BOOKS.

CHARLES LISTER.*

IT is not less than a privilege to be allowed to see into the mind and heart of one who went forth to meet his fate in this war as a bridegroom rejoicing. It is important for us all to know just how and why the youth of this country have conducted themselves as very perfect knights, combining reason with courage in a manner that before the war would have seemed incredible. Perhaps there was a tendency to think that as man lived progressively more remote from the primeval fighting instincts the standard of courage would be raised to the old level with increasing difficulty. But what do we see ? Courage has easily attained to the old level, and it has arguably surpassed it. The Elizabethans could certainly teach nothing to our own generation in this matter. Give the young man of to-day a cause which satisfies the tests of his reason, and whatever his imagination and his conceptions of civilization may do to dilute his natural courage by stretching his nerves and abating his resolution t.' suffer irrational violence, they will endow him with a hundred otherstitaining qualities capable of making him a more enduring man than t e type of our less finely tempered ancestors. While this remains true our Empire cannot perish from the earth. We aro grateful to Lord Ribblesdale for collecting these letters of his son, Charles Lister, who after being wounded three times in the Dardanelles died of his wounds, serenely patient and happy to the end.

Again and again we have noticed in the war that the finest and purest kind of courage, so far as we have been able to judge from letters that have been published, has been displayed by men who have not been afraid frankly to express an emotion or to avow love for their homes

• Charles Lister : Letters and Recollections. With a Memoir by his Father, Lord 1111blesdale. London : T. Fisher Unmin. I1Te. W. Det.1

and tenderness towards their friends. The greatest virtues remain the simplest. In the last analysis it will be found that a boy's honour, chivalry, and tenderness are developed at home. Home is their right soil. In rare cases they are the result of a different culture ; but we take one of the lessons of the war to be that the boy who has learned to feel a stain on his honour like a wound has learned that at home. This, it may be said, is a truism ; but it is sometimes worth while to remember that truisms are, after all, true in a finicking age given to over-refining and to separating effects from their obvious causes.

Charles Lister was a young man of striking unconventionality. In other times he might have spent a long life with a reputation for a sort of reckless moral courage—a higher-powered absence of self-conscious- ness—combined with a love for hard riding and hard reading. His absence of sell-consciousness was so supreme that it is recorded of him that he would rise in his seat at a theatre and express his approval or disapproval of a play. But the war-proved what else was in him—a patriotic determination, served -by amazing physical courage, which burned like a bright flame. As Lord Ribblesdale says in his brief memoir :—

" The War had taken possession of him with all the intensity of the Crusades of his younger days. Perhaps even with sorne of their glamour not much of this, though. This War was a very different affair and occasion. In Hooker's phrase, he looked upon our going into it as the strong and invincible remonstrance of sound reason.' He was no longer a boy liable to the Toistois and the Gapons and the Fabians. The Call had come upon him as the Holy Ghost came down upon the apostles— as a sudden great sound in the likeness of fiery tongues."

It is easy to be assured by the restraint of Lord Ribblesdale's writing about his son that here is no exaggeration. Lord Ribblesdale under- stood and knew because there was perfect confidence between the two. Charles Lister always wrote to his father as to one of his great friends. There is a charming touch in the memoir where a remark of Charles Lister as a child is quoted on the subject of guinea-pigs. He said guinea-pigs exhibited traces of " the worst human characteristics—dirt, greed, and cowardice." He was always stoically indifferent to his comfort—a happy trait which was, no doubt, consciously cultivated to its highest form during the Dardanelles campaign—and seemed to be untroubled by pain. At Eton his unconventional sympathy with political revolutionaries, and his propaganda on their behalf, soon became a legend. Mrs. Warm Cornish records his exceptional choice wf books in those days. In the Fellows Library he was chiefly attracted by the chapel-builder's wage-book and Caxton's Piers Plowman. Lord Ribblesdale describes his son's association with Socialism in a passage which delightfully mingles affectionate indulgence and irony :- "When Charles was still at his private school he became much Interested in a Hoxton mission and Hoxton affairs, and property ' came in for serious censure. Yet his Socialism—I use this meaningless word for lack of a better—was of quite a good-natured sort. Mr. Goldwin Smith predicted that the triumphs of plutocracy and of Grosvenor Square would end by making him an American citizen ; but Charles had no quarrel with plutocracy, or with Grosvenor Square ; they were in themselves Causes, and so respectable ; nor did he ever bother about persons or their views. For instance, in the days when he favoured nationalization of the raw material of industry—including our few family acres—and a comprehensive reconstruction of society, he never weakened in his liking for the landed gentry, the amusements of the leisured, and the Anglican clergy. Even the one or two important nobles who from time to time he encountered did not appear to make any disagreeable impression on him ; indeed he often commended their spacious ways of providing outdoor pleasures and good fare for them- selves and others. At one time Charles was alleged to have flown the red necktie of extreme opinions ; but a revolution would have had to proceed in due course of law—so I understood, and at the time he most favoured the nationalization of land he told me that he approved of some form of material compensation for the landlords—not indeed as a matter of abstract right, but of conventional equity."

