"Pam"

When Lord "Pam"&#* was born into fashion and fortune, England was still unconvinced that the U. S. existed. He was barely out of school when, as Secretary of State for War, he fought Napoleon (1809). Several months after Abraham Lincoln died, he died-- Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston,/- Prime Minister, the most popular nobleman who ever ruled England, the only Prime Minister who ever swept the polls without better reason than that he was himself.

Few beside his wife (he married when he was 55 and at 79 he rushed up to the gallery to embrace his wife after a debate) ever called him a great man.

He laughed at great men. Yet there was no greater man in public life anywhere when he died. Napoleon, Metternich, Wellington, Peel--he had sent flowers to a thousand notable graves. Gladstone and Disraeli--because he lived, they had to wait. And Bismarck had just begun. The last light of the 18th Century flashed in Palmerston's eyes--eyes which, shaded by a white silk hat, were too weak to catch any glimpse of the 20th Century.

Concerning this amazing character, Philip Guedalla has apparently learned all that a brilliant bio-romancer can learn. U. S. readers will not object if Author Guedalla's treatment of political problems is so trifling as to make him appear lazy when he is not facetious.

The problems, however, are dead. But lively Lord Palmerston is no longer dead--thanks to Mr. Guedalla who writes so incontestably well that even a Fiji-Islander would jump with delight to learn, a fact from every page. For example:

P: In 1830, Holland and Belgium were separated "by the sudden chemistry of revolution."

P: In 1834, Palmerston shocked England by opposing compulsory chapel at Cambridge. "Is it either essential or expedient that young men should be compelled to rush from their beds every morning to prayers, unwashed, unshaved, and half dressed; or, in the evening, from their wine to chapel, and from chapel back again to their wine?"

P: Germans (Queen Victoria's husband was one) muttered:

Hat der Teufel einen Sohn

So ist er sicker Palmerston,**

P: Austrian customs officials were terrified when they spied a case of knives stamped "Palmer & Son."

P: "He read everything and wrote an immense quantity"--but deliberately missed appointments including at least one with the Queen.

P: Queen Victoria laughed at his jokes "'till her gums showed." (This before she married a German and, in sentiment, became one.)

P: He had to explain to the little Queen what "bureaucratic" meant.

P: He pronounced guarantee with an unexpected "w" (gwarantee) -- it was a new word when Palmerston was 40.

P: He, 55, married a widow, 52, the same year that Disraeli, 35, married a widow, 50, and Victoria, 21, married Albert, 21.

P: He thought (surely not seriously) that Protestant life would be more secure in Ireland "if you could hang the Priest of the Parish whenever a murder occurred."

P: He said: "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow." When he spoke like that -- and he did quite regularly for 50 years, gouty England became blandly intoxicated and jumped bullishly over the moon.

P: In the revolutionary year of 1848, he wrote or read 29,000 despatches, and while other monarchs welcomed the shelter of a stable, Queen Victoria was free to have babies. (She had nine.) Did he boast? Of course: "We have shown that liberty is compatible with order," and every cockney gurgled down his beer to a mistranslation of "Civis Romanus sum."

P: He refused to be Chancellor of Exchequer in 1809. He refused again in 1852. He liked fussing over the despatches in the Foreign Office where, at one time or another, he received war-threats from every nation with a decent army. To all he replied in kind. He even (in religious debates) treated Heaven as a foreign power.

P: He became Prime Minister at 70. Disraeli, set back for another decade, yelped to a great lady: "An impostor, utterly exhausted, and at the best only ginger-beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon, very deaf, very blind and with false teeth, which would fall out of his mouth while speaking, if he did not hesitate and halt so in his talk--here is a man which the country resolves to associate with energy, wisdom and eloquence!"

Lord Palmerston was terrific. Like England when it was supremely English, he infuriated all his customers--and kept on getting their business.

Suppressed

As IT WAS -- H. T. -- Harper ($2.50). Boston has suppressed this book. It is the intimate, detailed, unashamed account of a living Englishwoman's love-life with a poet (Edward Thomas) now dead. She wrote it so that she might preserve her memories perfectly, completely, from the day she met him to the morning he laid violets on the pillow of her childbed. They were utterly innocent people who took of their bodies, as of their minds, words, books, faces, a joy that was neither sacred nor profane, but simply intense and natural. They were almost abjectly grateful for it.

