Literary Views And Reviews

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25134, 15 March 1947, Page 7

Literary Views And Reviews

OPEN PAGES

were oil from the same village of Ireland, and they belt ol course, to the old religion. SSidous men, the biggest ot them ■feet three, and all as strong as Clerks there was about them somethe directness and simplicity Sthildren. Newly cut from home, had found their way on to the harves and I met them during the SXdrawn-out agony of my first 3®tion as Labour candidate . became my -most devoted adufrents and at every one of my meet- ■ « during the election campaign Sfc were to be seen towering above kp crowd of lesser men: silent, watchready to quell disorder, to overWP and, if need be ’ remove. . . . Mv Chairman, a man named Mac Der a man in a million, had but to D J2\ rve in judicial tones, “I thmk that JSrforninst you. McKay, is a stranger S the Lans Division." or “I think, O’Neill, that the gentleman beyant

From CRUSTS AND CRUSADES Rv ff. M. Hughes and Robertson. 137 pp. thtfeought to go home,” for the three ITTdge quietly towards the offender—m the twinkling of an eye he disappear swiftly and noiselessJ from human ken. When MacDerrnott, at the close of my speech, would itfjuire with laboured but excruciating Steness whether any elector of the fang Division would like to ask a iJestion, and, pausing dramatically, down upo n the upturned faces expectancy that some instranger wojuld fall -ato ttemare, the three would stand with Lrs strained to catch the opening bars the question. Usually, of course, the Questions were in stereotyped form and put by one or more of my faithful followers, and to these I would make suitable and elevating replies, evoking unbounded enthusiasm. Occasionally, however, a wanderer from otter and less enlightened pprts would accept MacDermott’s invitation at : s face value, and, in his innocence, venture upon an unrehearsed and humourless effort to elicit the opinion of the candidate. Then would the thre advance and the question be nipped off in the bud—the questioner, crushed as if by some monstrous cataclysm of nature, subsiding into inarticulate gurgles. MacDermott, calmly ignoring the faint bubbles on the surface of the crowd which marked the spot where the rash questioner had gone down into its profound depths, would then invite the free and independent electors to ask the candidate another question But of course no one ever did

On the same morning that Charles was addressing the gentlemen at Carisbrooke —Monday, November 15, 1647—Cromwell, with Fairfax, was facing the regiments on Corkbush Field. There were not, however, seven regiments. There were nine. Both Harrison’s and Lilburne’s regiments had disobeyed orders and had marched to the field in battle array, wearing papers in their hats, as they would have done for purposes of identification had they actually been coming to an engagement. The papers were copies of the Levellers’ demands, with the slogan “England’s Freedom! Soldiers’ Rights!” orinted on the back. . . The seven regiments signed L Fairfax’s manifesto, setting out the conditions on which Cromwell and he would continue to lead the Army] without serious demur. Cromwell then rode over to the mutinous interlopers and ordered them to remove the papers from their hats. When he explained to Harrison’s regiment the exact terms of ,the Fairfax manifesto, the men

CHARLES AND CROMWELL By Hugh Ross Williamson Duckworth 268 pp

ihouted that they had been misled by their officers and enthusiastically destroyed the offending emblems But Uftrame’s regiment stood firm. Not a man moved to obey his order. For a moment it seemed that they had defeated him. The rest of the Army, watching tensely, saw -Cromwell turn his horse and ride away from them. If Rainsborough, watching with the imagined that his retreat was a gesture of capitulation, he was at once disillusioned. Immediately Cromwell wheeled round and with drawn sword charged headlong into the ranks of the mutineers. This was the final argument For the first and last time, soldiers of the New Model experienced the terror of “Ironsides” and broke, as his enemies had always broken before him. Scattering in panic in all directions, their wills paralysed by sheer physical terror, the men tore the papers from their hats (or, since there was no time for discrimination, threw away the hats themselves) and cried for mercy

