New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson, 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue. Books by GLD at IWP Books:

• 1901, The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue
• 1903, Letters from a Chinese Official
• 1905, A Modern Symposium
• 1907, Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue
• 1914, Appearances: Being Notes of Travel
• 1920, The Magic Flute
• 1930, After Two Thousand Years

And: E. M. Forster, 1934, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

E. M. Forster wrote that A Modern Symposium, might be called the “Bible of Tolerance.” The same might be said of Justice and Liberty: A Political Dialogue.

New at IWP Books: Thomas Raucat (1924) The Honorable Picnic. One of Jacques Barzun’s Favorite Books: “A novel of Japan that is hilarious through much of its span and turns beautifully tragic in a brief scene at the end. Expertly translated from the French.”

New at IWP Books: Hugh Edwards (1933) All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s. One of Jacques Barzun’s “Favorite Books”:

A strange, short novel that has been rediscovered more than once, been called a masterpiece by James Agate and Ian Fleming, and became popular as a BBC broadcast. In my experience it never fails to grip those to whom I recommend it, though its power, like its plot, is hard to explain.

Review at the Neglected Books Page.

New at IWP Books: Bernard Berenson (1952) Rumour and Reflection. On April 19, 1944:

London and New York send missionaries to China, to Africa, to the remotest and wildest parts of the earth, to inculcate the Gospel by the example of their own standard of life. Likewise we send expeditions to study the manners, customs, folkways of Trobriand, Easter Islands and other fashionable haunts of over-excited anthropological curiosity.

Many, myself included, question whether missionaries are not wasting our money, and their energies not doing the objects of their zeal more harm than good. We believe there are no end of Trobrianders, Easter Islanders and other neolithics, not to speak of palaeolithics, in our midst: in our slums as well as in every grade of society, the fashionable not least. We should prefer our missionaries to sacrifice themselves rather in humanizing these savages or barbarians, these fetish worshippers in our own ranks.

Anthropology should begin at home.

By anthropology I mean the study of usages, practices, manners, customs, beliefs, superstitions, etc., etc., that do not readily submit to rational treatment but remain as they are, mobile or fixed, and find brilliant defenders armed with all the learning that up-to-date research can apply.

I could wish that our anthropologists grew serious, and forgoing aquatic picnics among Pacific Islands would devote laborious years to the study of all that is naively taken for granted and no less tenaciously than irrationally held, by the average matron, the average business man, the average cleric, the average lawyer, the average soldier, sailor, administrator, butcher, baker, etc., etc., in our own societies, high and low, low and high.

Something of this kind must have been in the mind of the late Prof. Sumner of Yale with his sociological investigation and publications. Far from being a Philistine as Van Wyck Brooks designated him, we should honour him as the great scholar and pioneer that he was. What he meant to initiate was an inquiry as to what in our own people was too fixed, too immovable to yield to immediate philanthropic effort or legislative decree. What among “the heirs of all the ages in the foremost ranks of time” remains as little subject to persuasion and even to force as any other irrational energy, say a certain volume of water in motion or turning to steam.

You know enough about the nature of water not to argue with it, preach to it, or appeal to its better instincts. You let it alone; or if you must deal with it and want it to take a more convenient turn, you provide ample space for its career by canals, sluices, safety-valves and other devices.

Human nature in a given moment, at a given place is scarcely more subject to reason or persuasion.

From Jacques Barzun, “Berenson and the Boot” (The Griffin, 1952, @ IWP Articles).

The title, which appears perfect as one looks back on it, does not disclose ahead of time the character of the work. It is a diary kept in wartime, yet it is by no means a war diary. It is a journal in the grand manner of Gide — full of observations of men, art, and society; yet it is not simply a stream of thought accompanying work in progress. No life goes on in it but that of rumor and reflection, linked with the hope of survival. The sequence of intermittent jottings does show a dramatic shape, but this comes from the time and the events. We meet the author in January 1941 and he drops us in November 1944, immediately after we have endured with him the suspense of liberation under bombs and gunfire and the marauding acts of a retreating army. We pass, in short, from peace to war and reach as a climax the chaos that precedes the return of peace.

