of the same author's epigrams, Lampoons, was very widely quoted. An American poet of unusual promise, Mr. J. V. Nicolson, offered two individual works, The Sainted Courtezan and King of the Black Isles, while Mr. Robert Graves stood sponsor for another cynical but skilful American writer in Grace After Meat, by Mr. John Crowe Ransom.

In regard to the year's fiction, some critics discerned a steady return to the romantic, which was, indeed, exemplified in a few striking stories. The chief of these, Joseph Conrad's Suspense, was interrupted at a stage from which the denouement could not be foreseen. Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey, at the end of his career as editor of the Spectator, surprised his lieges with a first novel, The Madonna of the Barricades, the story of the Hon. George Chertsey's plunge with his Carbonarist Italian lady-love into the revolution of 1848. An older practitioner, Mr. Stanley Weyman, showed his accustomed skill in Queen's Folly. Mr. H. G. Wells, often urged to revert to an earlier manner, compromised acceptably in * Christina Alberta's Father. Sir Anthony Hope's later style is increasingly complex, and Little Tiger, in itself a moving tale, was weakened, perhaps designedly, by being related at two removes. The tree in Mr. J. D. Beresford's The Monkey-Puzzle was Tristram Wing's symbol for the malicious gossip that caused a kiss to bring deep suffering to at least three people. Mr. Frank Swinnerton had no more cheerful a theme in The Elder Sister, the tragedy of a group of those commonplace wage-earners still so lamentably rare in our fiction-two sisters loving the same weak egotist, who married one, betrayed her with the other, and so broke them both. Another of Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson's high-minded heroes weltered in emotionalism throughout One Increasing Purpose. Mr. Somerset Maugham's story of the punishment of a guilty love on a station in China, The Painted Veil, lost before its conclusion the edge and tension of the earlier chapters. Two of the most considerable performances were war novels. Mr. Ford Madox Ford's No More Parades, a sequel, though not a conclusion, to last year's Some Do Not, showed his uncompromising Tietjens in the nightmare surroundings of a base camp, where his unspeakable, unintelligible wife again contrived his undoing. Mr. R. H. Mottram's Sixty-Four, NinetyFour was also a sequel, retelling the story of The Spanish Farm, this time from the point of view of the young English officer, not the Flemish girl, incidentally presenting a valuable record of the small cumulative changes in environment on the Western Front from the early days to the end. The intensity, the very extravagance of power in Harvest in Poland, by Mr. Geoffrey Dennis, placed it in a class by itself, as remote from ordinary novels as his young undergraduate's battle with the actual powers of hell in the house of an ancient Polish family was from ordinary experience. The crucial scenes in Mr. Hugh Walpole's essay in the macabre, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, were, by comparison, unexciting. Cubwood, by Mr. W. R. Sunderland Lewis, recaptured small-boyhood for his readers in incidents curiously gruesome and sensational for such a theme, and Mr. T. F. Powy's obsession with the cruelty and degradation of human beings was again displayed in Mr. Tasker's Gods. Critics disagreed as to whether Mr. Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves was his master

piece or evidence of a sad decline. The Polyglots, Mr. W. Gerhardi's second effort in the Russian mode, made exhilarating comedy with another finely confused household in Harbin during the post-Armistice period. Mr. Michael Sadleir represented an entirely opposite school with The Noblest Frailty, handling a straightforward romance of the 'sixties in quite the manner of the period, despite his disclaimer of having attempted a midVictorian pastiche. In *Cat's Cradle Mr. Maurice Baring gave a close and crowded picture of half a century of social history. Two experiments in unauthorised Biblical exegesis appeared-Mr. Robert' Nathan's amusing version of the story of Jonah, Son of Amillai, and the more ambitious *My Head! My Head! by Mr. Robert Graves. The strength and fanaticism of the old Jewish faith were dramatically displayed in Mr. Louis Golding's Day of Atonement. A first novel, Piano Quintet, by Mr. Edward Sackville West, was a striking study of the inter-relation and inward isolation of five musicians, one woman and four men, touring the Continent. Mr. D. H. Lawrence presented another of his strange fierce parables in St. Mawr. The outstanding achievement among works by American novelists was undoubtedly Martin Arrowsmith, by Mr. Sinclair Lewis.

