interesting book because it portrays in quite unforgettable verse the attitude of the airman towards life : The world looks barren from the air,

Its charms are lost-its soul is dead :
None of a thrush's joy you share,

For, when you thunder overhead,
Below you lies like some great plan
A hundred miles in one brief span.

You turn no corner with surprise

And wonder what your eyes will greet,
And know not what before you lies,
Uncertainty is very sweet-

To taste new pleasures with each mile
And see new fields above each stile.

There are no flowers in the sky

Which shyly lurk beneath the grass :
You see no cowslip as you fly,

By no gay buttercup you pass:
No waxen chestnut blossoms bloom

To cast rich fragrance through the gloom.

And here is his confession of love :

There are three things I love far more than all :

The quiet hour of dusk, when all is blue,

And trees and streets and roofs have one frail hue;
Sublime October, when the red leaves fall,
And bronze chrysanthemums along the wall
Burn bravely when the other flowers are few;
My grey and lovely London, where the view
Is veiled in mist and crowned with spires tall.

He gives us a vivid description of the thoughts that pass through the mind of the airman as he bombs unhappy innocents: he explains how "he who has knelt high on the night" will lose his mind's perspective.

Every boast

Which man makes will seem so childish, vain,
That he himself will never boast again.

For men will seem so small, their work so frail
To him who has been often wont to sail

Where half a country lay before his eyes

As he gazed downwards from the midnight skies. The air in Paul Bewsher has its interpreter, the Army its interpreter in Nichols, Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, and a host of other soldier-poets; it is strange that we should still be waiting for an authentic voice to sing to us of war as visioned by the sailor, but the fact remains that the Navy has, as yet, produced no great, no authentic interpreter.

H

I

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II

J. C. SQUIRE

WANT to talk of J. C. Squire the poet, but two things stand in the way, Books in General

and Tricks of the Trade, neither of which can be classed as poetry. This most versatile of our younger writers refuses to be classified as a mere poet: whatever he touches he adorns, and therefore it is necessary to notice briefly his achievement as a critic and a parodist before we aspire to place him in his proper category. Under the pseudonym of Solomon Eagle " he discourses glibly week by week on "Books in General" in The New Statesman, and under his own name on the same subject in Land and Water. He is perpaps the ablest literary critic alive and does for literature to-day much what Shaw did for the theatre in The Saturday Review of several years ago. All is equally good grist to his mill: his object in Books in General (as he too modestly puts it) "is to produce the sort of book that one reads in, without tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep." He does far more than that; he makes such unlikely topics as "Who's Who" and Political Songs matters of great and absorbing interest: he intrigues us afresh with the Baconian theory and makes us rack our brains to remember a worse line in poetry than "The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps," or a more futile stanza of verse than

Farewell, farewell, bonny St Ives,
May I live to see you again,
Your air preserves people's lives
And you have so
little rain.

Occasionally he condescends to act the critic in the conventional guise. "Mrs Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else can write a silly story half so well as she. . . . The hero of this book [The Rosary] is as generous as he is clever. He can conjure; he can make seagulls settle on his shoulder; and he does kind actions to widows." And again, "As I read his [Mr Galsworthy's] books I feel as if I were in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day.” He sees life as "meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible." “At heart a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell. As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the drains ; but after all there are other parts of the edifice." He puts in a good word for Herrick as one of the greatest small masters in the history of verse, and in The Muse in Liquor quotes G. K. Chesterton's wonderful drinking song, one stanza of which I hasten to write out again for the sheer joy of so doing:

Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,

He ate his eggs with a ladle in an eggcup big as a pail,

And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was whale,

But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to

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dine,

I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.'

"Lives there," comments Squire, “a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this he does not automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability, singing it?" It is splendid to hear him say of Samuel Butler that "though the worst of his books is good reading, the Note-Books is as certainly his finest book as Boswell's Johnson is the finest of Johnson's." He has an unerring instinct for picking out the superlatively good among the books he is called upon to review.

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Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing he speaks of as extraordinarily good. . . . Even readers who do not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur's jokes very amusing and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more unusual) new." He is not ashamed to say of Wordsworth, "And then one goes back to his poetryand his prose and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur speaking the deepest of one's unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and drawing out all the divinest powers in man's nature. . . . He speaks direct to the labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing." He defends Henry James: "In an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of craftsmanship." The books that Mr Squire would choose for a long stay on a desert island serve as an index to his character: Shakespeare, Boswell, Rabelais, and Morte d'Arthur. "There is a strong case for taking a selection of the more morose and bewildered modern novels .

or