BOOKS ON THE TABLE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25394, 17 January 1948, Page 3

BOOKS ON THE TABLE

SOME OPEN PAGES himself ley Aftir \ Kalc °f humanity in bowler For i e b l 5 career as a fast he ved f ir r?!; cashlr ' was finished, DrormSno B d n n and ’ without comfenco Bolton accent and turbuI .on o' J? ecame on e of the chosen of the Otter I°°s? ° f J he ? aviUon at Lord’s, vjiien i saw him gazing for a fpw the wind ows at b ?wler of these latter years. He could seldom bear to look for long; popp , ed almost out of his hSfohtJJ®, e *P. k , lslve red of his face down l th d ' ■* h h could throw mi hat d ° wn ‘he Pitch quicker:” he would Shef field in a Lancashire and m ? t ch. when he was tirejboW!ed,all day until his £ ace resembled a boiled lobster, he expert-

From Autobiography By NEVILLE CARDUS Collins. 288 pp.

enced bad luck with appeals for leg-before-wicket. “Ah hit George Hirst bang on kneecap; and Ah’ll swear to mi dying day he was in front—ball would a’ knocked all three wickets But um Pi re gives it ‘not out,’ ana George hits me over ropes and crowd, sarcastic-like, shouts ‘Ow’s that Maister Brearley?’ and next ball he nits me again over ropes, and crowd shouts ‘Ow’s that’ again: so I knocks au mi ddle stump flying in two, and Ah runs down pitch and picks up broken halves of wicket and Ah brandem at cr °wd. And then Ah runs on field and comes back with six new stumps affd gives ’em to umpire and says ‘Here, take these, you’ll need all bloody lot before Ah’ve done.’ And he needed four on ’em, Ah can tell you.” NOTE:

Mr Cardus’s “Autobiography” is excellent reading, rich in diverse interests—of his childhood in a Manchester slum (but a slum in which the theatre, the free library round the corner, wasteland cricket, and the “effulgent personality of my Aunt Beatrice” lit day and dream) and of its strange, eventful sequel. Cardus took a perilous step into the insurance business and a happy one into professional cricket, as a coach at Shrewsbury. There the process developed that made “Cricketer” and “N.C.” of the “Manchester Guardian”; and the character of Scott’s wonderful paper and the characters of its reporters’ room and the famous Corridor are unforgettably described. Pervasively, there is music, love of which and ambition in which have made Cardus’s achievement as a cricket writer taste a little sour to him and perhaps help to explain why he has warped and fretted his work out of its old nature. Finally, to particularise minutely, a portrait of James Barrie and a recollection of a weekend as his guest are brilliant impressions, with nothing slapdash in the brilliance. Rather, the brilliance is that of a Van Eyck’s exquisite, methodical, ruthless precision in detail and brushwork and . steady, total grasp of composition. An exceptionally good book, this, and an absorbing one. If only Mr Cardus would stop worriting and fidgeting about his style. . . . Fortunately, memory carries him* back here, for pages? on end. into his earlier manner, which learned a grace that reproaches the strained attitudinising of his “second period,” as he calls it, or the third or fourth. One loses count, and patience.

The chief public enemy of all child photographers was a very learned Englishman, Professor Bertrand Russell. 'He had advanced ideas on education and propounded the theory that the best way to bring up children was to let them do as they liked. . . . A Bertrand Russell school was opened in a fashionable suburb of Melbourne, and parents paid fees to have their children taught this doctrine. Although Rosemary was only five years old, she had apparently stuck to her homework and was already a very advanced pupil. She came to my reception room with her mother and her nurse and immediately declared war.

She first knocked a spotlight over and broke it; she then grabbed one leg of the camera tripod and heaved. I caught the camera and lens in time, but the heavy base of the tripod fell across my toes. “Rosemary! you naflghty girl!” said mother, so Rosemary walked up to her and kicked her in the shins.

I said “Rosemary, what a dreadful thing to do to your mother. Aren’t you ashamed?” She walked up to me with a look of a penitent and kicked me so hard I yelled with the pain.

I Can Take It By JACK CATO, F.R.P.S. Georgian House, Melbourne. 322 pp.

I called my receptionist and whispered: “Take everything breakable out of the dressing room quickly,” and we shut Rosemary in this cell with her retinue while I made some preparations. We had a doll's china tea-set that had seen much service and could now be written off. I set it on the floor against a light wall and focused the camera on it; alongside I laid a hammer.