Editor Middleton Murry published three of the five chapters in his Adelphi (London monthly) because they seemed to him truthful and beautiful and it was to that sort of thing that his magazine was dedicated. It is neither unjust nor unnatural that such literature should be made inaccessible to the indiscriminate buyer. Boston, of course, was merely prurient, yet those readers for whom the book is really meant may feel that it deserves suppressing for its own sake.

Itinerant America

When the U. S. was very young,* wooden bowls were turned where "dish timber" grew and "minifers" (pins) came whence brass could be drawn into wire. New England resourcefulness produced "Yankee notions" which found a ready market with the agrarian Dutch, the simple Quakers, the luxury-loving Southerners. Bright young Yankees left home with a packful of Neighbor Brown's nutmegs, Neighbor Smith's pie tins and Uncle Timothy's rawhide "whangs" (shoe-laces). Bronson Alcott hit the road with tinware and almanacs instead of going to Yale. Worcester Polytechnic Institute was founded by John Boynton, onetime pack-peddler. The original soap Babbitt peddled razor strops. Benedict Arnold took woolens into Canada. Cherry rum, gingerbread and candy were the stock in trade of Phineas T. Barnum before, aged 25, he bought "161-year-old" Joyce Heth, "George Washington's nurse," and turned showman. Purloining a sheaf of his father's sermons, the notorious Stephen Burroughs tramped to one empty pulpit after another.

At the ports, one's profits on butter-stamps, axes, ballads, candles, sermons, maple sugar, hats, horse liniment and soft soap, could be put into indigo, poplin, clocks, Bibles, Jews-harps, carriages, beads. One swapped for a horse and, if one's reputation permitted, peddled home again to dazzle the village with a city wardrobe and watch-chain.

Westward of Philadelphia the distances were too long for peddlers, so freight creaked through the mountains to Pittsburgh at $3 per ton, on blue and red Conestoga wagons, the drivers rolling "stogies" between mudholes.

German-Jews outpeddled the Yankees, who turned storekeepers --Woolworths, Wanamakers. The canal, steamboat and railroad superseded wagoning. Religion grew organized, shutting out all but the most gorgeous spellbinders--Sundays and Sankeys, Moodies and McPhersons. Book peddlers had to learn the mass technique that flowered in Elbert Hubbard, Nelson Doubleday, E. Haldeman-Julius. All that remain of itinerant America are the scurrying hired droves who still "drum" everything from coal dust to white space; the glib "representatives" whose backslaps, hotel snoring and smoking-car anecdotes constitute an unmelodioua ground-buzz in the U. S. chorus.

Peddlers used to be called "Bible Leaf Joe," "Dew Drop," "Johnny Cup o' Tea," "Leather Breeches," "Dutch Molly," "Shoestring Pratt." Now they are plain "our-Mr.-Zerkle," "our-Mr.-Bragg." Along the road they used to meet, instead of small-time vaudeville folk, really queer dicks like David Wilbur, Rhode Island's gentle, weatherwise, forest wildman, whose passion was scratching signs on pumpkins; Dan Pratt, the sawbuck philosopher, whiskered butt of a score of colleges; Ann Lee and her twelve disciples who rumor said were self-made eunuchs; and Johnny Appleseed, wilderness pilgrim, with his body in a coffee sack, his head in a tin pot, who took Swedenborgian Bibles to the Indians and in 46 years of roaming planted fruitful apple pips over 100,000 square miles of Middle America.

The Author of this encyclopedic work, whereof the wit is second only to the scholarly wealth, is Editor of House and Garden, the sedentary sound of which title he dispels forever with a romantic introductory prose-poem: a series of fadeouts from the motor-clogged highways of today to the first faint trails through the trader's forest.

FICTION

Gopher Tundra

DECADENCE--Maxim Gorky--McBride ($2.50). Freely translated, the pen-name, "Gorki," means "bitter."* But in this study of Russian babbitts, Author Gorky is no Sinclair Lewis. He is impassive and even pitying toward those stupid, acquisitive bipeds--serfs before 1861, small-town industrialists thereafter--whose tendency to "make another America" out of Russia was retarded by 20th Century revolutions. This lengthy history of the Artamonov family, father and sons, rising with their big linen factory to as much power as they can control, then losing it all, is not satire or invective. It is honest, impersonal realism, thoughtful though morose.