This fidelity to nature was commended to the painters by the life of St. Francis. The romance of his story made his contemporaries feel that they need look no further than their own time and their own homes for the most inspiring truths. Artists therefore were free to look at life direct: and paint what they saw. The world rushed back on them as a reality: they could return to nature, and so we have at once the whole world of art living again. The thirteenth century was in every sense a Renaissance. . Nothing so important in the history of painting had occurred since the days of the Catacombs. And St. Francis was the central creative power.. • For the genius of Giotto, inspired by St Francis, could paint the landscapes, the churches, the cities, the rooms, the worship, the people, the habits and customs he himself knew. It is true

From THE CONSECRATION OF GENIUS . By Robert Sencourt Hollis and Carter. 330 pp.

that many of his conventions remained archaic, and his style, in spite of a strength and earnestness which recall the massive sublimities of Isaiah, is often naif. He had not gone far in the management of perspective. But his genius was revolutionary both in its range and in its freshness. He fills his picture with real people living on the solid earth: he opens up to the creative genius the world of men and women. and makes the human comedy one with the longing of the soul for “bugs unseen His scope, in short. that of Dante. “He defines and explains; and ekalls every sweet incident °f human nature.” says Ruskin, “and pakes dear to daily life every mystic n nagination of natures greater than our own. He reconciles, while he identifies, every virtue of domestic pd monastic thought. He makes the simplest household duties sacred: and «ie highest religious passions serviceable and just.” Boccaccio says that “e suided art forward into light

The Crystal Palace, whose cpnstrucalways looked so alien, had lust become quite in the architectural jnode with its steel and glass -when it For all its romantic Victorian it was neither crystal nor a Palace. There are two statues of the’Fnnce uonsort in his chosen region which you London is invincible By Dorothy Hood Hutchinson. 192 pp. Through Whit--4 ° mbf ‘ and Tombs Ltd. at the same time if you stand futhe right place There might have it uZ et an °ther. and I have a view of ‘■although it never happened! ar tist, standing just inside KenA? gton Gardens and looking down n^ een s Gate, in the early fifties, rethat thoroughly urban ‘“Oroughfare a s pleasant wooded on the eastern side, while the it u 171 o ne appears just as we knew the war except that the £n«ungs look very fresh and. new. th? /onground stands the gate of k llf t'ark to which we are accustomed, « is strangely enriched by statues

of the Queen and Prince Albert mounted on caracoling Seeds- he m uniform she in a trailing habit ‘i 1 e t hat with a P lunte - Either runds must have given out or the hSfat* Of i the f Pictur ® was seized with a bad attack of artistic licence. Dear Queen Victoria! No one now living can remember her passing by except seated very low in a clad m black bonnet and mantle, and Xnvnn Very elderly ’ far more so than anyone ever seems to be now. But sne was a dashing horsewoman in the SSX When our great-grandparents were young, and there is a cari'cature of her galloping at full, speed through a village, geese, children, dogs and all scattering before her.

NOTES

With a few exceptions, such as the RohEL S X ory o “ How Ned Kelly Robbed the Bank at Jerilderie,” told to him bv Ned’s cousin, the 25 chapters Mr Hughes calls “tales of bygone days are passages of autobiography or reminiscence in the first person, lhey stop at the end of the first world war; but most of them lie much further back, m Mr Hughes’s youth and the earlier years of that political career which lifted him. as he savs, irom pantryman to Prime Minister.” yes, and good, rich, popular politics; but no Parliament. Mr Hughes writes with enormous and infectious gusto.

.. Hugh Ross Williamson’s study of the Protector and the King he sent to the scaffold is designed to dramatise “the clash of two characters,” or, as he says in another place, “a tragedy °f circumstance and character in which there were, in fact, two victims. The book is written with a vigorous fluency that never allows its development to be clogged by detail or become doubtful for want of it. Readers whose idea of the struggle has been oyer-simplified by school histories will be fascinated as they discover that the personal relations an d negotiations between Charles and Oliver were crucial in it and how fatally these were determined bv personal factors.

The central thesis of Mr Sencourt’s book requires him to study closely the triumphant artistic achievements —in painting and architecture, chiefly, but poetry and music also—of the thirteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mr Sencourt promises this age of conflicts and disorders—hurling “aimless men like fiends or phantoms in their clouds of storm”—its emergence into the “fuller life of a new Renaissance” only when, like the great ages of the past, it has learned to turn impulses like theirs to its truths and triumphs—the impulses of faith behind reason, hope behind imagination, and love behind passion. The book in eloquent passages of critical interpretation and comparison. About 30 full-paee photographs illustrate the text.

