of the joke, the Count has unquestionably been having some fun with himself 'stirring up the animals' in Europe.

flattering, and is confined mainly to the intellectual and spiritual donation that each can contribute to the potlatch. It is no dry enumeration, but is enlivened with the scintillations of the auction room. Although Keyserling is probably partial to the Nordics, he tells us that the only tension he ever observed in Sweden was 'the one between a state of sobriety and a state of intoxication,' and that the Norwegians, 'even more than the Swedes, can be called the dregs of a race' - meaning that they have sent their best blood abroad until only the old maids remain at home. Hungary is taken as a text for a pæan to the aristocrat, and Switzerland is described as a fossil democracy. The chapter on the author's native Baltic lands, with its undertone of personal reminiscence, is one of the most interesting and convincing in the book.

He says, moreover, that he has reverted in this work to a mood, or sector, in the spiral of his developmental ascent, corresponding to that of the Travel Diary. Yet we imagine that the Diary, though so much the earlier production, has an illusion of authenticity for most readers that the present volume will in some degree lack. That is partly because most of us either know Europe better than we do Asia, or have a larger cargo of preconceived opinions about it, and therefore match our own ideas more obstinately against those of the author, and partly because the pundit pose becomes the seat of judgment better than the Shavian.

The last chapter, entitled 'Europe,' which is written in a more earnest style if not in a more earnest spirit, and which might serve better as the prolegomenon than as the conclusion of the volume, contains an original message. To be sure, it includes the author's commendation of a rather fantastic summing up of the American as 'a European with the manners of a negro and the soul of an Indian.' That is a case where Keyserling probably draws too wide a generalization from too small a particular, as when, after recording a remark by my good host Lycurgus, of the Kilauea Volcano House, he explains that the island of Hawaii is 'inhabited chiefly by Greeks.'

Nevertheless this is a book to be taken seriously, and is profitable to the reader precisely in the degree that he approaches it in the spirit of a disciple. For its author has had a unique intellectual experience of Europe. Ancestral and racial ties, student associations, social contacts, linguistic comprehension, all the fruits of a varied cosmopolitan existence ripened by meditation in systematic, self-imposed seclusion, truly qualify him for a hearing. He has the art of saying things that fertilize our existing fund of knowledge, and, without adding greatly to its mass, enrich its quality.

But there is food for thought in the passage enumerating the numerous points of coincidence' between America and Bolshevist Russia. "The life-philosophy of Russia, too, is materialistic and antimetaphysical. The sex emancipation which is the aim of young feminine America differs in no essential from the ideals and achievements of Russian womanhood. In exactly the same way American caste ethics are beginning more and more to resemble Russian class ethics, and American justice is growing more and more like Russian class justice; American intolerance toward everything un-American is also beginning to resemble the intolerance of the Russians. The same applies to the machinelike equalization, which derives from the same reasons in both countries. The lower the original social stratum, the more does the collective become the ideal In America, as in Russia, and in the sam as in Russia, the individual is sinking ba the undifferentiated mass.'

A true American he is the unhyphenated soul will also derive amusement from this book; but we fancy that it will make the author disliked in many European quarters. Some of this dislike will be based on misunderstanding, perhaps, for it is not easy to follow all the involutions of thought, the qualifications and subqualifications, and the balancings against each other of elusive and debatable national characteristics, that crowd to the point of prolixity some of the chapters. The translator good fellow that he is - has made it as easy as possible for the reader; but Keyserling should have such an interpreter for America as Herbert Spencer had in John Fiske. Without such elucidation the superficial reader may lay the volume down with a hazy impression that the English are inspired dunces, the French versatile plodders, and the Germans profound nonentities.

A chapter, or better said an 'essay,' is devoted to each of the greater nations of Europe and several of the smaller ones, and to the Baltic States and the Balkans as groups, followed by a synthesis in a final chapter called 'Europe.' Some of the essays have previously been published separately. Russia is dismissed as part of Asia, and Spain is psychoanalyzed and found to be part of Africa. Starting from the premise that the World War was an inevitable crisis in European culture inaugurating a new stage of evolution, the author appraises each important element of the Continent's population as a possible asset of the New Europe in process of formation. His appraisal is frank and not always

The Battle of the Horizons, by Sylvia Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 1928. 12mo. 322 pp. $2.50.

