NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18129, 19 July 1924, Page 11

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

AN ENGLISH VILLAGE. Miss Helen Hamilton, whose "Compleat Schoolmarm"—on the evidence of the wrapper—was a book that should have been read by the Minister of Education (the "Athenteum" said), by all Inspector? and Councils (the "Journal of Education" decided), by every High School mistress (in the opinion of the Educational Times"), and indeed bv every one who has been to school (i'f the "Daily News" knew anything), has made a further bid for immortalitv in "Great Meddow." We have no doubt it is a real village as seen by the compleat schoolmarm, and if it is, the lady has a shrewd eye and not too big a bump of reverence. But to picture a village in 150 pages is a work for a great genius, and Miss Hamilton is merely an ironical,.a far too deliberately ironical, chronicler with a moderately competent journalistic pen. The villagers do not live, and if they did they would not live long. The best that can be said is that the book is quite readable, and at its modest price most admirably printed and produced. Miss Hamilton has not added a new name to the geography of fiction. (Basil Blackwell, Oxford.) A LADY IN SPAIN. Mrs Elinor Glyn has been to Spain—enterprising lady, as the guest of the King and Queen. And in Spain they have bull-fights and palaces and lace mantillas, and Mrs Glyn has seen them all. She has sat a whole afternoon in the private box of the Duke de Tovar, on "the queer, high leather-covered banquette," and because she knew it would be lacking in courtesy to faint, Bhe has gazed boldly, but with her "heart beating in her throat," at the bulls "ra nning their horns right into old horses' stomachs" or "attacking them with fury and tearing out their insides." "Thank goodness," though, the "aids put a knife soon into the poor horse's forehead," and while she sat gazing at the "appalling sight' of the miserable carcass, with its bulging entrails lying in pools of blood," she had time to reflect on this strange sport, and to see that "at the present stage.of the world's unrest, a legitimate outlet for fierce passions. may be a Bafety valve in that particular country which the War did not reach, and keep it from worse things"; and in any case that "the Providence Who rules this Universe knows His business, and will not let bull-fights go on a moment after, they have served their end in the general scheme of things!" . . . And as with the bull-ring, so with the cathedrals and the palaces and the processions and the mantles and the cockfights ("I went to a cock-fight! in Seville—yes, I did!"). Mrs Glyn finds a place for them all in the scheme of things, and for herself h the midst of them helping Providence with her pen. "Letters from Spain" is far more amusing than the professional funny books, and far easier to understand. (London: Duckworth and Co.) LONDON. Exiled Londoners, if and when they can buy it, will find much joy in "Th Artist's London" of- Mr John rVotin . The publisher has selected eighty recent drawings by fifty contemporary artists —Frank Brangwyn, George Clausen, Laura Knight, Muirhead Bone, Sir John Lavery and fifty-five others—and bound these up with four essays by John Drinkwater, Wilfred Whitten, W. P. Robins, and James Laver. The pictures interpret themselves, and the essayists do what in them'lies—a good deal more in one of them than in the others—to give us the thoughts that eye presentations do hot evoke. Very curiously, the poet of the party writ"savagely about the fogs and the crowds William Morris and Mrs Meynell he has no- patience with the "absurd superstition that grime enhances the • beauty of age.' '. Where shadow and grime and murk come into their own, he protests, the result is sheer horror.. "The physical aspect of Mn-. Chester, for example, is. frightful. And so far as London is of the same character, it is frightful too, and it is n" abuse of art to trifle with the fact." That will not please all Londoners, nor all aesthetes, nor for the matter of that will all the drawings shown please them either. Sevoral of these last entirely lack distinction, but the production as a whole will seem a precious thing both to those who have seen London and will never see it again, and to those who sigh to sec it but know that sighing is as far as they .will get. (Direct from the publisher, John Castle, The Strand.) UNEMPLOYMENT. It is a comforting thought, or would be if it could be accepted, that the distress following a groat war could bo avoided by the pleasant process of maintaining something like a war standard of consumption. If we could maintain , such a standard —not for a month or two, but for years, and indeed indefinitely—there would of course be no distress. So long gs our consumption was what economists call productive consumption there would be no problem but the miracle of keeping the process profitable. Yet it is almost such a miracle as this, that a" hasty reading of Mr J. A. Hobson's "Economics of Unemployment" suggests that the author believes in. Actually, of course, he does not believe in any miracles .-.' all, but the thesis of his book is summed up in the following long sentence, and he has to be read very carefully if he is not to appear a plain economic moonshiner. We quote, his actual "If, say, consumption could be maintained at three-fourths of the high war standard, and could be applied productively to enhance the future efficiency of the human instrument, instead of being applied destructively, it would seem that trade fluctuations might dia-

appear, by a policy which would riot merely avert unemployment (outside the minor requirements of economic elasticity), but would furnish the economic conditions for a continually increasing productivity, with a corresponding rise in the general standards of consumption." There is an enormous "if" there, and a very big •' seem,'' and as we have said, Mr Hobson is far too acute and sound a man to play ducks and drakes with facts. But he does really believe that more regular, if not absolutely regular, cinplovment could be guaranteed to everybody if we could, and wonld, utilise both capital and labour to their normal full capacity. He believes also that it is due to selfishness, ignorance, and perversity that we do not so utilise them, and that is what makes his book a serious contribution to the

study of the problems with which «•« whole world is now grappling. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.) DIET. On the chivalrous principle of "ladies first." Dr. Cecil Webb-Johnson wrote his "Diet for Women" before he produced the monograph "Diet for Men" which has already been noticed in this column. But we did not receive it first, and if we had done so it would not have been necessary to niter anything that was said of the second volume. For after all men and women

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differ far less as consumers of food than the}' do in any other respect. What makes a man fat makes a woman fat, usually a little faster; what gives one rheumatism gives the other rheumatism, or dyspepsia or bad temper or melancholia —so far as those misfortunes are dietary sorrows only. The Webb-Johnson gospel is a very simple and beyond question a very sound one. We are not to eat too much or too frequently of anything. We are to avoid, almost entirely, whatever is merely an irritant or a slow poison—big quantities of mustard, pepper, salt, pickles, black and long-brewed tea, and so on. We are to cat sparingly of meat, and freely of fruit, vegetables, and brown bread, and we are to masticate oar food and not wash it prematurely into Our, stomachs with fluids of any kind. The chief difference between the author's programme and that of other writers on diet who are not faddists or fanatics is that he objects violently to the free consumption of milk. (London: Mills and Boon.' Christcaurch: Whit- . combe and Tombs.) .