THREE years ago this reviewer, in discussing the earlier volumes of this history, spoke of the writer as a man of genius. Now he would call the man a writer of genius. For, however opinions may differ as to the value of Mr. Churchill's Protean labors in the war as Private Member, Minister of the Crown, Soldier, First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions, and unwearied instigator, prodder, pusher of every man or method susceptible of advancing the Allied cause, none will dispute the enormous interest of his history or the flexible dexterity of a narrative which sweeps through the six continents and the seven seas, and yet never completely disentangles itself from the personal history and fortunes of the narrator. There is an Ego at the centre of Mr. Churchill's Cosmos, but if it lessens the stature of the statesman, it exalts the effects of the artist.

What a life it is to make history and then to write it; to buttonhole the supreme actors in the world's supreme drama and then to paint their pictures in colors of your own choosing! Readers of history who recall the portrait gallery in the stately corridors of Clarendon will remember what an accent of reality is added to the likeness of Squire Cromwell when the historian recounts his conversation with that racy Radical in the lobby of the House. Mr. Churchill's narrative is full of such personal snapshots, and yet, by a subtle dissemination of his personality, he seems never to depart from the objectiveness of his chronicle or to interrupt the progress of history. His gift of evoking a remembered scene and of etching the quick lines of a personal sketch are alike remarkable. It is not for nothing that Mr. Churchill's water colors sell in Paris even when freighted with a less distinguished name.

Mr. Churchill's talent for controversy does not fail him here. His enemies maintain that he slips through politics like an eel, but as an historian his opinions are nothing if not definite. He has his views about Robertson and Haig, Henry Wilson, Gough, and the rest, and he states them. Not for him is the rôle of the august historian apportioning praise and blame without favor. He hates his enemies, sticks by his friends, and damn the reader who disagrees! The muck and sweat of the fight are still on him. He is a man's man, and plays the game hard.

If the World Crisis is not a final history, it is a contribution to finality. No one else has written so burly a story of the Great War. The judgments may not be ultimate - the writing is.

A clever commentator in the Atlantic remarked some time since, regarding the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, that if the war did n't produce an unsinkable ship, at least it produced an unsinkable politician, and we will hazard the opinion that this book of his will be afloat and in repair when all but a fraction of the histories now written of these great events will be flotsam and jetsam on the shores of Time.

ELLERY SEDGWICK

Fire under the Andes, by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1927. 8vo. xii+331 pp. Illus. $4.00.

You wonder how anyone could have hit upon a title so reticent of its meaning- until you read Miss Sergeant's book; and then you marvel at the felicity of her choice of words, a felicity that extends from title-page to conclusion. Her fire under the Andes you learn through a quotation from Emerson and her own painting of a series of American portraits- is nothing but the light and warmth at the heart of things, the vital sparks of heavenly and earthly flame, which are as essential to human fulfillment as hydrogen to a balloon or springs to a coach. The title, you find, is most happily descriptive of the book.

To illustrate the need and power of fire under our mountain ranges of rock, Miss Sergeant takes fourteen contemporaneous figures - all living but Miss Amy Lowell - and subjects them to a biographic treatment very much her own. She counts it 'out of keeping with the sharp biographical method now in fashion,' and so it is, if 'sharp' must imply the exposure of all that is unlovely. If 'sharp,' on the other hand, may relate to penetration of vision and clearness of outline in recording what is seen, Miss Sergeant is out of fashion chiefly because so few can compete with her in these particulars.

In contrast with Mr. Mencken one of her subjects - Miss Sergeant alludes to herself as 'a dissident from the race that is being superseded, as one who has assimilated certain aspects of European culture.' Is it not precisely because she is thus a sort of amplified New Englander that the spirit behind her technique and in large measure determining it is what it is? Does not her unlikeness to the biographers of the latest mode lie in her willingness to extend a prevailing admiration and respect to the subjects she has chosen, her unashamed readiness to reveal these feelings? Her first act of discrimination is in choosing a subject - whether it be Pauline Lord or Mr. Justice Holmes, Amy Lowell or Paul Robeson. Her sympathies and comprehensions are broadly catholic. Her final discriminations

are implicit

one reads them rather between the lines than in unyielding type. Yet they are there, and the reader is constantly aware that the warm admirer of her sitters-most of them obviously her good friends is also their shrewd observer.