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Jane Austen found herself included among the women novelists of 1925 by virtue of her last work, Sanditon, a fragment in twelve chapters, writen in 1817, remarkable for its unwontedly high spirits and its novel setting in a newly-launched bathing-place. Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith's *The George and the Crown followed the fortunes of the homely, unheroic hero from Sussex to Sark and back again to the Downs. Elizabeth" kept the inevitable painfulness of her theme in* Love well subdued through two hundred pages of her book. Miss Naomi Royde-Smith, celebrated for her connexion with the old Westminster Gazette, published a first novel, The Tortoiseshell Cat, describing the getting of wisdom by a charming girl who had grown up aware of everything but realities. Miss May Sinclair was once more among the clergy in* The Rector of Wyck, while Mrs. Virginia Woolf made another of her interesting technical experiments in * Mrs. Dalloway. From America came Mrs. Edith Wharton's * The Mother's Recompense, and an earlier novel by a dramatist, Mrs. Susan Glaspell's The Glory of the Conquered, the tale of the devotion of a brilliant wife who gave up her own art to help in the work of her husband, a blinded scientist. From far away and long ago came the first of the six contemplated volumes of The Tale of Genji, translated by Mr. Arthur Waley from the Japanese of the Lady Murasaki, who wrote in the eleventh century this story of an Emperor's son and his amours.

Short stories composed several memorable volumes, headed by Tales of Hearsay, by Joseph Conrad, to which Mr. R. B. Cunninghame-Graham contributed an admirable preface. Mr. John Galsworthy's short tales were all assembled and attractively correlated in a single volume, Caravan. Mr. Walter de la Mare exerted his special enchantments in Broomsticks and Other Tales, to which Mr. A. E. Coppard's Fishmonger's Fiddle offered an effective contrast in solidity, strength, and earthliness, especially in his rural tales. Mr. John Metcalfe delighted amateurs of the shudder with

The Smoking Leg, and Mr. Gerald Bullett's originality and power made a success of The Baker's Cart. Two volumes of singular charm and artistry -Mr. Wilfranc Hubbard's *Orvieto Dust, and Mrs. Naomi Mitcheson's Cloud-Cuckoo Land-were devoted to studies from the antique. The chief characters in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Tales of the Long Bow set out to demolish standard proverbs and achieve accepted impossibilities, and the author's combative fancy thus gave itself unlimited scope. There was plentiful entertainment in Mayfair, a dozen of Mr. Michael Arlen's richly, too richly, decorated revelations of what appeared to him "the real state of affairs existing in the very Heart of London." Lastly, though it was a 1924 book, the illustrated edition of * The Twilight of the Gods, by Richard Garnett had a spice and a charm of its own which set it in a category apart; so great was its excellence that it may fittingly serve as an addendum to the review of the literature of the year 1925.

Of the above books the following have been deemed suitable for special notice; they are given in the order in which they happen to appear in the General Survey :

GENERAL LITERATURE.

King Edward VII. A Biography. By Sir Sidney Lee. Volume I. (Macmillan).—These eight hundred pages cover the sixty years of the life of Edward VII. as Prince of Wales, and close with his accession to the throne, and the volume was read with avidity by an interested public. Sir Sidney carefully points out that his is not an "official" biography, and though it has been compiled at the request of the present King, and owes everything to the facilities His Majesty has afforded, the author himself bears the sole responsibility for its form and contents. This does not indicate that Sir Sidney has permitted himself any indiscretions: his work might well rank with that of a courtier, for all its lack of obsequiousness and its candid acceptance of the limitations of the personality with which it deals. To some extent Mr. Lytton Strachey had already stolen Sir Sidney's thunder. If the former's Queen Victoria had not appeared, the earlier chapters in the present volume would have caused considerably more excitement. Even now the father and mother who subjected their son to a training so utterly unsuited to his character and needs, appear almost sinister figures. If the passing of a legend of supreme benevolence and wisdom has thus done the author some service, the Great War has helped him in another particular by removing any obstacles to the open discussion of Anglo-German relations throughout the Victorian era. William II. is naturally handled with some severity, even with less recognition than might have been expected of the fact that the nephew's early environment was as unpropitious as the uncle's, if in a different way, and acted upon a far less stable mentality. It would be otiose to follow Sir Sidney step by step through the details of the career of the Prince of Wales-his public appearances, his part in ceremonial occasions, his travels, and the liketreated as they are with a fullness to which more picturesque qualities

have been sacrificed. It is the connexion between the slow reorientation of our foreign policy, and the Prince's relations to his mother, that emerges from these pages almost with the effect of a dramatic plot, and so presents a line the reader may follow to his great enlightenment. Perhaps the most important and illuminating part of the work is Sir Sidney's account of the relations between the Prince and William II. over a lengthy period. As for the personality of the Prince himself, Sir Sidney does not disguise its limitations, his preoccupation with matters of ceremony, physical qualities, manners, social standing, and dress, his acceptance of lower standards in more important respects, and his indifference to letters and learning. Nevertheless, he pays due tribute to the Prince's invincible charm, generosity, and open-mindedness, his power of assimilating and retaining information, and his ability to profit by any opportunities of travel or any intercourse with eminent men. His interest and activity in social and philanthropic work are also shown by Sir Sidney to have been greater than has generally been realised. In its whole plan the book naturally follows a more austere tradition than that at present in favour, but it is by no means difficult reading, and takes its place, not by right of its subject alone, among the most important biographies of our time.

