etting into the War the result could hardly be bettered. One never feels
that latent antagonism which readers, even though they may agree with him,
unconsciously experience towards an author who seems to be arguing a point.
Mr. BLACK gives the extreme views of the blatant patriot, and of the
anarchist and socialist who cannot see the distinction between arguing
against war on paper and arguing against this War on the street corner. He
makes us realise the people who think only how to make the War an adjunct
of themselves and those who desire only to make themselves a useful adjunct
of the War. He draws his types cleverly and states the case of each one
fairly, but with a humorous restraint and from a standpoint of absolute
detachment. _The Great Desire_ has plenty of charm regarded merely as a
story, but I recommend it especially to those who are apt to judge the
Americans by their politicians or to assess New York on the basis of the
HEARST newspapers.

* * * * *

If it were only for his complete fearlessness in following well-worn
convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of
memory, Mr. J. MURRAY GIBBON'S _Drums Afar_ (LANE) would be rather a
remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the
audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House,
and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a
hospital, where his _fiancee_, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in
the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational
_cliche_. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which
no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in
one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on
leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's
daughter, he quotes--

"I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more."

And, although the girl is annoyed, it is not on account of the citation.
Much of the story, however, deals with Chicago, and since my previous
knowledge of that city could have easily been contained in a tin of pressed
beef I can pardon Mr. GIBBON for being as informative about it as he is
about Oxford colleges. (He seems, by the way, to have a rooted contempt for
Balliol, which I had always supposed was a quite well-meaning place.) On
the whole, either in spite or bec