Miss Hood describes her topical survey of historical and legendary London as “an attempt to recall the legends that cling round the names of old streets doomed to disappear in the Reconstruction”—but not those streets only. It is delightful historical gossip, what is familiar in it —and a good deal is—having the freshness of the author’s agreeable, easy style. The illustrations, more than 30 of them, from old prints, are excellent. CRIME poison-bottle; Nancy Spain’s Death Before Wicket (Hutchison. 184 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.) runs some distance, opening up the unscrupulous character and doings of the lovely Joan Weir, games mistress at a fashionable girls’ school, before her course to sudden death is finished—just as the cricket match, parents v. Ist XI, is about to begin. By this time, a quartette of lovers, all badly treated, to say nothing of jealous wives, is assembled and a Scotland Yard man conveniently figures in the parents’ side; but not to him the credit and the glory. That goes to the amusing, resourceful Du Vivien, once an all-in wrestler, now proprietor of the Heeton Arms, and his ally Admiral Sir Peter Piper. This is a crisply written story. HIRE-TAXIS

There is a great deal to be learned about the hire-taxi racket in London, late in the wag when cars and petrol were scarce and American dollars plentiful, in Charles Graves’s Dusk to Dawn (Hutchinson. 208 Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.). Two officers, out of the army, set up in the hire-taxi business on their own account. They are prepared to go so far wide of the law but no further. One of their men sets himself no limits. The story is exciting and finishes well. DIAMOND BULLET

Once get over the hurdle of belief that Mr Nigel Morland sets when he has the beautiful model Lanthia shot dead, with a diamond bullet from an airgun, at the crowded Lanner dress show, and Strangely She Died (Herbert Jenkins. 189 pp.) is good, easy going. Professor Steven Malone, another of those prodigiously talkative, sen? detached associates of Scotland Yara, hasn’t yet the final polish on him but promises well.

PLASTIC SURGERY IN INDIA

Sir, —A primitive form of plastic surgery existed in India long before Alexander Herzen, as Mr Efford recalls, met the Prussian police spy for whom Diffenbach had carvea a new nose The work of the ancient Hindu doctors is described by Dr Peyton Rous, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in a report on skin grafting experiments published in the “Journal of Experimental Medicine Before transplanting skin from one part of a patient’s body to another, the Hindus used wooden shoes to pound the area to be sliced until it became inflamed and swollen. They found that by exciting the skin the cells would react, and a patch removed to another place would be more likely to remain in place and grow than if unstimulated by blows

Dr. Rous made a series of tests with rabbits to learn whether grafts of irritated or excited skin would grow more quickly than those of unexcited skin. The results confirmed the ancient Hindu practice, for he found that irritated skin united with the underlying tissue sooner than normal skin and obtained a blood supply more promptly and abundantly while new skin grew more readily - on the area that had been sliced The irritation was produced by chemical means instead of by pounding with wooden shoes.—Yours etc. J.M.C. March 7. 1947.

The festival play at Canterbury Cathedral this year is to be T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral. ” This will not be the "rst time his great verse drama has been chosen for the occasion; it made its appear ance in the cathedral in 1935 Each year between 1930 and 1939 the friends of Canterbury Cathedral produced a play before the thousands of visitors who resorted to the great traditional pilgrimage centre of Englp d for the summer festival and during that period works by Shakespeare Tennyson. Laurence Binyon Dorothy Savers. Charles Williams and Christopher Hassall were • err cted This is a year of special interest, because these dramas are now to be resumed after the long interruption occasioned by the second world war.

MIN V Th bubble reputation Once when checking my boasting too frequently qf myself in company, he said to me. •Boswell, you often vaunt so much as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire and thus accosted the person next to him. Do you know. Sir, who I am? No. Sir (said the other,) I have not that

advantage ‘Sir, (said he.) lam the great Twaimley, who invented the New Floodgate Iron.” ’’ —JAMES BOSWELL: “The Life of Samuel Johnson.”