Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 11.djvu/301

 ii s. xi. AFRO. 10, 1915. ] NOTES AND QUERIES.

291

J. A. Thomson on ' Science,' which strains all the possibilities of a work of popularization in the direction of imitating the exhaustiveness of a German ' Bericht.' It is a fine record ably inter- preted. Dr. John Lees in dealing with German ' Literature ' had a subject apparently easier, in reality more difficult. He gives us a rapid, illuminating survey of the history of German literature as a lecturer on literature would do, by treating at more or less length of the work of the greater authors. For the purpose in hand, we should have welcomed, in addition what would have been, of course, far more difficult an account of the characteristics of the undistinguished mass of German literary work which forms the pabulum day by day of the undistinguished mass of the population. Two brilliant studies are those of Prof. Baldwin Brown on ' Art ' and Prof. Toyey on ' Music.' They might well serve as a beginning of their respective subjects for students intending to read these seriously, though in Prof. Tovey's some allowance must be made for the personal equation. Prof. Michael Sadler has borne the present crisis more steadily in mind than have the other writers ; he gives us a short article on ' Education,' containing a good deal of generaliza- tion something, in fact, more of the nature of journalism than are the other essays. Prof. D.H. MacGregor on ' Politics ' is as much an argument as a history of German statecraft, and works down to the consideration that a nation is, in relation to an international tribunal, comparable to an organized minority within a nation, and possessed of the same rights. " What," he asks suggestively in conclusion, " have we gone forth to destroy ? "

The editor of the volume supplies the closing essay on ' Religion.' This, again, has a direct bear- ing upon the question of the War, but is also a care- ful piece of historical work, and should serve as a corrective to some of the wild statements not infrequently made about a lack of religious spirit in the Germans at any rate, in the Prussians. Prof. Paterson describes in detail the special cha- racter of the German religious spirit, and the nature of the work it has accomplished. He does not refuse it the praise of great things, but seems to expect that " a climax of religious apostacy " may be at hand. Defeat might, indeed, bring the nation back to the Christian ideal ; it might also, he thinks, make manifest that as a people the Germans have not known their " day of visita- tion," and that their candlestick is to be, for a season, removed out of its place.

The Fortnightly Review starts out with a sonnet entitled 'The Pity of It,' by Mr. Thomas Hardy. The poet " in loamy Wessex lanes " has heard old words like "Thu bist," "Er war," and laments the flame flung between kin so near of speech as ourselves and our foes. Miss Anne Topham's 'William the Sudden' was written in 1910, and published in America. She has seen the Kaiser from pretty near at hand, and the portrait she makes of him causes one to suspect that the four years or so since it was set down nave seen definite, and one might perhaps add morbid, developments in the Kaiser's mentality. It is not difficult, look- ing back, to see that this is the same man as the War Lord : yet there is little in the sketch here given of him which at the time could have been supposed likely to result in the present state of

things. Mr. John Galsworthy invents delicately- one might say deliciously in 'A Sportsman's Reverie,' a dream about the creatures there are scores and hundreds of them, it would appear which have fallen to his rifle. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's account ' Within the Enemy's Lines ' of her experiences of the War in the early days of it, when she had gone to Brussels to set up a hospital there, makes a series of stirring pictures, some of which, even though so much worse things- have befallen since, may well rouse indignation. Constantinople bulks large in the articles on the War, and we may particularly mention Mr. J. B. Firth's historical study, ' England, Russia, and Constantinople.'

IN the last volume of 'N. & Q.' a query about Jane Austen's reference to Columella brought from one or two correspondents notes on the life and works of Richard Graves. Readers who were interested in these will welcome Mr. Havelock Ellis's lively and appreciative article on Graves and his book ' The Spiritual Quixote ' in this month's Nineteenth Century. The retrieval of an- almost forgotten and humorous classic strikes one as at the present moment a particularly pleasing enterprise. Mrs. John Lane's vivacious pen does good service in depicting the "true inwardness" of the German-American. Mr. J. L. Walton con- tributes Part II. of his discussion of ' The Case of Dr. Axham,' Part I. of which appeared last December. We expressed then our hope that the article would receive careful and sympathetic attention. We can but repeat the hope in regard/ to the present pages, which reinforce Mr. Walton's argument with weighty evidence which will take a good deal of gainsaying. Miss Estelle Blyth, describes vividly and in careful detail the sequence of wonderful scenes which compose the celebration- of Easter at Jerusalem by the Greek Church. Mr. C. H. Babington depicts with no little force * A. Town in Northern France: March, 1915.' The- rest of the number if we may perhaps except Mr. Ellis Barker's 'Bismarck and William II. : a Centenary Reflection 'consists of discussions ot various problems thrust upon ITS by the war.

THE April Cornhill will, we imagine, be treasured" chiefly for the description it contains of the battle of the Falkland Islands, from the pen of a mid- shipman on H.M.S. Carnarvon, who had the good luck to take a hand in this fight on his seven- teenth birthday. Admirably thorough and clear,, with its numerous plans of the different positions of the ships, its liveliness and well-told incident,, it is a remarkable production for so young a mind,, as well as of value in itself. Mr. E. Hilton Young*. M.P., dates last month from the Grand Fleet at Sea a striking poem called ' On a Battleship : a Volunteer's Reflections.' Its nearly prosaic sim- plicity, touched at the same time with strange- ness, its combination of manliness and dreami- ness, the curious choice and also curious handling in the metre, seem effectively to unite in one small compass more of the elements which go to make the spirit of the War on the side of the Allies than we have seen in most War verses. Another article, the interest of which ought to survive the current month, is Capt. C. T. Davis's instructive description of ' German Machine Guns in the Trenches.' The Marchesa Peruzzi de' Medici has a charming account of Walter Savage Landor as when a girl she knew him at Siena. She visited.