Then the fiend was led in. I said: “Rosemary, would you like to play tea-party?” She sat down beside the cups and saucers, and with my boot I nudged her into the right position. She took up the hammer and smashed every bit to smithereens; at the same time sne watched me with the face of an angel. I took the pictures as fast as the slides could fall in and out of the camera. Then I walked up to her and said: “Thanks, Rosemary; while you were breaking the tea-set I got 12 lovely pictures of you.” Without changing the angel expression she threw the hammer and hit me in the stomach. NOTE:

Mr Cato’s is the autobiography of a photographer, and a very lively one. The ambiguity is easily resolved: the liveliness belongs to both man and book. Paris, London, South Africa, Tasmania, Melbourne, he has been shooting tor 40 years—landscapes, celebrities of the stage, politics, art, and fashionable society, wild beasts, children, London suffragettes battling with the police, and the stage tricks of Maskelyne and Devant, for example. (Mr Cato exposes with relish the tricks that have been used—taking in Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge, in particular—to make the camera produce “spirit” pictures.) Pavlova, Wilkie Bard, “Little Tich,” Shaw, Churchill, Masefield, Melba, and a hundred other great names figure here, not in a mere parade of names, but in reminiscences of quick, revealing interest. (It was Melba who imperiously swept Mr Cato out of Hobart to Melbourne and established him there.) He writes penetratingly and amusingly on such professional subjects as the asymmetry of the human face, to which he attributes both the difficulty and the fascination of camera-portrait work. lhe book is illustrated with dozens of Mr Cato’s pictures of all kinds, and beauties they are. *

Within the sphere of human activity it is the task of the old to administrate, to accumulate, to conserve, to complete. In this way a burden is lifted from youth which would restrict its independence. Youth is thus set free for fresh achievements and new ideas. Age and youth have their separate tasks, and one may ask oneself which is the more important. If human society is to preserve its culture as a basis of further development, then the function of preserving this culture, which is the task of the old, is probably as important and as necessary as the innovations, the search for new paths, the pioneer activity of youth. Everything that is new will appear all the more fruitful and beneficent if the opinions, the experiences. an_ the needs of all age-groups have been respected. In youth and early manhood the armour is forged, skill is

acquired, and the eyes are set upon the goal; the years of maturity lead to the zenith of original achievement and vigorous activity; in later years hypotheses are verified and corrected, the new material is surveyed and tested; then also is the time for teaching what has been learned, for preserving the acquired values and trans-

From Old Age: Its Compensations and Rewards By A. L. VISCHER, Dr. Med. Allen and Unwin. 200 pp.

mitting them. Great things are achieved, as the American neurologist, G. M. Beard (1839-83) tells us, when enthusiasm and experience are counter-balanced. But life is not wholly occupied with the production of masterpieces. There are periods of preparation and provision, which must be cherished no less than the time of great achievement.

The testimony of Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) confirms what has been said concerning the relation between intellectual work and the age of the worker. “We scholars, above all, know from our own experience that the great scientific achievement cannot be brought to a completely successful conclusion without many years of continuous and uninterrupted labour. It is perhaps correct that in men like Gauss the great ideas by which they have advanced the world’s store of knowledge have all occurred to them in their youthful years; but the sowing is only one half of the scientific profession, and the time of harvest is no less indispensable if a great scholar is to fulfil his destiny.” NOTE:

Dr. Vischer, whose work is cordially introduced by his distinguished English colleague, Lord Amulree, has for 20 years directed the Municipal Home for the Aged in Basle. His book is, first, a close study of the processes and marks of senescence, and of the questions raised by evidence of the differing duration or expectation of life at different periods of history and among different races, by examples of human and animal longevity, by medical work on the problems of prolonging life and rejuvenation, and by the characteristic maladies of old age; and, second, it is an essay of wide scope, nourished by extensive readfng, on the maintenance of firstclass intellectual and artistic powers into and through old age, on their adaptation to the conditions of old age, and, more generally, on what the individual can do to ripen slowly and well into useful and enjoyable age. The second part will most interest the ordinary reader; but there is nothing in the first to baffle his interest and much to hold it.

