green forest-toward all, whether much or little, that he was ever to be."

The title of The Tree of Heaven is also symbolic. That friendly sheltering presence in the garden of the Harrisons at Hampstead represents the comfortable enclosed well-being of prosperous England in the years before the war. It is to the Harrisons much what Mr. Walpole's Walpole's Green Mirror was to the Trenchards. There are points of close analogy between these two novels. Both are stories of family; and in both instances this family life, self. absorbed and self-sufficient, typifies the existence and. the point of view of the British upper middle class during the early years of the twen tieth century. In both instances the central figure is the mother of the family: it is she, at least, who most strongly values and clings to the family solidarity, and to those ideas of social and national stability, to that comfortable status quo, upon which she feels that the safety of the family depends. Mrs. Harrison, like Mrs. Trenchard, pretends that change does not exist, because change is what she dreads of all things. But she lacks Mrs. Trenchard's satanic pride, and thereby in the end snatches spiritual victory from her temporal defeat. The Trenchards, it will be recalled, were disrupted by modernity, the cleavage between new ideas and old, the pitting of the younger generation against the elder. The Harrisons are in peril of such disruption; but they save the family soul by losing its body for England. A more striking analogy, in some ways, might be drawn between this book and St. John Ervine's Shifting Winds. Here again is the Britain that has been so long safe from foreign enemies that it is no longer safe from itself, a Britain of feverish inconsequence, avid of meaningless avid of meaningless pleasures, heckled by Woman, stumbling toward the verge of civil strife

-a land of individualism cavorting among theories. The admirably "sound" business of the elder Harrison is menaced by strikes; the lad Nicky, scorning Victorian conventions, marries a self-confessed wanton; the girl Dorothy tries her hand at militancy; the boy Michael will own allegiance to nothing but his right to be "himself." Stone by stone the foundations of the family happiness and security fall away. Then comes the war: and, in sweeping away the last vestiges of the old cherished structure, miraculously reveals a deeper foundation in the love and service of England. Even Michael, that stubborn individualist who as a schoolboy has pronounced “esprit de corps the putridest rot," and has grown up a rebel to the will and manners of the crowd,-a scornful non-conformist as Nicky is a genial one-is to pay with joy the supreme tribute to his kind. This is a far stronger and sounder book than The Belfry, which, with all its adroitness, was over-preoccupied with its satirical portrait of a certain prominent English writer, and which made a convenience of the war in order to effect a plausible but false solution of the hopeless matrimonial problem that had been set. There is not a trace of mere cleverness, much less of claptrap, in The Tree of Heaven. We know these people, their problems are real (and indeed have become largely our own). Out of the personalities they are and the world they live in, their story grows steadily and naturally, not toward an effect, but toward a completed interpretation. That interpretation is based upon faith not only in the essential soundness of England, but in human nature and its destiny.

We cannot wish to have our storytellers treat the period of the war always upon this high and somewhat severe plane. Between the anxious seriousness of those who stay at home and the defensive buffoonery of the

trenches, romantic fancy still plies her healing trade. It is well for us to understand the thing that is, and it is also well for us to clothe it, now and then, with what glamour we may, to assure ourselves that the old dreams may still be dreamed. The author of Rose of Old St. Louis is primarily a romancer, and her Comrades has its central thread of "heart-interest" in the love-story of a young Briton and a girl from Kentucky who make each other's acquaintance on the Continent during the days before the war, and are presently caught in the mill and put through. In her handling of all this, in her machinery of plot and situation, Mrs. Dillon follows those conventions of romance of which the world, in its coming-on disposition, never grows tired. Things happen very handily; coincidence accommodates its long arm to our needs. On the other hand, the course of true love must not be too smooth, since its final goal (in romance) is marriage. Hence fate and the chronicler interpose the familiar obstacles of untoward incident and misunderstanding, to the end of a suitable postponement of that consummation which we never seriously doubt from the outset. Our hero is wounded and loses an arm in a German hospital, but we know that the rest of him is safe enough. When the moment comes for his desperate attempt at escape through the German lines, our fears are a pleasant pretence. Nor is our excitement intolerable when our heroine is discovered driving her ambulance daily into the thick of the fighting at the front. We know that she is invulnerable, since she is ours. The villain of the piece is a German Secret Service agent of diabolic nature, who of course gets his deserts in the long end. But this purely romantic plot is not the whole of the book. The "Foreword" gives a hint of graver purpose which is not unfulfilled in these pages: "Many

