UNIQUITIES
=i=
Each of these five is a book which, either from its subject, its
authorship, or its handling, is _sui generis_. I call such books
"uniquities"; it sounds a little less trite than saying they are unique. I
think I will let someone else speak of these books. I will look to see,
and will let you see, what others have said about my uniquities.
=ii=
First we have _Our Navy at War_ by Josephus Daniels. W. B. M'Cormick,
formerly of the editorial staff of the Army and Navy Journal, reviewing
this book for the New York Herald (28 May 1922) said:
"Josephus Daniels always was an optimist about navy affairs while he was
Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921, and now that he has told what the
navy did during the world war he demonstrates in his narrative that he is
a good sport. For in spite of the many and bitter attacks that were made
on him in that troubled time he does not make a single reference to any of
them, nor does he wreak any such revenge as he might have done through
this medium. In this respect it may be said that truly does he live up to
the description of his character set down in the pages of Rear Admiral
Bradley A. Fiske's autobiography, namely, that 'Secretary Daniels
impressed me as being a Christian gentleman.'
"In its general outlines and in many of its details there is little in Mr.
Daniels's story that has not been told before in volumes devoted to single
phases of the United States Navy's war operations. For example, his
chapter on the extraordinary task of laying the great mine fields, known
as the North Sea barrage, from Norway to the Orkneys, is much more fully
described in the account written by Captain Reginald R. Belknap; the story
of 'Sending Sims to Europe' is also more extensively presented in that
officer's book, _The Victory at Sea_, and the same qualification can be
applied to the chapter on the fighting of the marines in Belleau Wood and
elsewhere, and the work of our destroyers and submarines in European
waters.
"But Mr. Daniels's history has one great merit that these other books
lack. This is that it tells in its 374 pages the complete story of the
work of the navy in the world war, giving so many details and so much
precise information about officers and their commands, ships of all
classes and just what they did, the valuable contributions made to the
winning of the war by civilians, that it makes a special place for itself,
a very special place, in any library or shelf devoted to war books."
=iii=
Leslie Haden Guest, a surgeon of wide experience and secretary of the
British Labour Delegation to Soviet Russia, is the author of _The Struggle
for Power in Europe (1917-21)_, "an outline economic and political survey
of the Central States and Russia," of which E. J. C. said in the Boston
Evening Transcript (4 March 1922):
"The author writes from personal observation in Russia and discloses much
of the life of the day in that country which heretofore has remained
undisclosed to the world. He has met and interviewed Lenine and Trotsky
themselves, shows us the individuality of these great Bolshevist leaders
and tells us much of the life of the people and of the social conditions
and tendencies in that distressful country.
"Next he crosses to Poland, another undiscovered country, and shows us the
new Poland, its aims and its struggles to emerge from a state almost of
anarchy into one of a rational democracy. Very little do we of this
country know of the new nation of Tcheko-Slovakia, but Dr. Guest has
travelled through it also and shows us the two sections, one cultured, the
other more backward, but both working together to form a modern democratic
nation.
"The distressful condition of Austria and the Austrians now suffering for
the sins of the Hapsburgs, is next shown forth. Vienna, once the capital
of a vast empire and the seat of a great imperial court, was suddenly
reduced to the level of the capital of a small agricultural, inland state,
a condition productive of great suffering. The conditions here are shown
to differ much from those in other countries, for the dismemberment of
Austria was not brought about by the act of the Allies, but of their own
people. The causes of the suffering are fully explained, as are also the
causes of similar conditions in Hungary, in Roumania, in Bulgaria and in
other countries affected by the economic and political upheavals following
the war. That democracy in Europe will finally triumph Dr. Guest feels
certain and he gives lucid reasons for the faith that is in him. He gives
a broadly intelligent analysis of the entire situation and finds that the
essential conditions of success of a democracy are peace, education and
adequate nutrition. But he shows that a great problem exists which must be
worked out; and he shows how it must be worked out. Dr. Guest is not alone
a thinker, but an observer; not a theorist, but a man of practical
understanding, who has studied a problem at first hand and shows it forth
simply but comprehensively and with an eye single to the needs of
humanity."
=iv=
Of _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_, by Raymond M. Weaver, Carl Van
Vechten, writing in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post (31
December 1921), said:
"No biography of Melville, no important personal memorandum of the man,
was published during his lifetime. It is only now, thirty years after his
death and one hundred and two years after his birth, that Raymond M.
Weaver's _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_ has appeared.
"Under the circumstances, Mr. Weaver may be said to have done his work
well. The weakness of the book is due to the conditions controlling its
creation. Personal records in any great number do not exist. There are, to
be sure, Melville's letters to Hawthorne, published by Julian Hawthorne,
in his _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. There are a few references to
Melville in the diary of Mrs. Hawthorne and in her letters to her mother.
