One young lordling, deaf and dumb from shell shock, has his senses restored by the mere sight of the new Joan of Arc, and falls in love with her. She refuses him at first because she is vowed to The Cause.... "For a moment she resisted, resisted almost fiercely, and then she lay passively like a child in his arms." Mr. Spender has invented a young man who willingly throws up both title and title-deeds at the call of the People and becomes plain Citizen; but it is a pity that the author in creating another peer should have given him an existing name. Regarded either as fiction or as propaganda this is a poor book.
Roast Beef, Medium is the curious title that Miss Edna Ferber has given to the Business Adventures of Emma McChesney. This American authoress, who writes vivaciously in her own language, gives bright and cheerful expression to her belief that people should be earnest and good and that Roast Beef (not too underdone is conveyed by "medium") should as a staple diet take precedence of flaked crab meat with Russian sauce. These business adventures are certainly not caviare. Emma McChesney is a bagwoman, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. Rivals make love to her and try to get the better of her alternately, and she has a young cub of a son to support. Very sick of hotel life, she longs for a house of her own—especially a kitchen. In the last chapter she gets them. The book is full of homely advice. Emma was fresh and wholesome in appearance, though not so young as the picture on the wrapper deceitfully indicates. But she was a good sort and refused to Marry T. A. Buck himself because she didn't love him. She was, in fact, a "worth-while" woman.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
AN INTERPRETATION OF KEATS'S "ENDYMION." By H. Clement Notcutt. Printed for the Author by the S.A. Printing Co., Capetown.
Mr. Notcutt, who is professor of English in the University of Stellenbosch, believes that Endymion enshrines an allegory, or at least that it contains, in a clear unbroken stream beneath the surface, a meaning that corresponds with the ideas that filled the poet's mind. The alternative can hardly be impugned; it is as true of Keats as of most poets, and in the interpretation of Professor Notcutt it appears to mean little more than that there is a general reflection of the ardour of the poet's mind and his desire of beauty and beauty's immortality. If it is a question of allegorising to a greater extent than that vague generality, then Keats is surely the last poet who can be taxed with it. Professor Notcutt recognises some of the objections and says that the reason why Keats did not explain his allegory was that he was dissatisfied with the poem and discouraged by its reception; but that does not explain why, in the intimacy of his letters (many of which allude to Endymion) he did not give a hint to anybody that there was an allegory to explain. The letters, indeed, with which Professor Notcutt shows an excellent familiarity, speak freely of imagination and invention, in reference to Endymion, but of recondite suggestions and esoteric gospelling there is nothing. Nor can we regret this. A heavenly meaning attached to the earthly story would not have made Endymion a better but a worse poem. It is one of the most beautiful, if one of the most faulty, poems in the language. It was Keats's privilege to see and create beauty and present it as a finer reality in the midst of the crude and half-unreal realities of common life. Had he lived he might have enlarged even this office in fulfilling it, but it is sufficient that Endymion shows that he could fulfil it.
CERVANTES. BY Rudolph Schevill. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.
TOLSTOY. By G. Rapall Noyes. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.
For most of us Cervantes is Don Quixote: even if we are familiar with The Exemplary Novels and the Journey to Parnassus, we do not get from them any idea of personality which infringes on the overwhelming effect produced by the Knight of La Mancha. Even Mr. Schevill, who is a Professor of Spanish Literature in the University of California, in his effort to give us an idea of Cervantes only succeeds in producing an idealised portrait of Don Quixote. How odd this is can be realised if we try to think of other imaginative authors in the terms of their characters. If we are tempted to think of Shakespeare as Hamlet, we immediately correct ourselves by recollections of Falstaff, of Prospero, of Coriolanus, or Juliet. No one, however much he may be persuaded that the Papers of the Club are the author's best book, begins to compare Dickens with Pickwick; nor, to take an author nearer Cervantes in time, has one any inclination to identify Rabelais with Pantagruel.
Two explanations of this odd fact about Cervantes are possible: one is that he had exhausted his capacity for creative, imaginative work in the writing of Don Quixote—but this view cannot be upheld by anyone who loves the Exemplary Novels. The other is the simple one that Cervantes was Don Quixote. It is a commonplace of psychology, especially of Catholic psychology, that men of fine temperament will always be severer on faults which are their own. Cervantes found in himself the exaggerated chivalry which he starts to mock, but still loves in Don Quixote. He had the Crusader's heart, but he lived in a time when—pace Mr. Chesterton—the Crusading spirit was dead, or knew the uglier ends. So in his immortal story Cervantes presents the last knight with tonic humour and loving laughter. Ultimately nothing can make anyone ridiculous but success and prosperity; and from these Cervantes preserves his hero. Mr. Schevill's book is not very lively reading. He gives us the facts of Cervantes' life, and his treatment of Cervantes' art in comparison with other Spanish popular works of the period has no like value for English readers. At one time Spanish literature was well known in England, but to-day we have no doubt that Mr. Schevill's detailed accounts of La Lazarillo and La Celestino are necessary.