Foreign News: Sir Harry in Africa*

Autobiography, Unemotional and Concise

The Story. Those extraordinary young men, who throughout the last century devoted themselves to creating what is now known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, were apt to start almost anyhow and end almost everywhere. Sir Harry Johnston began life as a student of painting and zoology in London; he is ending it by writing vigorous novels in which there appear imaginary descendants of Dickens’ characters; and he spent the intervening time in the British consular service.

With the unemotional conciseness of a consular report, this book gives the record of his amazingly versatile and far-flung career. An early passion for travel sent him to Tunis; he was meditating a trip to central Asia when one of those remarkable accidents which seemed always to be happening to intelligent and well-connected young Englishmen 40 years ago diverted him to the west coast of Africa, with a letter to Explorer Stanley in his pocket.

It was the great age of African exploration, when the world was thrilling to the achievements of Livingstone and Stanley, and the statesmen of Europe were at the height of their wild scramble for all the remaining corners of the earth. Young Johnston drifted naturally into Colonial administration as a Vice Consul in the Cameroons. Thereafter he served all over Africa, from Nigeria in the West to Mount Kilimanjaro and Nyasaland in the East. With an incomprehensible industry he controlled the natives, pushed British trade, extored, painted, studied native languages, worked as a botanist and zoologist, wrote books and articles, dealt with the delicate diplomatic questions raised by the colonial rivalry of the other European nations. He undertook exhausting expeditions, fought minor wars with Arab slave traders, assisted the missionaries to make the African world safe for commerce, apparently did it all with the utmost British gravity.

The Significance. The book is dry narrative. But it is interesting because it sets forth one of the most absorbing of stories—the incredible picture of 19th Century imperialism. The British colonized Africa under an impulse that seemed to spring equally from the mission societies, the British Museum, the trading companies, and to be carried on with a classic casualness. Johnston first met Cecil Rhodes at a bachelor dinnerparty in London. The two sat up all night discussing a new scheme for colonization in central Africa; when they parted the next morning Rhodes had given Johnston a check for £2000, and by afternoon, Johnston, while waiting for the Foreign Office to look into the matter, was already buying supplies for the expedition. It was the way things were done.

The story is filled with British soldiers, explorers, adventurers—men who spent a few months among London drawing-rooms and then a couple of years in jungles, men who wandered about the world, whose friends were scattered across a hemisphere, but who were all joined by their common membership in the British official class. They are not often described with any detail, but the exact atmosphere in which they moved is obvious everywhere in the book. It is an atmosphere unconsciously summed up by Sir Harry’s explanation of his dislike for the Boers: “Their policy toward the natives was far more despotic and wilfully stupid than ours had ever been; their lack of interest in native languages, in intelligent natural history, exceeded ours.” Sir Harry’s is a taciturn account of that combination of exploitation, good government and scientific inquiry which solemnly carried the British flag around the world.

New Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

A CURE OF SOULS—May Sinclair—Macmillan ($2.50). The Reverend Canon Clement Purcell Chamberlain cared really for nothing but the easy comfort of his body and the comfortable ease of his soul. He shrank before the physical vigorousness of Cartwright, his junior curate, who was always suggesting something to do, such as founding a Men’s Club or starting a Sunday afternoon service for men alone. He shrank from Jackman also, who came to him with the tortures of his soul. Finally he found a way out. He rid himself of an unpleasant sister by inviting her down when Queningford was at its dullest. He devolved his parish work on Miss Lambert. Jackman left him. He promoted Cartwright away. Then he married Molly Beauchamp, a rich widow, and was able to leave for good. But though everything appeared to be successful, though he himself was content, he brought failure to everybody else. It is an ironic book, not very exciting, ably done.

THE PRESBYTERIAN CHILD—Joseph Hergesheimer—Knopf ($10.00). The book comes in a black box labeled in old rose. Its gorgeous binding is wrapped in oil paper. It contains 66 pages, of which 21 are blank. It is about the author’s youth, and is signed by the author. Only 950 copies are supposed to exist. The few printed pages describe Mr. Hergesheimer’s Calvinistic grandsires, his Calvinistic upbringing, and what he believes to have been his escape from Calvinism. Said Elmer Davis, critic: “As the first 10,000 words of a full-length autobiography, to sell at $2, it would deserve praise.”

THE THOUSAND AND FIRST NIGHT—Grant Overton—Doran ($2.00). A young aviator, Evan Lloyd, who drops out of the sky at sunset—Cynthia Fanning, who is taking care of her invalid grandfather, the ex-sea captain Magellan Fanning, in St. Martin’s Manor, the home on the end of Long Island that has belonged to the Fannings since the reign of King Charles II—the memory of a shipwreck that occurred more than ten years before the story begins—a rash debt undischarged—the narration of the tragic love story of another Cynthia Fanning and young Pedro da Gama that was acted two centuries previous in Tangier: out of these materials Grant Overton has written “a tale of the miracle we call love and of the commonplace we call fate.” A most unusually good romance, it nevertheless has its defects: a stiff burden of complications, a style that is sometimes as much Mr. Hergesheimer’s as the author’s.

*THE STORY OF MY LIFE—Sir Harry H. Johnston—Bobbe Merrill ($5.00).