In front, the massive shoulder of Blacksidend rose brown in the autumn sunlight and the trees enfolding Gilmilnscroft vied with the woods of Waldoch in their contrasts of startling colour. Winding far ahead across the brae I could see the lonely deserted road which trails over moss and heather to Muirkirk. It was over there where the pathway climbs Tinchornhill that the martyr boy George Wood was so cruelly butchered by a trooper in the killing times of 1686. In the misty distance, Cairntable, blue and unreal, seemed as if undecided in its pose betwixt earth and sky. Each of these names has some story cr tradition—Blacksidend, Gilmilnscroft, Muirkirk, Cairntable —all are woven into the pattern of that older Ayrshire of Wallace and Bruce, the Covenanters, and Robert Burns. On Blacksidend was buried a mighty warrior of days so far behind us that no record of his name or deeds now survives, but the cairn which was erec-

From Autumn in Kyle and the Charm of Cunninghame By D. C. CUTHBERTSON Herbert Jenkins Ltd. 216 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

ted over his tomb is proof of his renown in a chapter of our country’s story so old that we have long since lost the key. The mention, too, of Gilmilnscroft takes us back fully 500 years, because Alexander Farquhar, who was laird in 1407, was not, I think I am right in saying, the first of his line. It was somewhere hereabouts that in 1779 Joseph Train, who gave such help to Sir Walter Scott in the providing of lore and legend, first saw the light. His father was employed on the estate. Amongst the subscribers to the Edinburgh edition of Burns’s poems figures the name of John Farquhar Gray of Gilmilnscroft with marked against it “two copies. NOTE: Mr Cuthbertson’s progress through Cunninghame, Kyle, and Carrick, the historic divisions of Ayrshire, is that of a local and national patriot, in the best sense. Town, village, and countryside recall to him their historic and literary associations, ancient and modern. Legend and old wives’ tale are gold as pure as record certifies. Coilsford. for instance, belongs equally to Old King Cole and to Burns’s ill-fated Highland Mary.* This is, pre-eminently, Burns country; and the Burns Ibver will find himself reaching frequently for his edition of the poet—Henley and Henderson, it may be hoped. But Scott is hardly behind Burns. Mr Cuthbertson writes an old-fashioned prose—he “wends his way,” and so forth—but it suits his leisurely, expatiating method very well.

RELIGION, ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY THE KANTIAN SYSTEM Mr H. J. Paton. White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in 'the University of Oxford, has written in The Categorical Imperative (Hutchinson’s University Library: Senior Series. 283 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.) a study of Kant’s moral philosophy, designed particularly, in the course of a general exposition, to remove objections—“a whole series of misinterpretations,” in his view—which have become “traditional, and stand in the way of an unprejudiced approach.” Philosophers will note with interest that the author does not exempt himself from having fallen into traditional errors. He now acquits Kant of the charge, implicit in his earlier book, “The Good Will,” of having neglected teleological factors in the moral life. This is, of course, a book for readers well advanced and practised in moral philosophy. THE EPISTLES “ It would have saved me a grqpt deal of labour if this book had come into my hands when I first seriously began to try to discover what Christianity was,” says Mr C. S. Lewis, introducing Mr J. B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches (Geoffrey Bles. 224 pp.), a new translation of the New Testament Epistles. Mr Lewis’s general statement of the case for new translations of the Scriptures is excellent; his special plea for this one of the Eoistles—that it is exceedingly helpful in dispelling the view that Paul twisted the “kindly and simple religion” preached by Jesus into the “cruel and complicated” body of doctrine found in h’is Epistles—may be recommended to readers who want to apply themselves purposefully to Mr Phillips’s text. HYMNS Among the most recent additions to the Britain in Pictures series is Canon Adam Fox’s English Hymns and Hymn Writers (Collins. 48 pp.). He traces the antecedents of hymn singing, in early Christian tradition, in the specifically English hymns and carols of pre-Tudor centuries, and in the metrical psalter of the Tudor age, up to the seventeenth century religious lyrists and the “great age.” the eighteenth century, of Watts, Wesley, and Cowper, with Addison, Toplady, and others beside them. The degeneration, both in tune and words, of nineteenth century hymns—great exceptions notwithstanding—was arrested and countered by the Oxford Movement, and the editing of the standard and admirable collection, Hymns Ancient and Modern, followed. How and why dissatisfaction

developed, apd what reforming ends it pursued. Canon Fox very well shows, especially in regard to purely musical considerations. Robert Bridges receives a just tribute; but it is odd to find no mention, even, of Percy Dearmer. The illustrations, in a book which offers no great scope for them, are specially to be praised. THE GOOD LIFE Mr H. D. Lewis’s Morals and the New Theology (Gollancz. 159 pp.) may be called “a tract for the times.” He insists, with obvious justice, on the need to re-establish moral truth and principle as the prime force in civilised life and does not hesitate to identify morality with religion. He argues that this need can never be satisfied while “much of what is normally presented in the name of religion is entirely unacceptable today,” and examines “the dominant trend in Protestant theology to-day” as it illustrates, in his view, a fatal disharmony \yith “elementary ethical principles.” I PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY The Rev. Leslie D. Weatherhead, of the City Temple, London, having “long believed that psychotherapy and religion should ideally go hand in hand,” commends Mr John Martin’s From Failure to Fulfilment (Allen and Unwin. 168 pp.), which is “a minister’s notebook on psychological method,” based on practical experience over 20 years in dealing with individual psychological problems. CHURCH UNITY