happy days spent among the kindly and simple-hearted Saxons only add to the poignancy of my sorrow that they should have been deluded and driven into this awful holocaust by Prussian Junkerism, Militarism, and Kaiserism." The scene opens in Dresden, is thence transferred to Leipzig, Rome, Berlin, and America. The Dresden pension, where our British younger son, "Mr. Hatfield of Hatfield Abbey," is sojourning, is kept by a Prussian widow, who has two attractive but very German daughters. The guests are a polyglot assembly: Hatfield the Englishman, a Pole, a Swede, a Russian, a Rumanian, a Frenchman, and a "Herr Geheimrath," a type of German officialdom. War seems far off, yet Hatfield off, yet Hatfield is puzzled by some things for one, the coldness of the daughters of the house toward the Frenchman and himself. To this happy family are presently added two Americans, whom he has already rescued from the attentions of some German officers-Beatrice, the beautiful Kentuckian, and her quaint companion, the spinster Miss Martin. All the men succumb to the beauty and charm and intellect of the American girl excepting the Frenchman, who is betrothed, and the German, whose bureaucratic soul is not responsive to an alien attrac tion. But it is another sort of German that is presently to become Hatfield's chief rival. Though a baron and high in German official circles, he is capable of being both loyal to his Fatherland and constant to his friends of whatever race. The friendly German vow of Bruderschaft sworn between him and Hatfield, already open adversaries in love and destined to be adversaries in war, is not an idle one. To the Baron the English prisoner owes his chance of escape. It is the ideal of a wider Bruderschaft, to embrace all nations, toward which Mrs. Dillon sees the world blindly struggling. Who

Pot

Feminine sentiment, undeniably, gives this book its atmosphere. Potterat and the War is a book of masculine sentiment and humour. terat is a kind of Swiss Tartarin; this is the third and final instalment of his memoirs. It finds him a retired Police Inspector of sixty, with an admirable second wife, and one child of his old age; with a pleasant old cottage facing the lake, on the borders of the town of Lausanne; with a fine garden, warm friends, a perfect digestion, and an immense enthusiasm for life. Potterat is of the pure Vaudois stock, and has none too much affection for the other strains in the composite Swiss nation. But he likes to be friendly with everybody, and as chosen orator of his Choral Society speaks eloquently of the Switzerland of three languages and of three races that "dwell together in perfect harmony within her borders, bound together by the ties of mutual respect and mutual rights.

Little quarrels

and differences we have, certainly, and sometimes feeling runs high, but the moment the red flag with the white cross is hoisted, the ranks close up, and the Swiss Confederation is the cement which unites all hearts in one." Privately, perhaps, he has his reservations; there is a natural friction of race, for example, be tween himself and his son-in-law Schmid. When the war breaks out, his French blood asserts itself, and he chafes and blusters about the absurd nature of that official neutrality

which forbids an honest man to recog nise the facts. His heart is with the defenders of France, he exults openly when Joffre turns and the Hun is driven back from Paris; he cannot forbear pluming himself a little on the prowess of his kinsmen. On the other hand, when, at the first breath of war, Switzerland's wonderful little army rushes to defend her borders, Schmid and his fellows of Teutonic stock are in their places, not less resolute than the Vaudois. The heart of the nation is sound for defence. But that is not enough to content the chivalrous soul of Potterat. Always there weighs upon his consciousness the tragic plight of that other little country which has been denied neutrality, which has been ravished, and trampled under foot before the eyes of the world. What right has Switzerland or any other country to be safe and neutral in the presence of this outrage? The presence and testimony of the two old Belgian refugees who are presently allotted to the Potterat household strengthens his feeling. That Switzerland should not at least have filed a protest is more than he can bear. The thing becomes an obsession; he, at least, must put himself on record. In the end, he writes three letters, one to Joffre, expressing in the name of "thousands of citizens, neutral by national obligations outwardly" his hope for France's success in driving the invaders out of Belgium; one to King Albert, to the same purport; and one to the Supreme Council of Switzerland, urging that in the name of true neutrality, Switzerland ought to speak out for the rights of Belgium. And so, having uttered itself, the stout heart of Potterat ceases to labour and, with a jest and a blessing on his honest lips, he goes to sleep forever. A neighbour speaks his fitting epitaph: "Poor Potterat! . . . We shall never see his like again. . . . It's this war that has killed him. He felt it and lived it with all his heart.

Ah, he was a splendid fellow! One of the very best!" So much for Potterat and the war. But the human substance of him, his philosophy, his delicious humour, cannot be conveyed at second hand. If there are still "Anglo-Saxon" readers who cling to the notion that the Latins have a kind of wit, but that we others have a monopoly of pure fun, I should like to turn them over to Potterat, and see what he will do with them. One more thing: it is strange that the name of the author of this remarkably skilful and idiomatic translation should not be given on the title-page of the book.

