Confessions of a Journalist. By Chris Healy. (Chatto and Windus.
6s.)—.A firm of publishers may find it consistent with discretion to give this volume in its entirety to the world, but a critic has serious doubts whether it would be prudent to make extracts from it. All kinds of people and things are paraded before us in these pages. In the first chapter we are told about the International Society, how it prospered or did not prosper, and how it came to its end, the customary end of such societies, the bailiffs seizing the furniture for rent. Of its members, we
especially admire one logical gentleman who refused to work because he would be thus increasing the wealth of some capitalist. The International had its habitat in London ; but it is in Paris 'that our author seems to be most at home. He has acted, we gather, as a correspondent for English and American newspapers. He quotes a message from one of the former, offering two guineas a column for murder stories and peculiarly French divorce cases. We are told that both these articles are produced in more abundance and of a more characteristic quality in this country. And it is quite truo that even the most respectable dailies publish these cases in most unnecessary detail. Naturally, Mr. Healy has much to say about Dreyfus. He describes him as indiscreetly zealous, never content with doing his work, and rousing suspicion by making himself familiar with the affairs of other departments. The book is made up of many strange ingredients, to which the reader will add, if he is wise, a grain, or even more than a grain, of salt. Very often the author is behind scenes or in interiors to which we do not pretend to have access. Now and then, however, he comes within our ken. We are told how Arthur Lynch was driven into the course which ended in his imprisonment for treason. His books were boycotted or savagely cut up because he rebuked a roomful of acquaintances for foul talk,—" every man in that room was a book-reviewer." This sounds a little odd to the writer of this notice, who knows something about "book-reviewing." If Mr. Lynch really published a book with the title of " Religio Athleti," there may have been other reasons for his want of success.
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