The method which Miss Sergeant has pursued with consummate art probably lends itself better to small than to large canvases. Distillation is a matter of the essence - the very antonym of bulk. The 'new biography' of which we hear so much will probably continue, like the old, to range in stature from the heroic to the thumbnail. In whatever dimension, Miss Sergeant has set an example of the sympathy, intelligence, and art which distinguish the best of biographical writing, whether 'new' or 'old.'

M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE

The Outline of Sanity, by G. K. Chesterton. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1927. 8vo. viii+256 pp. $2.50.

'A MIXTURE of a gossip and a gospel' Chesterton calls his last book, which is chiefly a reprint of articles dealing with his beloved Distributism. Defense of private property inspired by sad recognition that few people to-day can have any; return to small holdings; animosity against the department store and its kin; plea for manufacture to regain now and then at least its etymological meaning-here they are, his familiar motifs, paradoxically, discursively, but earnestly defended. There is no use in getting impatient with a whimsical mind. Some people enjoy, some don't, economic theory illustrated by absurd anecdotes, or a pun doing duty for an argument. Plodding intellects are prone to scorn the nimblewitted, and ingenuity in phrase-making is usually found suspicious. But Chesterton's books should not be regarded as a mere magazine of paradoxes. The puns often summarize close reasoning; the fables are true tales.

Here he is aware that we are between two fires: the conflagration of capitalism, slowly consuming civilization, and will-o'-the-wisp socialism, luring us toward a morass. This last he deems mirage, but he is as sure as anyone in Moscow that the glow in the opposite direction is burning up the world. So he follows the gleam of a Distributive State, descried by few eyes except his own and those of Mr. Belloc. And he says good things about it. He thinks that the two enemy fires are tending to meet as they spread, that 'socialism is the completion of capitalistic civilization'; nor is he ever cleverer than when he demonstrates that our capitalist monopolies are developing the worst features of socialism, unredeemed by elements of the idealist dream. Averse, in the sacred name of Persons, to centralization and monopoly, he demands that our mad stampede in that direction be stopped. Accordingly we are all to quit trading in big stores and to hunt up wee shops in side streets. A number of us are to acquire little lots of land and live on them, growing turnips not to sell but to eat. 'Consume what

you produce!' It shall be a mystic battle cry, on the banners which high souls ready for sacrifice shall follow. And if we skeptically demand a more definite plan we are reminded that the author's predecessors Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Rousseau, and the rest-never had any. Chesterton for his part declines to be discouraged; insists that 'a law of nature can be recognized by resisting it,' and that we can give up our bad ways if we like. Material prosperity may suffer

who cares? If we can make men happier it does not matter if we make them poorer, it does not matter if we make them less productive.' To release men from the tyranny of the stereotype we must break up our regimented society.

No apology for vagueness is needed. Technical propositions of possible ways to counteract the rush to concentrate property appear casually in the midst of the fireworks. But the book is concerned rather with furthering an attitude than with presenting a programme, and the attitude is a popular one just now. The demand to set people free to be whole men, not pieces of men nor men run in moulds, is at work in the crudest forms of revolt among young people as well as in the theories of our social philosophers. A way out must be found, and the bureaucratic solutions proposed by socialist schools of the eighties are discredited. Whether peasant proprietorship is the way, who knows? Chesterton perceives that civilization is always going to have a number of diverse expressions. He even realizes that sporadically, as in the case of Ford cars, mass production may restore individual freedom, or an electric power plant help the peasant to contentment which, parenthetically, happens in Switzerland, where electric bulbs inside the chalets contrast so queerly with manure heaps outside. The most ardent socialist can grant that the instinct for personal property has a value not to be forfeited, and that in the better society of the future the small farm, the small shop, may play a pleasant part. Chesterton would probably confess that he is nearer the socialists than the capitalists. For the socialist appeal owes half its force to its indictment, with which he is in complete accord. The spectacle of masses of men held in wage dependence is obnoxious to him. Between the capitalists and himself there can hardly be truce; between him and the socialists it is hard to discern a present quarrel, though the roads will obviously diverge in time. Ruskin could not energize his Guild of St. George; Tolstoy has bequeathed a memory of tragic defeat. Will Chesterton succeed where they failed? If not, he will take failure with his own imperturbable good humor and optimism.

VIDA D. SCUDDER

Mr. Fortune's Maggot, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York: The Viking Press. 1927. 12mo. viii+241 pp. $2.00.

WHEN Miss Warner's publishers decided a year ago to bring out an American edition of her first