UNCENSORED' CELEBRITIES.*
THE first and most favourable impression produced on our mind by Mt. Raymond's book is that he has evidently chosen his own subjects ; he has not had them forced upon him by the necessity of completing some definite series. His essays are all honest attempts to deduce motive from conduct, to analyse character, and to put down the results in clean, intelligible English ; he interests his reader because he has first interested himself. On the other hand, he has been infected by the bacillus of' the intellectual class which urges its victim at all costs to be "clever." This leads him at times into making the deplorable verbal jingles which, in certain circles, are accepted as epigrams. " Have we really arrived at the path when we must be told that if the country is not safe in a statesman's hands, at least the country's safe is safe ? " he ask, in his chapter on Mr. Austen Chamberlain; but he does not pause for the reply, which no doubt Mr. G. E.. Cheeterton would be happy to furnish. Indeed, Mr. Chesterton might wisely be left to explore unaided all the possibilities of that type of antithesis. He does it very well and very thoroughly by himself, and we are sure that when he sees the havoc his pupils have wrought with his favourite form he must be tempted in the stillness of the night to repent him of ever having illustrated it. Mr. Raymond always means something ; but we like him better when he expresses his meaning in honest slang than when he tampers with the high explosives of modern journalism.
Turning from the manner of the book to its matter, we find the author on much safer ground. His attitude is eminently judi- cial; he can dwell on Mr. Asquith's virtues without insisting on Mr. Lloyd George's defects, and he can be just to both without being unfair to Mr. Balfour or Lord Robert Cecil. He is a democrat who does not paint a Tory all black or a Labour leader all white. He is vehemently anti-German, but he refuses to join in the vulgar clamour against Lord Haldane. He pleads consistently for a high ethical standard in public life, and yet he can find kindly and honourable things to say about Mr. Horatio Bottomley. On one subject only does his equanimity desert him : Ireland is for him the fatal problem. Any one who has dared to speak on behalf of Ulster hi, ipso facto, suspected of sinister activities and condemned out of hand. It is not to our present purpose to inquire how far the pre-war attitude of North-East Ulster was justified by previous history, nor how far her conduct in the war has maintained her tradition of loyalty to Great Britain ; all that we desire to point out is that any ono who has identified himself with that cause has thereby placed himself beyond the pale of Mr. Raymond's charity. Sir Edward Carson and Lord Birkenhead are outlawed at once ; they are not only self-seeking politicians, but turskilled lawyers and ranting orators. We thought, when we read of Mr. Boner Law that " of the few politicians who have emerged from the great teat with enhanced reputations, he is one," that his war record woukl save him from destruction ; but when we turned the page and discovered that he had delivered himself into the onfinom "hands of the Carsonitee " we knew that all was lost. We were astonished at the wholly genial and sympathetic view taken of the late Sir Mark Sykes, whose Tory attributes did not seem to us likely to recommend him to Mr. Raymond's affections, and whose special knowledge of the Near East was not in itself a certificate of righteousness; but the mystery was soon explained when we read :—
'But he recognizes two sufficiently obvious facts which the meat majority of his party have never had the candour to face. The, first is that there is an Irish question : that Ireland is not a collection of English comities, but a nation, and not altogether a small one. The second is that Sir Edward Carson's position is neither logically nor morally to be distinguished from that of the leaders of the Sinn Fein party. He use had the courage. not once, but many times, to call a spade a spade, and Sir Edward Carson an incendiary."
Mr. Raymond remarks in his Preface that while not laying claim to Judge Jeffries's power of " smelling" a certain kind of person "a mile off," he is 'not ashamed to admit that in some doubtful cases he has relied chiefly on his nose." No reader of the book will have much difficulty in deciding on the places where Mr. Raymond has substituted his nose for his intelligence; but despite the excellent precedent that he offers us, we cannot agree that animal scent is the best guide to human character.
• Unantawyd Cekbritire. By E. T. Raymond. London; T. Ilalter Souls. Iles. ad. mid
A hearty and outspoken prejudice has the redeeming quality of putting people on their guard, and just as Macaulay's readers soon learn to discount his rhetoric at the usual market rates, so any one who takes up Uncensored Celebrities will quickly perceive where he must make the necessary allowances for his author's pet foible. Out of this danger-zone Mr. Raymond is both acute and equitable. It is almost impossible to do justice, by a short quotation, to his diffused and penetrating sagacity, which needs a good deal of room to develop itself and produce its full effect; but as we have already exhibited him in his less in- spired manner, we must try to show something of his finer qualities also. We take an extract from his paper on Lord Grey of Fallodon :—
He is not what we ordinarily understand as a great man. He lacks the showier qualities. He has no power of compelling speech. He wields not the bejewelled scimitar of Mr. Lloyd (barge, nor the active rapier of Mr. Balfour, nor the trenchant Roman blade of Mr. Asquith. In sheer intellectual power he must yield to many of his contemporaries. Even in the day of his greatest prestige it was difficult to point to any specific superiority, character apart. in explanation of his unique position in England and Europe. But Viscount Grey is an example of the troth that a man may be larger than tho sum of his qualities. If ho is not a greet man, he is certainly a great Englishman. His chief weakness es a Foreign Minister was that he was too English. It is, I think, his chief strength to-day. He stands for English justice, English moderation, English avoidance of extremes. The world knows exactly what he means when he speaks of a League of Nations—that he is neither chasing a sentimental will-o'-the-wisp nor fashioning an instrument of permanent oppression for the defeated. The English people know what he 3-nerate when he avows himself a democrat while leading the life of an aristocratic recluse. For they see in him more than in most of his contemporaries that old liberality which so long made the English oligarchy almost popular."
in minor details Mr. Raymond is by no means always impec- cable. He quotes Dickens, Coleridge, Mr. Kipling, and Mr. G. H. Lorimer without managing to get any one of them exactly right. Furthermore, we should like to know what evidence he has for the statement that, "apart front Darwin, a physicist or two, a few economists, and the mechanicians, all British thought during the last hundred and fifty years" has been "borrowed from Germany." It is simply not true ; and even if it were true, the admitted exceptions are so important as to deprive it of nearly all its value. If Mr. Raymond takes a solemn oath to distrust facile epigrams and verify all his references, he will do some first-rate work in the very near future.
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