Except toward the end of the book, it is not our feelings that are harrowed but our minds that are engaged, for Mr. Berenson is a reflector in the active and the passive senses of the word, and the interlude in his career which the present pages record finds him fully and uncommonly equipped to sort out impressions and attach meanings to the madness around him.

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson, 1901, The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue.

From G. Lowes Dickinson’s Recollections (cited in E. M. Forster’s biography):

To me the worst kind of disillusionment was that connected with universities and historians. Hardly a voice was raised from those places and persons to maintain the light of truth. Like the rest, moved by passion, by fear, by the need to be in the swim, those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place. In a moment, as it were, I found myself isolated among my own people. When I say isolated, I do not mean in any sense persecuted. I suffered nothing in Cambridge except a complete want of sympathy. But I learned once for all that students, those whose business it would seem to be to keep the light of truth burning in a storm, are like other men, blindly patriotic, savagely vigilant, cowardly or false when public opinion once begins to run strong. The younger dons and even the older ones disappeared into war work. All discussion, all pursuit of truth ceased as in a moment. To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to truth.

New at IWP Books: G. Lowes Dickinson (1914) Appearances: Being Notes of Travel (in India, China, Japan, America). From “In the Rockies”:

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent. “Click — click — click — Pick — pick — pick — Pock — pock — pockets.” So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.

• E. M. Forster, 1905, Where Angels Fear to Tread (PDF)
• Noel Annan, 1965, “The Disintegration of an Old Culture”

New at IWP Books: E. M. Forster (1923) Pharos & Pharillon.

The career of Menelaus was a series of small mishaps. It was after he had lost Helen, and indeed after he had recovered her and was returning from Troy, that a breeze arose from the north-west and obliged him to take refuge upon a desert island. It was of limestone, close to the African coast, and to the estuary though not to the exit of the Nile, and it was protected from the Mediterranean by an outer barrier of reefs. Here he remained for twenty days, in no danger, but in high discomfort, for the accommodation was insufficient for the Queen. Helen had been to Egypt ten years before, under the larger guidance of Paris, and she could not but remark that there was nothing to see upon the island and nothing to eat and that its beaches were infested with seals. Action must be taken, Menelaus decided. He sought the sky and sea, and chancing at last to apprehend an old man he addressed to him the following winged word:

“What island is this?”

“Pharaoh’s,” the old man replied.

“Pharos?”

“Yes, Pharaoh’s, Prouti’s” — Prouti being another title (it occurs in the hieroglyphs) for the Egyptian king.

“Proteus?”

“Yes.”

As soon as Menelaus had got everything wrong, the wind changed and he returned to Greece with news of an island named Pharos whose old man was called Proteus and whose beaches were infested with nymphs. Under such misapprehensions did it enter our geography.

New at IWP Books: E. M. Forster (1953) The Hill of Devi. Jacques Barzun, “The Secretary’s Turban and the Story Behind It” (The Griffin, November 1953):

In his biography of that unjustly neglected writer G. Lowes Dickinson, E. M. Forster records a moment in their friendship: “On October 11th, 1912, I hung over the edge of a ship at Port Said — my first glimpse of the East or of Dickinson in a sun-helmet. He bobbed far below me in a little boat, looking dishevelled and tired. He had been stopping at Cairo, and he was joining R. C. Trevelyan and myself to visit India.”

It was this first visit of Forster’s that led to his return in 1921, his serving for eight months as secretary to a maharajah, his finishing A Passage to India, begun after the earlier voyage, and finally his publishing just this year, under the title of The Hill of Devi, a remarkable account of all these episodes.

The book starts innocently with some letters of 1912 written to Forster’s family in England. It winds up with a tale of despair and disaster that is historically of our age, and yet forces the mind back to late Roman times to find an analogue, for it is a tragedy of state, of love, and of character. Between the quietly humorous start and the last irrevocable word occur the characteristic incidents of a Forster novel — extraordinary, ludicrous, touching, unbelievable — and all marked with the stamp of truth. Here at last no critic can pit his sense of probability against the novelist’s: it all happened “on oath,” it is a slice of modern Anglo-Indian history; and if the detail sounds fishy to the imprehensile ears of Suburbia, it is not because Forster has invented or distorted, nor is it because the scene is India; it is simply because Suburbia’s categories for life are a size too small.

Barzun’s review is available at IWP Articles.