LITERARY NOTES

Hokitika Guardian, 9 February 1935, Page 2

LITERARY NOTES

FURTHER BOOKS REVIEWED

“Breathe Upon These 'Slain” (Evelyn ,Scott). This novel is the story of an English family from the Victorian nineties to the present day, and is a scrupulous record of moods and events that have gone into our making. But it is more than that. Its cenral core Is the question on the answer of which may possibly hang the fate of the world to-day—whether or not human lives are to be governed by emotion’s dogma, or if, accepting humanity for wh a t it is, there is still capacity for a will so to arrange the pattern of life that-each of us may become what he would. This effort to state the essence of the book is liable to give the false impression that it is am exercise in dialectic. It is not. It is the story of human beings whom Miss Scott presents with the wholeness, the respect even for qualities unsympathetic to herself, which she would hold a s a requisite to civilisation.

Tlie frame of the story is a little rented cottage in an English sea-coast town. On the walls hang faded photographs of the people who had lived there, pictures, that like geologic strata, record •faniilv history. In this ease the pictures and other haphazard mementoes nre pieced together to recOnsruct the story of the Courtneys. In the earliest pictures there are four little girls Meg, Cora. Ethel and Tilly. Frail little Tilly, the youngest, soon drops out. Meg “had her 'fate in her face from the beginning 1 ’ and congeals into ia spinster whose unconscious prurience costs the vicar his job. Gooa-looking Cora settles down as the adequate wife of a doctor who eventually achieves liis ambition of Harley Street. Their elde l brother Bertram, escapes the family and his own aimlessness in India and later, even more successfully, in unquestioning amiihiation i nthe World War.

•But Ethel, who likewise knows the anchoi'lesness of her generation, is ot the tougher female stuff. Neither the military fixity nor the theosophy in which Bertram finds comfort- will do. Tn the photographs you see her as always eager, always a little -dreading her own eagerness and a possible betrayal, and often committed to what her set and domineering mother regarded'as serious Tolly During the greater part of her life sh? is without a sure faith—and it is her scepticism which make Ethel so unique for “It w a s terrible to be faithless in an age w-hich had not hoard of ‘complexes’ and had to believe everything it was told.”

Miss Scott’s -Teaders will not need to he told of her capacity to grasp in a .‘line, a sound, colour or scent so real that it escapes the print into one’s own body. She seems to hare a de§i r e to know and to feel that brooks no facial formula’s nor comfortable platitudes to create specious and over simple solutions.

"A Wav To Social Peace” (H. Wickham Steed); In six essays the author describes the postulates of economic peace. After a, brief survey of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution |as they effect us to-dav he goes on to discuss t)ie ethics of Communism 'Fascism und S*v*ism. This discussion includes a well-written summary of Karl Marx’s Communist manifesto of 1848. In the third essay he deals with the fundamental quesion of the Machine Age—Better machines or better men V Or both ? Ho then touches on the principle of co-partnership or jcmployeepartnership, and the various attempts th a . have been made to put these into practice. Several pages are devoted to the New Zealand experiment in the sawmilling industry, and which will interest m ,a n.V. And th e last two essay.® treat problems of social structure, of political stability, international peace .and possible remedies for our present difficulties in all these spheres.