THE DARK BRIGADE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3313, 12 September 1917, Page 53

THE DARK BRIGADE.

By Jessie Mackat.

Among the witty Athenians who own pur great Western Ally as fatherland we New Zealanders have a hazy notion of one Ambrose Bierce, an essay-writer of rather wider than CaJifornian reputation, who has added his quota to America's success in this special field of literature. By the American essayist a very high order of merit has been reached. Since Washington Irving and the floating "Fernleaves " of that strong-minded original, Fanny Ferm, flung on the River of Time over 60 years ago, there have been rich argosies of essay-writing sent trading to harbours of fame. George William Curtis wrote his strong, sunny papers half a century ago. Thoreau gave the world the hermitry of the Walden woods; Margaret Fuller pursued the rainbow with thornwounded feet in the world of the Transcendentalists far back in the rousing 'forties; and Emerson enhanced the art of the essay-writer with a mellow brilliancy that lit the reconciling path across the Atlantic, and met the volcanic glow of Carlyle upon the farther side. These giants of old New England have gone to the Valhalla of all masters of pencraft, and prophets of the later time; but America, though never again rising to the height of Concord in the Emersonian days, has also never been without her quota of fine essay-writers, instructing and delighting at the same moment. Few people here realise that America's fortunes are now guided by a man who handles the essay with a beautiful grace and a masterly power that marks the writer-born and the thinkercrowned. Woodrow Wilson's collection of essays, published just before his victory at the polls last year, is a sign of the times, for all who iiave read therein. The Emersonian influence is strong, but not more than friendship warrants. The moral effect of the book is immense: one has the novel impression of seeing civics transformed into prose poetry. The book, indeed, is a scholar's and a critic's : no political bar-sinister upon its scutcheon in an age when it seems increasingly difficult to touch Governmental tongs and keep white fingers; but yet one cannot forget that the man who wrote these literary judgments is employed thinking America into a newer world than Columbus found it. Of the true literary essay-fibre is Agnes Repplier, also, who for a generation past has shown herself a noble craftswoman of the pen in the highest periodicals of the West. Lowell's prose gift has been lost in the tricky marsh-lights of Hosea Biglow and Bird-of-freedom Sawin; but he, too, was heir to the classic tradition of New England in its prime. One would not say that Mr Ambrose Bierce is of this high company; but in this collection of his fugitive pieces, "The Shadow on the Dial," we have much that is true and a little that is new put into sledge-hammer phrases that hit home. He takes the standpoint of a detached, ultramodern, yet blase, journalist, with a long lapse back into conservatism here and there. On the woman question he is trivial, and of necessity his gospel is a gospel of earthiness, wherein the " good news" is , a scanty gleaning for most. But he hits on the weak spot in the argument with tolerable frequency, and on his breezy, off-hand conclusions, born of Yankee cocksnreness, it is possible now and then to rear a solid bit of construction.

I have been struck especially with an essay, " Some Features of the Law." In this he deals particularly with that profession whose common soubriquet may be euphonised into the Dark Brigade. Quite a few of us have not waited for Mr Bierce to tell us that the Dark Brigade, otherwise the lawyers, occupy a certain tin-godship in their vocation which will not be tolerated under a more perfect social order. True, he is on thin ice when he calls for a drastic revision of the good old British law that the accused is not allowed to incriminate himself. It is possible that a practical course of pleading in the courts would have made it. clear to the writer that innocence is not always clear-headed in the forensic sense, and cannot be trusted to "let its hand keep its head " in old-world fashion. And though there is alluring there is not absolute conviction in these sentences: "It is not for the public interest that a rogue have the same freedom as an honest man; it should be a good dfeal harder for him. His troubles should begin, not when he seeks acquittal, but when he seeks counsel. It would be better for the community if he could not obtain the services of a reputable attorney, or any attorney at all. A defence that cannot be made without his attorney's actual knowledge of his guilt should be impossible to him. Nor should he be allowed to remain off the witness stand lest he incriminate himself. It ought to be the aim of the court to let him incriminate himself—to make him do so if his testimony will. . . . Testimony of the guilty would assist in conviction; that of the innocent would not."

Bat In attacking the ethics of the present system, giving the lawyer carte blanche, as it were, in attacking the witnesses of the other side, as well as in simulating an enthusiastic certainty of his client's innocence, the writer stands on firm cround.

"The moral sense of the laymen," he says, "is dimly conscious of something wrong in the ethics of the noble profession. The lawyers, affirming, rightly enough, a public necessity for them and their necessary services, permit their thrift to construe it vaguely a personal justification. But nobody * has blown away from the matter its burnous encompassment, and let in the light upon it."

This is very true. It may be that we have so much els« that needs putting right that the Augean stable of the law as professionally interpreted haa been Buffered to wax dirtier, while the better element of society lias been busy getting

more suitable laws on the Statute Book for interpretation. But perhaps it is to women, and women who have had the unenviable experience of being handled in open court as suspects of some kind in their capacity as witnesses, that the ineaualities —the brutalities, let us say —of le modern system seem most repellent. As Mr Bierce says: "In testing the credibility of a lawyer it is needless to go into his private life and his character as a man and citizen t his professional practices are an ample field in which to search for offences against man and God." And one seems to hear the voice of the modern Hudibras in the lines that grace the argument: I grant, in short, 'tis better all around That ambidextrous consciences abound In courts of law to do the dirty work That self-respecting scavengers would shirk: "What then? Who serves however clean a

plan By doing dirty work, ho is a dirty man.

(To be Concluded.)