GENTLEMAN-PLAY GOER

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 256, 25 July 1936, Page 23

GENTLEMAN-PLAY GOER

“Theatre of Life,” by Lord Howard, of Penrith. (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1.

It was not till after 1905. the end of the period he describes, that Lord Howard of Penritli became himself an actor on the diplomatic stage—if something can be called a stage when the curtain is never lifted except by a memoir-writer years after the performance is over—so it was as one of the audience that he wrote this book for his children and a wider group of readers. That wider group, he thought, might consider it “trivial, uninteresting, in bad taste or dull.” In bad taste it never is, and its trivialities are saved from being uninteresting or dull by the unusual quality of the writer. Lord Howard saw himself as an onlooker from tlie pit, but that lie never was. The GOOD acres of Greystroke that, lie rambled in as a boy made him one of a class that grows smaller as the supertax grows older—the occupants of the riclil.v-upholst.ercd boxes close to the special seat of royalty. However, his spirit was too strong to allow him to accept the ease that might have been bis. and after early travelling with his mother, and a beginning in the diplomatic service, lie roughed it in South Africa, prospecting, with a violently radical Australian, a Swede, a Scot, and a New Zealander named Fox. who. because he had been a schoolmaster, was “despised and considered to lie a useless product of a refined and effete civilisation.” That trip, besides giving Lord Howard a permanent interest in Africa and the Empire, must have made his book very different from anything lie would have written had lie missed the experience. Whether lie is telling of his experiences in the diplomatic service, to which lie later returned as a trooper in the Boer War. of his investigation of rubber-growing in South America, or of his attempts to copy South American practice in the West Indies. Lord Howard always reveals himself as an honest and admirable man, not, brilliant, but. witli a character that was better than brilliance.