S. AMERICA: PAST AND PRESENT

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25300, 27 September 1947, Page 7

S. AMERICA: PAST AND PRESENT

Vision- of Pern, By Violet Clifton. Dankworth. 364 pp. Land of the Condor. By Hakon Mielche. William Hodge and Co. 252 pp.

Long residence in Peru and much study of record and tradition have contributed to the substance and quality of Mrs Clifton’s book; but the most diligent search of records and of folkmemory in the field of early Peruvian history cannot construct a complete and consistent account of its persons, events, and culture. Mrs Cliiton has been tempted,, therefore, or has deliberately chosen, to adopt a rather visionary treatment of the Inca and preInca period, and her style of writing has not responded happily to the demand on it. Readers who wish to learn what is known about the Incas, the children of the sun, and about their temples, priesthood, rites, and strangely regimented social order will succeed better elsewhere; but Mrs Clifton will often enough fascinate others with passages of glittering, bizarre descriptive prose. In the second part of the book she turns to the period of the Conquest. Here the record is fuller and more precise; and the 20 chapters in which Pizarro, Balboa, Hernando de Soto, Don Pedro de Alvarado, and Atahualpa take the stage are the best in the book. Its last section deals in particular with the national and local saints ’ and mystics of post-conquest Peru and generally with the influence of Catholic civilisation in this part of the New World. (Mrs Clifton s conclusions parallel those of Salvador de Madariaga, in his book on the Spanish Empire in South America, recently reviewed here.) A map and some illustrations —10 from drawings of great interest by Porno de Ayala—are included. Mr Mielche’s book carries the reader a zig-zag course from the bay of Castro, in the most southerly province of Chile (whose southern tip is the Horn), to the far north of mountain and desert. A straight line up the Chilean coast is 3000 miles long .*. . and what a variety of scene and climate, industry, race and social order, and tradition lies along that line. Mr Mielche has an intelligent magpie’s interest in bright scraps of fact of all kinds, and knows (much better than a magpie) what to do with them. He seems inconsequent and casual; actually he arranges his material skilfully and comments on it shrewdly and with a very agreeable, easy wit. There are passages too substantial to be called “scraps”: here a crisp summary of the long story of Spanish power, in Chile, here an account of the mountain copper mines# here the story of that prodigious, latter-day industrialist-adventurer, the Dane Peter Wessel. This book is excellent reading, illustrated with a few photographs and decorated with innumerable, clever little marginal sketches by the author.

ATOMIC POWER One World or None. Edited by Dexter Ma ters and Katharine Way. Latimer House Ltd. 159 pp. Through Paul’s Book Arcade, Hamilton. This is a symposium of articles on atomic power and its problems by publicists and men of science. Some are concerned with the facts alone. Those who deal with the political issues, though not in constant or complete agreement on ways and means, wholly agree that effective international control of atomic energy must be established, if civilisation is to avert the threat of catastrophe; and they agree that the prevailing doctrine of national sovereignty is inconsistent with any such control. Among the contributors are Harlow Shapley, the astronomer, Eugene Wigner, the physicist, General H. H. Arnold, Harold Urey, the chemist. Walter Lippmann, the commentator, and Albert Einstein.

POLITICAL SCIENTIST Science Advances. By J. B. S. Haldane. Allen and Unwin. 253 pp. The essays here collected by Professor Haldane were contributed, over a period of four years, to the press, most of them to the “Daily Worker.” They range a very wide field. One group is devoted to “Some Great Men’ (11 of them), from Archimedes and Copernicus to Marx and Eddington. Other groups are devoted to animals and plants, human physiology and evolution, medicine, hygiene, inventions, and Soviet science and Nazi science. There are dozens of these pieces, mostly quite short. They are vigorously written and thoroughly good reading. What is curious—or is it curious? —is that Professor Haldane so frequently contrives to turn science into political science, and takes excellent care that his equivalent of the “Whig dogs” don’t get the best of it.