Later Charles Lister was received into the bosom of the I.L.P. Lord Ribblesdale continues :—

" After this initiation, for I dare say a year or so, he appeared to be conducting a regular correspondence with various Comrades.' He lived and moved encumbered with papers, returns, and leaflets ; received and wrote many letters, and set up a business-like yellow leather dispatch-box of the shape and size now standardized by serious-minded persons. This rade mecum was constantly being mislaid or left in trains, but it bore a charmed life. This was not a cheerful phase, and he often seemed to be brooding over the intractable anomalies of a troublesome world. Still, there was light as well as shade. One day a reception of the LL.P. and a tea-party took plaoe at Gisburne ; speeches were made by leading Extremists slightly cramped in style by their courteous reser- vations in favour of one particular park and one particular proprietor. Mr. Clough, the Member for our division, made a capital, if unexpected, :speech, -all but rebuking Charles for having acted hastily in cutting himself off from the traditions to which it had pleased God to call him. Why he left the Independent Labour Party I never discovered—' Who men change their minds—fools never' is a good Yorkshire adage."

We must quote here, because it bears partly on the same subject, from the letter which Charles Lister wrote to Lady Desborough about the death of Julian Grenfoll. This is the most beautiful thing in the book: " I can't write what I feel about dear Julian. The void is so terrible for mo and the thought of it unite unmans me. I'd so few ties with the life I left when I went abroa 1--so few, that is to say, that I wanted to keep, and I always felt as sure of Julian's love as he did of mine, and so certain of seeing his dear old smile just the same. We did not often write of anything of that sort just for that reason, and now the whole thing has gone. How much worse it mast bo for you and yours. All of us loved him so, and I'm sure if I were back with father and Diana we should be in the depths and feel almost worse than I do now that one of our nearest and dearest has gone. I suppose that if death meant wholly loss, all recollections would be wholly bitter ; but the consciousness that we are recalling memories of one who may still be •near us makes recol- lection precious, an abiding realization of what is, and not a mere regret for what has ceased to be. I suppose everybody noticed dear Julian's vitality, but I don't think they were so conscious of that at tenderness of heart that underlay it. He always showed it most with you, and with women generally it was his special chasm. I think now of the way he used to take my hand. if he had felt disappointed with anything I'd done and then found out why I'd done it. I remember a time when he was under the impression I'd chucked Socialism for the 'loaves and fishes,' etc., and of course that sort of thing he couldn't abide, and he thought this for a longish while, then found out that it wasn't that after all, and took my hand in his in the most loving way. I don't suppose many people knew of the ardent love he had for honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty, and what sacrifices he made for them, and sacrifices of peace of mind abhorrent to most Englishmen. The Englishman is a base seeker after happiness, and he-will make most sacrifices of principle and admit any number of lies into •his soul to secure this dear object of his. It is want of courage on its negative side, this quality—and swinish greed on its positive aide—the man in his search for truth and in his search for what he believed to be his true self caused himself no end of worry and unhappiness, and was a martyr who lit his own fires with unflinching nerve. . . . He stood for something very precious to me— for an England of my dreams made of honest, brave, and tender men, and his life and death have surely done something towards the realization of that England. Julian had so many friends who felt for him as they felt for no one else, and a fierce light still beats on the scene of his passing, and others are left to whom he may leave his sword and a portion of his skill."

That letter contains the heart of what we tried to say above. Only a brave man could have written it, and only a brave man could have cooled towards Charles Lister for such a reason as is attributed to Juliet' Grenfell.

At Oxford Charles Lister distinguished himself by preaching Socialism to friends who probably found his personality more irresistible than his arguments ; by helping to organize a printers' strike against the Uni- versity ; by being " sent down " for a riotous collision with the authori- ties of Trinity College—he went straight from the scene of academic disgrace to work at the Trinity Mission in West Ham, which, as Mr. Cyril Bailey says, was " almost an inspiration in the high line' " ; and finally by taking a First in Greats. Afterwards he entered the Diplomatic Service and served in Rome and Constantinople. The war then called him. It was inconceivable to him that he could stay where he was. He joined the Middlesex Yeomanry, but when he had abandoned hope that his regiment would be sent to the front he ex- changed into the Royal Naval Division. He found himself posted to Staff work, and never ceased pulling strings till he was allowed to un-Staff himself and take his place in the trenches. " Still, bless the Staff for getting me out here," he wrote from the Mediterranean, " and I'd sooner be a doorkeeper, and so on, than dwell in Norfolk all the summer." Again he writes of the progress of his importunity : " I am painfully getting this intrigue through now, lobbying and waiting for the great." The intrigue succeeded and he was- able to write :—

" It is an exhilarating sense,-marching in front of a line of strong men in step, their bayonets bright in the sun and the great adventure in their eyes. They all wear shorts now and step along very gaily. The G.O.C. was pleased with us and said so. The division, as you know, is fearfully and wonderfully made, and combines all the elements in its officers—the Guardsman, the Marine, the Balliol man, and the retired merchant service officer. It is remarkable how they have welded together."

We have tried to quote -enough to show what Charles Lister'a character was and where were its origins. All the letters about him from the Dardanelles dwell on his amazing fearlessness in action. We find the whole matter summed up in the remarkably deft and sensitive lines at the end of the book by the new Head-Master of Eton :— "To have laughed and talked—wise, witty, fantastic, feckless— To have mocked at rules and rulers and learnt to obey, To have led your men with a daring adored and reckless,

To have struck your blow for Freedom, the old straight way : To have hated the world and lived among those who love it, To have thought great thoughts, and lived till you knew them true, To have loved men more than •yourself and have died to prove it— Yes, Charles, this is to have lived : was there more to do 2 "