THIS second novel by the competent and youthful pen of the English girl whose Hounds of Spring ran down so successful a quarry on both sides of the Atlantic is by no means an anticlimax to Sylvia Thompson's promising beginning. The 'future' which critics foresaw for her becomes part of an assured 'present' with the appearance of this later book.

The embattled horizons with which this international episode deals are metaphorical as well as literal. The story pictures the effort at mutual understanding between the Old World and the New, as typified by an English family with its roots firmly established in tradition and breeding, even though the surface soil has been sadly torn up and impoverished by the war, and a young American girl, self-confident, shining, secure, new even as they are old, her strong young certainties reënforced by every luxurious influence with which her recently prosperous parents have been able to surround her. Perhaps no thoroughly typical American can be said to exist in this land where each section breeds its own special product, while England is sufficiently homogeneous to have created a far more definite type. But Athene Reid presents, doubtless, a truthful picture of a rather humorless, unimaginative, but well-intentioned young woman, whose veneer of cultivation and whose self-confident patter about Art and Life form a very thin surface to cover abysses of fundamental, unsuspected ignorance. The Graham family, into which she marries by espousing the delightful Geoffrey, is thoroughly typical of what we think of as characteristically English, and we feel in this novel, as in so many others, how much more the family, as a unit, counts there than here. Geoffrey's mother, with her clear vision, her deep reserve, and intuitive understanding of the actual shortcomings and potential possibilities of her American daughter-in-law, forms one of the most lifelike portraits in this excellent picture gallery, where likenesses of Patricia, Bobs, Clifford, and their circle of friends epitomize modern England. The character drawing in the novel is of perhaps more interest than the plot, though that is by no means lacking in eventful happenings, and is refreshingly free from the taint of morbidity or abnormality that mars so much post-war fiction.

Whether the narrowly escaped wreck of the domestic happiness of Geoffrey and Athene would have been averted by so complete a change of character as that which transformed a selfconfident young egotist into a chastened and repentant wife may perhaps be questioned - but we are glad to accept so optimistic a result of a mother-in-law's true talk as being possible, if not probable.

Miss Sylvia Thompson, with a sure and

sagacious stroke, has driven another nail in the coffin of the conventional novel of a past era. The insight and cleverness of her work entitle her to a front seat in that ladies' gallery of modern novelists where 'Place aux dames' has become a recognized slogan. In the case of this fresh and vivid young writer we are constrained to add also, 'Place à la jeunesse.'

A. L. GRANT

Heading for the Abyss. Reminiscences by Prince Lichnowsky. New York: Payson & Clarke, Ltd. 1928. 8vo. xxvi+471 pp. Illus. $7.50.

"THE World War was due to spontaneous infernal combustion,' said my wife in a moment of inspiration. A hundred years hence the historians will scarcely improve the verdict. And at the same time they will not be improving on Prince Lichnowsky's verdict on Germany's part in setting the blaze. 'Autocracy, incompetent statesmanship, militarism as a state within a state, the post-Bismarckian glorification of war, and, last but not least, our alliance with Austria, lay at the root of the catastrophe. To these one may add Herr von Holstein.' Thus speaks His Serene Highness, who, ranking with royalty, remained a gentleman, whose serenity was not only titular but genuine, and whose mental processes were not only honest but clear.

Prince Lichnowsky was German ambassador to London from November 1912 until he received his passports as a result of the outbreak of the war in August 1914. His brochure, My Mission to London, written privately in 1916 and published from a pirated copy in 1918, caused his temporary banishment, and started a controversy which had not ended with his death on February 27, 1928, in his sixtyeighth year. This book was the final form of his side of the argument. And his verdict was and remains: 'To cause a war without having willed it is an offense unpardonable. No worse accusation can possibly be brought against a statesman. We just blundered into the World War by mistake!'

Lichnowsky was a descendant of minor royalty, mediatized but retaining the social perquisites of royalty. Yet he was no conservative and clearly perceived that 'Europe's transition to the democratic principle inevitably involved Austria's disintegration.' He was wise enough to try to save Germany from betting not only on a wrong horse, but a spavined one. Always writing in good temper, and even suavely, his judgment is the more weighty because it is so evidently against his traditions, his friendships, his training. But, as he says, 'tradition is the hobbyhorse of all indifferent riders.'

The prince's thesis is simple. Bismarck after a great career overstayed his hour, acquired a grouch against Russia, or rather against Gorchakov, played foolishly with and finally allied Germany with Austria-Hungary for no