Of People

MR. BELLOC—A PHENOMENON WHICH MUST BE SEEN FROM A LITTLE DISTANCE
The Silence of the Sea and Oilier Essays. By Hilaire Belloc. (Cassel, 7s. 6d.).
So Falls the Elm Tree, By John Louis Blom. (Macmillan, is. 6d), Outside Information. By Naomi RoydcSmith (Macmillan, 5s.).
Durham Company. By Una Pope-Hennessy. (Ghetto and Windus, 7s. 6d.).
WReviewed by WILFRID HOOKE LEY E English having invented the proverb "Jack of all trades, master of none," many of us proceed
to apply it somewhat naively to the realm of literature. Mr. Belloc has suffered some obliquity from this, particularly in his capacity as historian. How can a man be sound on the seventeenth century, they say, who has notoriously written some of the best comic verse of the day, who is a satirist, a wit and—most suspicious of all—a poet?
Nor do his accomplishments cnd there. French folk songs, architecture, warfare, wine—such things, too, are within bis province; the Belloc who has the battles of Napoleon at his finger-tips is also the penetrating critic of Jane Austen and the mart who has said fast word on P. G. Wildehouse.
Such versatility is bewildering to the average roan, and where history-writing is concerned it is suspect. The truth is that Mr. Belloc is a phenomenon who must be seen from a little distance, and only posterity will be able to do that. He is too large for his contemporaries to take in.
His latest book of essays, The Silence of the Sea, betrays his many-sidedness though the emphasis this time is on the historian. Of our distempered days he writes, " they erre vulgar and they are chaotic, the), are murderous. they are dirty, they are atheist, they are intolerably wearisome, they have every vice, but they are magnificent aids to the understanding of history."
The understanding of history, the holding on to the past if we arc to safeguard the tuture—that is the chord he strikes in essay after essay, and its harmonies will tingle in the brain (as Stevenson would have said) long after the book is closed. Flashes of the eternal Baste illuminate these essays horn moment to moment: the lightheartedness of The Path to Rome, the pungent ironies of Emmanuel Burden. the way of opening an essay with a sentence like " man said to me once: Do you like tripe," and of flinging it away (as Beethoven flung away the Scherzo of the Seventh) with a " With' which charitable thought, farewell."
And there is one essay which timorous hearts should absorb by reading it over and over again until its comfort has sunk deep into the soul. It is on Permanence — most Bellocian of themes. He affirms that the principle of permanence underlies all vicissitude, so that when we ask " When Shall we again know Europe?" we arc not asking a vain question. I hesitate to quote unless I could quote the whole essay, but here is the last paragraph:—" The Illitavens, which are so mewl: more ancient and will outlast that which they roof, are not themselves for ever. but they have ' forever' written large upon them. for all men to read, and. having read, to make raisin of their own dignity and of their hormonal destinies. We, part of their household, may on that account repeat without fear that flue Immemorial hills, the deep woods, and the quiet rivers Thal return," Or the books that have come my way recently, there is one on which I want to throw all the spot-light at my command. It is called So Falls the Elm Tree, and it is the life of a nun—one of those remarkable mother-superiors (some of us have been privileged to meet one from time to time) of whom one exclaims, " Well, if that woman could have a seat in the cabinet there
would soon be little the matter with the world."
She is Mother Ann Valencia, who with a SMail party of nuns went out from France in the 'nineties to start a hospital in Hertford, Connecticut. The bishop had put a house at their disposal, but the workmen were still in when they arrived, and this fact was symbolic of the whole enterprise—at its commencement. The atmosphere of chaos during the first month or two is brilliantly described. Mother Valencia hadn't a word of English; nor indeed did she ever learn any, to speak of, save the phrase " I fix," (which she picked up from the workmen the first morning) and, as time went on " 0. K."; so that " 0. K. I fix" becomes symbolic also a talisman or even a battle. cry ; for alter nearly fifty years of fixing. this heroic genius had turned St, Francis Hospital into what is clearly one of the largest, the most up-to-date, the most famous hospitals in the United States.
The author is a priest of the Society of Jesus—his identity with one of the characters in the book is a problem which I will leave readers to solve; a most intriguing problem it is. For the story is told in the manner of a novel. and I believe this was the only way to tell it. How else could he have got such a personality across, how else could he have made this indomitable woman live? Fr. Blom has all the art of the novelist; but he has something more—something without which the book would have been superficial and a failure Ile is able to lay bare the hidden springs of action without which such a career as Mother Valencia's would seem the merest activism and an ordinary though absorbing success-story. There is nothing a reviewer can do about this book but recommend it as heartily as he can. Even the blurb-writer for once fails to give one the faintest idea of its contents —its humour, its warm humanity, its excitement, and its deep spirituality.
A THOUGHT crossed my mind as I was " reading (and enjoying) Miss Naomi Royde-Smith's Outside Information that this is not a book one would like to fall into the hands of one's Aunt Jeminia—assuming that that lady is now sheltering from enemy activity in some Devonshire village. It is the record of seven weeks in September and October, 1940, and though it is largely concerned, as the title suggests, with the absurd rumours that kept coming to her ears during those weeks, a good deal of it describes her own experiences and those of her correspondents in actual air raids.
For my part (having as yet had few such experiences), I found the descriptions far
more vivid than anything I have read in newspapers (witness a letter quoted on pp. 133 and 134) for Miss Royde-Smith is no mere journalist but a novelist of exceptional power. The book will be of value to the histotian like Defoe's Journal of the Plague ; but if that journal had been served up hot while the plague was in progress it would have made poor reading for a frightened family in the next strut who were hourly expecting the germs to reach them. No, it is distinctly not a book for Aura Jemitea : but happily the dust-cover is So revolting that she is unlikely to give it a second glance.
AME Una Pope-Ilennessy's Durham Company is a work of salvage for which lovers of the past should be eternally grateful, She is salvaging the literary associations that cling to certain spots in the county of Durham, fragments of the old contemplative life, as she calls them, which clsc must soon disappear under the onrush of armament factories, shipbuilding yards, council houses and whatnot.
There is Seaham House (already some sort of institution) the scene of Byron's marriage to Miss Milbanke, Soekburn-on-Tees, where Wordsworth and Coleridge walked and talked, Mainsforlh, the home of Suttees, the famous antiquary, Rokeby, where Walter Scott "sees rhe Great flow Co meet the Tees," and Harnstetley, the home of the Suriees who wrote JorrOcks.
These are the chapter headings and will tell you what the book is about; no quotation would give you any idea of the interesting things she has to say or of the delicate charm of the writing. Many of us solace ourselves nowadays by re-reading our old favourites among the Victorian novelists, having on hand in turn a Dickens or a Trollope or a Biome: few ever think of varying them with a Surtees, whose books indeed have an exclusively " hunting" air to those who have never opened them. But they ale actually a mirror of mid-Victorian society: " We are shown," says Dame Una, " life in country houses and castles, the exact furnishhug, the paper on the walls, the woollen bell-pulls, the chair cushions, tlw antimacassars, the japanned work-tables. the hip-bath, the foot-bath. the four-poster. We attend the the clamant, and partake of the ballet food. we watch the, ladies in their flounced frocks and later on their crinothies."
Isn't this just what some of us are looking for? It would be interesting if Dame Una's essay provoked a revival of Surtces like the revival of Trollope some ten or fifteen years ago.