There remain the short account given by J. E. A. Smith, a man with no kind
of mental approach to his hero, a few casual memories of Richard Henry
Stoddard, whose further testimony would have been invaluable had he been
inclined to be more loquacious, and a few more by Dr. Titus Munson Coan
and Arthur Stedman; but both these men, perhaps the nearest to Melville in
his later years, were agreed that he ceased to be an artist when he
deserted the prescribed field of _Typee_ and _Omoo_, and they harassed his
last days in their efforts to make him perceive this, much as if an
admirer of Verdi's early manner had attempted to persuade the composer
that work on 'Aida' and 'Otello' was a waste of time that might much
better be occupied in creating another 'Trovatore.' In desperation,
Melville refused to be lured into conversation about the South Seas, and
whenever the subject was broached he took refuge in quoting Plato. No very
competent witnesses, therefore, these. Aside from these sources, long open
to an investigator, Mr. Weaver has had the assistance of Mr. Melville's
granddaughter, who was not quite ten years old when Melville died, but who
has in her possession Mrs. Melville's commonplace book, Melville's diary
of two European excursions, and a few letters.
"Generally, however, especially for the most important periods and the
most thrilling events in Melville's life, Mr. Weaver has been compelled to
depend upon the books the man wrote.
"The book, on the whole, is worthy of its subject. It is written with
warmth, subtlety, and considerable humour. Smiles and thoughts lie hidden
within many of its pregnant lines. One of the biographer's very strangest
suggestions is never made concrete at all, so far as I can discern. The
figure of the literary discoverer of the South Seas emerges perhaps a bit
vaguely, his head in the clouds, but there is no reason to believe that
Melville's head was anywhere else when he was alive. Hawthorne is at last
described pretty accurately and not too flatteringly. _The Scarlet Letter_
was published in 1850; _Moby Dick_ in 1851. It is one of the eternal
ironies that the one should be world-famous while the other is still
struggling for even national recognition. There are long passages,
well-studied and well-written, dealing with the whaling industry and the
early missionaries, which will be extremely helpful to any one who wants a
bibliographical background for the ocean and South Sea books. Melville's
London notebook is published for the first time and there is a nearly
complete reprint of his first known published paper 'Fragments From a
Writing Desk,' which appeared in two numbers of The Democratic Press and
Lansingburgh Advertiser in 1839 (not 1849, as the bibliography erroneously
gives it). Mr. Weaver is probably right in ascribing Melville's retirement
from literature to poverty (it was a fortunate year that brought him as
much as $100 in royalties and his account at Harper's was usually
overdrawn), to complete disillusionment, which made it impossible for him
to say more than he had already said, even on the subject of
disillusionment, and to ill-health.
"It is a pleasure, moreover, to find that Mr. Weaver has a warm
appreciation of _Mardi_ and _Pierre_, books which have either been
neglected or fiercely condemned since they first appeared, books which are
no longer available save in early editions. They are not equal to _Moby
Dick_, but they are infinitely more important and more interesting than
_Typee_ and _Omoo_, on which the chief fame of the man rests. It is to his
credit that Mr. Weaver has perceived this, but a great deal more remains
to be said on the subject. _Mardi_, _Moby Dick_, and _Pierre_, as a matter
of fact, form a kind of tragic trinity: _Mardi_ is a tragedy of the
intellect; _Moby Dick_ a tragedy of the spirit, and _Pierre_ a tragedy of
the flesh. _Mardi_ is a tragedy of heaven, _Moby Dick_ a tragedy of hell,
and _Pierre_ a tragedy of the world we live in.
"Considering the difficulties in his path, it may be said that Mr. Weaver
has solved his problem successfully. The faults of the book, to a large
extent, as I have already pointed out, are not the faults of the author,
but the faults of conditions circumscribing his work. At any rate, it can
no longer be said that no biography exists of the most brilliant figure in
the history of our letters, the author of a book which far surpasses every
other work created by an American from _The Scarlet Letter_ to _The Golden
Bowl_. For _Moby Dick_ stands with the great classics of all times, with
the tragedies of the Greeks, with _Don Quixote_, with _Dante's Inferno_
and with Shakespeare's _Hamlet_."
=v=
A man who is certainly an authority on naval subjects tells me that _The
Grand Fleet_ by Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa is the masterpiece of the great
war. He does not mean, of course, in a literary sense; but he does most
emphatically mean in every other sense. I quote from the review by P. L.