Compared with the hearty and downright humanity of such a story, the Just Outside of Stacy Aumonier seems a trifle niggling and inconsequential. You may say that this is because one is sentimental and the other "realistic"; and that human nature is not really such a simple matter as the builder of a Potterat represents it to be. I am not at all sure that this is true. Mr. Aumonier himself admits that the majority of human beings are consistent enough, we can tell what they are from their looks, and what they will do from what they have done. But this type does not interest him; his concern is frankly with the "others of whom we cannot take stock . . . the wayward children whose impulses make the history books uncertain records. Sometimes they live great lives obscurely; at other times they lead mean lives, although they figure on a great canvas. It is yet to be completely understood that there never was a hero, except a stage hero." Granted, if by hero we mean the Hatfields of romantic tradition, the leading juveniles who must comport themselves to order or fail to satisfy us in our romantic mood. But if we are to be serious, let us compare Potterat with the Arthur Gaffyn of this story and feel whether, in substance and in truth, the fat Swiss ex-police

99

as

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man does not at least equal the "temperamental" young Briton of Mr. Aumonier's story. To take it on its own ground (and so I should have done but for the writer's specific assumption that to "paint a man," Thackeray said that Fielding had done for the first time with Tom Jones, is normally to paint a personality not only complex but vacillating and inconclusive) this is a study of a human type with which British novelists before the war were somewhat monotonously preoccupied. Arthur Gaffyn is a youth, and a man, whose character is overlaid and partly vitiated by "temperament.' He has high impulses and fine theories, but is harassed and stultified by his sense of the complexity of things. His spirit revolts against the coarseness and hypocrisy of modern "civilisation," he has a sincere desire to get into "the big game," to do his part in making the world better; but his energy goes into fumbling for some general specific, and he is unable to move in a straight line toward any single objective. He remains "just outside" the current of the active world, a spectator who now and then casts an experimental brick into the flood and is grieved that it shows no sign of turning aside. Meanwhile, of course, he is being nagged by the flesh, there is always some habit or desire twitching at his sleeve. He is without grossness, but sex will neither let him alone nor satisfy him, till divorce offers him escape from an unhappy marriage to the sanctuary (momentary, at least) of union with an American girl twenty years his junior, who blithely sets herself the task of making a man of him. All this takes place before the war, of which the book contains a hint in the forecast of Leffbury, the old designer. The world, he says, is working to no purpose: "In the trouble that is coming and there is very big trouble coming to humanity--it won't be the

young who are to blame, or even the weak or the sensual! It will be the old, who have worked without love.

...

Things to save time, to increase comfort, to 'speed up' humanity, to create luxury! And what does it all amount to? Work without love. Do you remember the old punishment, now abolished, the punishment of abortive labour? A man was made to carry bricks across a yard, and then carry them back again, and so on all day. In time it drove him mad. What does this prove? That even the vile have a soul, the instinct for service. Man cannot work with out love. But these chartered libertines of righteousness, these old men whispering in their secret chambers and pulling the wires, are simply carrying bricks from one end of the yard to the other and back again. One day they will go mad, and then they will drive the young before them like cattle to the slaughter." Leffbury himself, who is strong where Gaffyn is weak, who has seen his road of service, and pressed forward upon it, has yet been defeated of his end by these brutal forces. But his spirit is unconquered, and I defy his creator's attempt to disprove him a hero by making him swear and tell bawdy stories!

The day draws near when the political equality of the sexes will be assured, but let no man flatter himself that he is going to dispose of his mate by giving her the vote. To begin with, he cannot do better than divest the word mate of its biological meaning: his mate is to be his partner, not his servant, in the affairs of the household; she is to be equally free to choose her own friends and to do her own work; she is to be "economically independent;" and she is not to be a mother unless motherhood suits her own inclination and convenience. All this is made clear not only by the published and listened-to utterances of feministic propaganda, but by the testimony

She

of current novelists, especially in America. Men like Rupert Hughes, Winston Churchill, and Henry Kitchell Webster lift the refrain, and the voices of story-telling women are a chorus nearly in unison as they repeat the burden. Even the writers of the sweet-pretty stories, the rocking-chair romancers, cannot afford to be mute. Witness A Daughter of the Morning, in which a country lass begins by running away from the family drudgery (housework in this kind of fiction always involves knotted fingers, soiled aprons, and ugly tempers) and ends by nearly refusing to marry the man she adores because she does not want to take care of his house or his babies. is not, she admits complacently, a "mother-woman." And she wants to keep on helping him in his great work as a social reformer: "I care now for the big issues-for life and death and the workers-for the future more than for now. We are working for them-you and I. I will not let myself care only for getting your food and keeping the house tidy." And all the gentleman can do is to look away over the fields and murmur: "To think what we have done to love-all of us. I know that the possibility is exactly what you say it is." And when she goes on to boast that she is not the "motherwoman," he says that is all right, too -of course she does not want to bother with taking care of children: besides, she is "the new factor we've got to deal with, the mother-to-therace woman." This looks pretty unpromising for the kiss-curtain: however, we only need another halfpage to get to it, for our modern wooer stoops to conquer, and says he knows what a horrible problem it all is, but he thinks perhaps they ought to have a try at it, since it cannot be solved "by every woman funking it, and staying unmarried." "Will you come," he cried, "will you come and face it with me? And do your best,