Robert Owen, by Mr. G. D. H. Cole (Benn), would evoke, if nothing more, a tribute of admiration to the industry of an author who could, in a single year, produce this study, a volume on Cobbett, an historical treatise on the Working Class Movement, and some part of an entertaining detective story. Mr. Cole's book has not the scope of Podmore's lengthy biography; on the other hand it gives Owen his proper political importance, and the 1830-1834 period of his leadership of the militant trade unions has the benefit of the author's unrivalled familiarity with that movement. While he adds nothing to the story of Owen's life, which is treated quite adequately for his purpose in a brief opening chapter, Mr. Cole subjects his personality to a scrutiny no one could call too sympathetic, and explains his failure to inspire any warmer feeling by his too rigid devotion to principle. Yet this is the story of a great originator, perhaps the most remarkable pioneer of the social reconstruction of the nineteenth century, and Mr. Cole docs him in that aspect every justice. He was not, says Mr. Cole, the great economist and financier so many of his contemporaries thought him: the economic basis of his colonies and Labour Exchanges was always unsound. But his ideas were germinal, and he came back from America to find that they had spread among the working classes of England, and that his place was at the head of the co-operative production movement which was to lead to his foundation of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, whose defeat involved his own. Mr. Cole views him as one who became progressively a little madder from 1817 onwards, and he has obviously an imperfect sympathy for Owen's essentially patronising, benevolently authoritarian attitude to the classes to whose interests he devoted such unwearying energy and ingenuity. He left them at least an inspiration that is not yet exhausted.

Cardinal Newman, by Bertram Newman (Bell).-This study of Newman is written almost entirely from the literary standpoint, theology being

regarded only as providing the subject of his most famous passages. is curious that this aspect of him should have been so long ignored, for the Cardinal was a superb stylist, a moving poet, and a brilliant wit. Even the Apologia has overshadowed work of his that deserves quite as much attention, for a piece of polemics and self-analysis combined, written at a high speed, inevitably has its blemishes. Mr. Bertram Newman has wisely lured his readers towards the original form of the Apologia, as it was before the onslaught on Kinglsey's position was deprived of so much of its vigour. A very striking section of the present work is that dedicated to Newman's noble failure in his efforts towards a liberal Catholic University in Ireland, and the lectures on "The Idea of a University." The historical essays and the Discourses include many of his most trenchant pages, and the devotional writings have a fervour and beauty to which the harshest materialist could scarcely be insensitive. As a biographer Mr. Bertram Newman shows a praiseworthy impartiality, his treatment of Kingsley and Manning providing an excellent test of that quality in this connexion. His Cardinal is an intelligible human being and a writer of rare gifts whose themes will, of necessity, limit the number of his admirers. To those who can remain indifferent to the religious issues evoking the best of Newman's work, his namesake's book should afford invaluable guidance.

Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916, by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, K.G. Two volumes (Hodder & Stoughton).-Lord Grey's book was not intended as an autobiography, and such self-revelation as it contains is largely undesigned and correspondingly delightful. His aim was to give "a true impression of the course of events that led to Britain's part in the war," and he has provided what will surely be the leading exposition of its causes. As Under-Secretary to Lords Rosebery and Kimberley at the Foreign Office from 1892-1895 he had seen for himself that the position of Britain "was not isolation, and it was far from being splendid." Ten years later, when he came back to office, he found the Entente established, and devoted himself to its consolidation and to the destruction of all obstacles to good-feeling between this country and Russia, achieving both ends without in any way compromising Britain. But from the early days he had found it very hard to deal with Germany. In the matter of naval competition "we could come to no agreement, and," says Lord Grey, "it was not our fault." Campbell-Bannerman, Haldane, Churchill found their suggestions ignored, and the Foreign Secretary could reach agreement on such controversial points as the Baghdad railway and Portuguese Africa, but on the naval question no progress could be made. Our conciliatory efforts even caused alarm in Paris and St. Petersburg, yet nothing could subdue that inveterate and ineradicable distrust" prevailing in Berlin. So the tragedy neared. Lord Grey makes it clear that we had promised no co-operation whatever against Germany in the event of war; our military discussions were simply such as were in the circumstances reasonable and inevitable. His most fascinating chapter sums up the considerations dominating him during the days immediately preceding the outbreak of war. He knew that the catastrophe must, if possible, be averted; that everything depended upon Germany; that the Government

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