Five addresses—by the Rev. Norman Cocks, the Rev. John Burton, the Rev. Alan Walker, the Rev. W. Cumming Thom, and Bishop Moyes—at the summer school of the Australian Board of Missions, 12 months ago. are printed together in The World Church (Angus and Robertson. 51 pp.). FOLDER The “Observer’s” comment on the award of the Order of Merit to T. S. Eliot in the New Year honours list: T. S. Eliot joins John Masefield in the poets’ corner of the Order of Merit. His position is peculiar because he became the hero of the Left while holding the views of the Right. The Left likes his break with tradition in poetic method; the Right, his support of tradition in faith and morals. His influence, while editing “The Criterion,” was far-reaching; as a practising poet and dramatist he considerably assisted the revolt against the simplicity of style and sentiment known as Georgian. Eliot was often allusive and difficult and he never lacked courage to go his own way. Champion of High Anglican orthodoxy, he has been, confidently heterodox in criticism. His observations on Milton evoked from that master of epigram. Dr. H. W. Garrod, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford, four stinging lines “On the late detractors of Milton’’: “Thou should’st be living at this hour, Milton, and enjoying power. England hath need of thee, and not Of Leavis and of Eliot.” Eliot, now an honorary fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, and D.Litt. four times over, was at Garrod’s College, Merton, and like Garrod has been Norton’s Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Garrod’s epigrams, published by Basil Blackwell .... are in print, which is a hint to lovers of the sharply thorned and finely flowering word. Eliot’s best-known play is “Murder in the Cathedral.” It is a tale of quarrels at Canterbury, but is not as topical as it sounds. * Stung by the statement of Mr George Bernard Shaw that Fabian Marxism has become hopelessly outdated, the Moscow journal “Bolsnevik,” branding him as a “reactionary,” describes an article Shaw recently published in London as “a disservice to the cause of progress and the struggle against the forces of Fascism.” It says that Shaw repeated that “archaic, bourgeois parrot-cry that the irreconcilability of Karl Marx in the fight against Lassalle. Bakunin, and the Fabians and leaders of reformist unions was a sign of the pettiness of Marx.” The “Daily Herald” says that when the Moscow attack was reported io Shaw he roared with laughter, and said: “The fact of the matter is that the newspaper in Moscow is 50 years out of date. Tell them that they don’t know anything about it and that I do.” Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) was a brilliant German Socialist. Michael Bakunin (1814-76), anarchist and revolutionary. led the violent Latin section of the First International against the political socialists led by Marx. A note by Edward Shanks in the “Sunday Times,” when the death of Miss Alice Warrender, founder of the Hawthornden Prize for literature, was announced recently: _ When I became the recipient of the Hawthornden Prize twenty-eight years ago, the prize itself, with the honour attaching to it, was naturally a matter for rejoicing. I did not then know that something much more valuable had come to me—a lasting friendship with one of the most remarkable women I have ever known. Alice Warrender, who instituted this literary award, was at first sight a formidable person, and of her generosity 1 already had proof. I was to learn how these two characteristics made up her nature. Whatever she did she did strongly and consistently. Those who once had her friendship, though they might at times incur a criticism expressed with considerable energy, yet could never forfeit it. The list of the winners of her Prize can be read, but the full tale of what she did for others will never be known She enjoyed givihg, and at the annual presentation of the Prize her evident pleasure was a heart-warming sight. But her pleasure when she was able to do a private kindness was no less. Moreover, to an advanced age she gave lavishly of her time and energy in such local matters as the affairs of the British Legion. A host of friends of all ages and conditions will feel that something unique has gone from their lives. MINUTE “WITH THE GREAT STARS LOOKING ON . . .” On the whole the most grisly story of letters this writer ever heard was told him in the lobby of the Hotel Albert in New York—by a very old publisher who hadronce been young. He said that into the saloon of that same hotel once had come with rather faltering feet a large-boned old man with a ruffled beard and a sombrero. As soon as he entered that saloon every man in it raised his newspaper up to hide his face from the old man. He went depressedly out. ... A spirit in his feet had led that very old publisher, then a young man, he didn’t know why, to follow that senior. He caught him up just as he was about to cross East Twelfth Street and, catching him by the arm, said he seemed to know his face. Who was he? The old man replied: “I am Walt Whitman. If you’ll lend me a dollar, you will be helping immortality to stumble on.” —FORD MADOX FORD: “The March of Literature.”