Bearlike Artamonov Sr. becomes almost lovable during his invasion of the town of Dryomov, with hia masterful bluntness, self-assurance, genuine humility, faith in work; his crude affection for his sons, his bold carnality. Pyotr, the eldest son, is no less stupid than his father except that he knows he is stupid. His endless wondering about the right and wrong of things is what undoes him. Did he kill the clerk's nasty little boy by accident, he asks himself, or in malice, or to save his own son an evil companionship. He cannot decide that and a hundred other matters. Uncertainty makes him surly and surliness alienates his educated children, hastening their departure and his decline from peasant-bourgeois hardheadedness. One turns out an indolent woman's man. The girl is a prig. The other son, bright and gentle, joins the revolutionaries. They are, as Pyotr was, boys without any family tradition. The seed of their difficulty, as of Russia's, was the so sudden liberation and enrichment of their peasant forbear by his aristocratic master at the Emancipation. The Russian bear did not learn to dance in a generation. In two it forgot how to dig for roots and nourishment.

Author Gorky introduces characteristic figures--the hunchback brother who tries to hang himself for hopeless love, later becoming a monk, then losing his faith; women of various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post--the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action and atmosphere of Decadence are typified in a single meteorological description from it: "During the daytime an opal cloud of acrid smoke rose in a column above the earth and at night the bald moon looked unpleasantly red, and the stars, shorn of their rays by the mist, loomed out like the heads of copper nails, while the water in the river reflected the troubled sky and gave one the impression of a stream of thick, subterranean smoke."

Gospel Fiction

DAWN--Irving Bacheller--Mac-millan ($2.50). According to St. John, a bad woman was brought to Jesus and he said to her, "Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more." According to Irving Bacheller, her name was Doris. He recounts where she came from, where she went when Christ said "go. . . ."

Doris was not a bad woman at all, but her love affair with Apollos, a Jew, had a pronounced geographical tendency that kept getting her into scrapes. She even had a child by Vespasian when the future emperor was only a centurion. Her wanderings make the frame of this novel wide. Her adventures, which are as unintermittent as they are various, provide bright colors for the picture.

It is a pretentious picture and Author Bacheller is proud of it. If he had written a more humble book more humbly he would have written a better book.

Mercenaries

THE BAND PLAYS DIXIE--Morris Markey--Harcourt, Brace ($2). Author Markey, the latest recruit to that swelling corps of young Manhattan newsgatherers who write disillusioned novels about wars, is not unaccomplished. His story has many an authentically stirring moment--a Yankee band challenging the Rebels with "Dixie" before the carnage at Fredericksburg; a sardonic Southern gallant shooting between his horse's ears on a midnight pursuit; the preparations for a lonely sabre duel; a bright-haired Richmond belle riding through magnolia-fragrant lanes and other pleasant spots. But the story itself is less satisfactory. The web of realism hangs loosely upon its romantic skeleton. Two cousins Hale, Canadians, are turned from Federal mercenaries into Confederate impostors, and from comrades into enemies, by the circumstances of being wounded and imprisoned, and of seeing Camilla Dame (heroine) walking in her pretty garden. Kirk Hale, the cousin to whom the author devotes most of his attention, is as thoroughly a blackguard in his way as was Captain Flagg of What Price Glory, the model hero-villain of all Park Row War fiction. Only, unfortunately, he is a dull blackguard, subject to long states of his author's laboring mind. Similarly Anthony Hale, the noble cousin: his silence is not eloquent.

*PALMERSTON--Philip Guedalla--Putnam ($5).

/-He was a Viscount of the Irish peerage, i. e., although an English nobleman he had no seat in the House of Lords. For 40 years he steadily refused to accept an English Earldom.

**If the Devil has a son,

Surely he is Palmerston.

*HAWKERS AND WALKERS IN EARLY AMERICA--Richardson Wright--Lippincott ($4.50).

*Author Gorky's real name: Alicksei Maximovitch Pieshkov.