DESERT Wind in the Sahara. By R. V. C, Bodley. Robert Hale Ltd. 278 pp. “I wore the Arab dress because it was the most suitable for desert life. I ate the Arab food because it was all I could get, and also because I liked it. I practised the Moslem faith and did not drink wine or eat pork because otherwise I would have seemed an outsider, a kind of disguised tourist, watching my Arab companions but not bemg one of them.” Colonel Eodley wanted to be one of them, to make his home and his life among them:, thus carrying out the, advice that Lawrence and Gertrude Bell gave a man who, after the first world war, found himself profoundly ill at ease in the Western civilisation which he inherited. He spent seven years, first with nomad Araos who drove their sheep from paslure to scanty pasture in the Sahara, then settled in an oasis, from which he made excursions to rejoin his old partners. Nobody has more distinctly noted the difference between desert life and that of the established community, small or great: As long as T was living in the desert, I never had a worry, I never had a cold. As soon as I came to the oasis I had unnecessary things to think about—money to pay servants, clothes to suit the occasion, hours at which to eat. By the time I had reached Algiers, the complications had quadrupled. People began to intrude themselves on me, the noise of the streets kept me awake, I was jostled from morning till night. It was not until I had revisited the fringes of my world that I realised how far from it I had strayed, how little I had missed it. And that is a true and honest statement. During the whole time I lived in the Sahara Desert, I never missed anything I had left at home’. Since I have lived elsewhere, I have constantly missed the Sahara Desert. I have constantly missed its deep silence, its singing wind, its admirable people, its security from all the troubles of our Western culture. Until I* go back there I shall go on missing But Colonel Bodley, having done his utmost to assimilate his doing and being and thinking to the Arabs’, came away knowing that he had not learned to understand them. His book is excellent, informative, pointedly detailed, and often very funny. WHAT DO THEY BELIEVE ? Puzzled People. Prepared for the Ethical Union. By Mass-Observa-tion. Gollancz. 159 pp.

Mass-Observation’s study of “popular attitudes to religion, ethics, progress, and politics in a London Borough,” is of course to be read with care not io build too much on too little. But the most careful reader will share the anxiety felt by Mass-Observation and by the Ethical Union over results which point to a widespread want of the sort of conviction without which, whether political or, religious, a community drifts and falters. These sentences epitomise the book: A distrust of established leadership pervades people’s minds to-day .... Current loss of faith (in religion, in politics, in progress, in science, and so on). is very largely a loss of faith in the unwieldy, centralised, remote organisa* tion, which increasingly monopolises the potential realisation of ideals, and which seems so distant and uncontrollable to ordinary people. It is a little odd that it is nowhere strongly suggested that a prime need to-day is for democratic devolution in all spheres, reattaching loyalties to nearer and more fully comprehensible objects and ideals.

Reviewing a reissue of Michael Sadleir’s “Trollope: A Commentary,” R. Ellis Roberts dismisses or discounts the common explanation of the sudden and great decline of Trollope’s popularity—that he chilled his readers when he told them, in his “Autobiography,” how he wrote his novels, dispatching them by a routine mechanically regular. Mr Roberts says:

That admission damaged his critical reputation, but would not have worried the average reader, even if he had ever heard of it.

There are other reasons. First, Trollope wrote too much—more than fifty novels and books of short stories, and a number of essays, travel sketches, and biographies. An author who has only a few books to his name is more likely to survive than an author who has fifty, of which more than a score are well worth reading. Then Trollope was unlucky in that there is no one ->r two of his books standing eminently above all the rest—as, for instance, does Mrs Gaskell’s “Cranford,” or Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone," or Charles Reade’s "The Cloister and the Hearth.” Another reason for Trollope’s lapse of popularity was that he represented-, to the rising young rebels against that order, the smugness, the self-satisfaction of the Victorian age; reuresented all they deplored and despised far more than did Dickens or Thackeray.

The last reason is one we may call mechanical The novels were out of print. Now it is not necessarily true that a book goes out of print because it is unpopular. That may be so; but it is equally tiue that a book may go unread simply because no publisher has the wit or the devotion to keep it jn print. Trollope at the moment is in luck because a great university press has undertaken the business of reprinting his novels. But I am certain that if any commercial publisher spent on a collected edition of Trollope a tithe of the paper devoted to “Always a Jade” or to “Myself and the Id” he could sell the edition without any difficulty. An American writer, Alfred McKinley Terhune, has published through the Yale University Press a life of Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. It is to be hoped that an English edition will follow, for reviews of the book make it sound like a good one, and a good one will do something to turn readers back to the source in which this delightful writer is most copiously and minutely revealed —his letters. “The trouble with all these in-and-out-of-bed'comedies is that people with no minds or morals are bound to be bores.”—lvor Brown, in an “Observer” notice. MINUTE

DELAYED ACTION The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,' are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are 25 or 30 years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. Ent, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES: “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.”