J., of Admiral Jellicoe's second book, _The Crisis of the Naval War_. The
review appeared in that valuable Annapolis publication, the Proceedings of
the United States Naval Institute for April, 1921:
"This interesting book is the complement of his first volume, _The Grand
Fleet,1914-16_. Admiral Jellicoe, the one man who was best situated to
know, now draws aside the curtains and reveals to us the efforts made by
the Admiralty to overcome the threat made by the German submarine
campaign. The account not only deals with the origin ashore of the defence
and offence against submarines, but follows to sea the measures adopted
where their application and results are shown.
"The first chapter deals at length with the changes made in the admiralty
that the organisation might be logical and smooth working to avoid
conflict of authority, to have no necessary service neglected, to provide
the necessary corps of investigators of new devices, and above all to free
the first Sea Lord and his assistants of a mass of detail that their
efforts might be concentrated on the larger questions.
"The appendices are of value and interesting because they show the
organisation at different periods and emphasise the fact that the Naval
Staff at the end of the war was the result of trial and error, natural
growth, and at least one radical change adopted during the war.
"Chapters II and III deal with the Submarine Campaign in 1917 and the
measures adopted to win success. The gradual naval control of all merchant
shipping with its attendant difficulties is clearly shown. The tremendous
labour involved in putting into operation new measures; the unremitting
search for and development of new antisubmarine devices is revealed, and
above all the length of time necessary to put into operation any new
device, and this when time is the most precious element, is pointed out.
"That a campaign against the enemy must be waged with every means at hand;
that new weapons must be continually sought; that no 'cure-all' by which
the enemy may be defeated without fighting can be expected; that during
war is the poorest time to provide the material which should be provided
during peace, the Admiral shows in a manner not to be gainsaid.
"Chapters IV and V deal with the testing, introduction, and gradual growth
of the convoy system. It is shown how the introduction of this system was
delayed by lack of vessels to perform escort duty and why when finally
adopted it was so successful because it was not only defensive but
offensive in that it meant a fight for a submarine to attack a vessel
under convoy.
"Chapter VI is devoted to the entry of the United States. The accurate
estimate of our naval strength by both the enemy and the allies, and our
inability upon the declaration of war to lend any great assistance are
shown--and this at the most critical period for the Allies--a period when
the German submarine campaign was at its height, when the tonnage lost
monthly by the Allies was far in excess of what can be replaced--when the
destruction of merchant shipping if continued at the then present rate
would in a few months mean the defeat of the Allies."
=vi=
I will give you what Admiral Caspar F. Goodrich said in the Weekly Review
(30 April 1921; The Weekly Review has since been combined with The
Independent) regarding _A History of Sea Power_, by William O. Stevens and
Allan Westcott:
"Two professors at the Naval Academy, the one a historian, the other a
close student of Mahan, have written a noteworthy volume in their _History
of Sea Power_, published in excellent form, generously supplied with maps,
illustrations, and index. The title suggests Mahan's classic which is
largely followed in plan and treatment. It will be remembered that his
writings covered in detail only the years from 1660 to 1815. While not
neglecting this period, this book is particularly valuable for events not
within its self-assigned limits. Practically it is a history of naval
warfare from ancient times to the present day. Each chapter deals briefly,
but ably, with one epoch and closes with an appropriate bibliography for
those who care to go more fully into the question; a commendable feature.
The last chapter, 'Conclusions,' deserves especial attention. Naturally,
considerable space is devoted to the story and analysis of Jellicoe's
fight. Few will disagree with the verdict of the authors:
"'It is no reflection on the personal courage of the Commander-in-Chief
that he should be moved by the consideration of saving his ships. The
existence of the Grand Fleet was, of course, essential to the Allied
cause, and there was a heavy weight of responsibility hanging on its use.
But again it is a matter of naval doctrine. Did the British fleet exist
merely to maintain a numerical preponderance over its enemy or to crush
that enemy--whatever the cost? If the Battle of Jutland receives the stamp
of approval as the best that could have been done, then the British or the
American officer of the future will know that he is expected primarily to
"play safe." But he will never tread the path of Blake, Hawke, or Nelson,
the men who made the traditions of the Service and forged the anchors of
the British Empire.'
"One factor in the success of the antisubmarine campaign is not mentioned,
important as it proved to be. This was the policy adopted by the Allies of
not giving out the news that any U-boat was captured or otherwise
accounted for. Confronted with this appalling veil of mystery the morale
of the German submarine crews became seriously affected; volunteering for
this service gradually ceased; arbitrary detail grew necessary; greatly
lessened efficiency resulted.
"The authors are to be congratulated on producing a volume which should be
in the hands of all naval officers of the coming generation; on the
shelves of all who take interest in the development of history; and of
statesmen upon whom may eventually rest the responsibility of heeding or
not heeding the teachings of Mahan as here sympathetically and cleverly
brought up to date."