MEN, MODES, AND MANNERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 4 June 1938, Page 4

MEN, MODES, AND MANNERS

ESSAYS OF AN HISTORIAN World's Wonder and Other Essays." By Marjorie Bowen. London- Hutchinson. 17s. This is a very pleasant medley jf essays by one of the most entertaining of historical writers. The subjects are not related, though a Dutch llavour hangs over many of them, and history, literature, and art all find thenplaces here. It is not possible in the space of a review to do justice to each essay, nor is it necessary. They can be conveniently divided into two groups, the historical and the literary. As far as the historical are concerned, Miss Bowen apologises for treating well-worn themes There is no need for such apology. The average reader’s history is not so well brushed up that it cannot stand a little further friction, and Miss Bowen’s cast of mind is too original to allow her to lapse into platitude. The iirst essay deals with a man of extraordinary powers whose name few people now know and whose fame is known to fewer still—Frederic II of Hohenstaufen His quick, indeed, almost incredible, rise to the highest place in the known world, his magnificent successes and his equally magnificent failures, are admirably recorded. We see here a long-vanished, almost legendary world, in which kings and emperors were indeed of a different, almos* divine clay. All throng- the historical essays there is a sense of times past with differe.it manners and different standards, so that the judgment is suspended, or rather modified. William 111 is dealt with at some length, for not only does he have a separate essaj to himself, but he o” his family come into the three delightful essays on the Dutch provinces -f Overyssel Drenthe and Guelders. He .s obviously somewhat of a hero to the author, or at, least a man wh„ has been much maligned. Her arguments against what might be called the “ Sour William ” legend are sound, j a add considerably to that nteresting body

of modern literature which whitewasnes anyone who has had the misfortune to attract the spleen of earlier chroniclers. With Mary Stewart, Miss Bowen is less confident but no less interesting. Here, too, one feels that her picture of the subjects character is probable and, within its limits, satisfying.

The literary essays are less interesting, unless one is a student of the curious, but they are never dull. In them the author contrives to give, not only a picture of the man concerned, whether he be Byron, or Edward Young, or Guillaume Raynal, but a picture also of the period concerned. She is an irrepressible historian, and her knowledge floats the subject in the whole period as a phenomenon inseparable from his time. In the process we learn a great deal more about the time than about the subject. As that is much more in Miss Bowen’s line, however, perhaps we should not cavil.

There is one essay which comes in neither group. It is a study of “The Art of Flattery ” as exemplified by the necessity that art has always been under of earning a living for the artist by the pleasing of his public, particularly when, as in the past, it was usually a public of one. It is the least successful of the essays, but not without a great deal of interest in its exemplification of the rewards that have always awaited the skilful flatterer. Even to-day, when the public appealed to is so much larger, that lesson is not entirely to be ignored. P. H. W. N.