THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF PLAYGOER

While yet "The Mirrors of Downing Street" and "the Glass of Fashion" are being widely discussed as something more worth while than the effervescence of "the Grandmother of the Flapper" or the diaric bombast of Colonel Repington there comes another books from the pen of A Gentleman With a Duster. It may not command such a broad audience solely with religious personality and "the rather ignoble situation of the Church in the affections of men", but an eclectic public will appreciate the earnestness of the man even if it doesn't agree with his views.

The chaos of opinion which distrubs the Modern Church is the theme for a series of brilliant, penetrating and able sketches of English Churchmen. The charm of stylistic finesse, literary taste, and epigrammatic terseness can best be appreciated in the books of A Gentleman With a Duster when we compare them with the turgid, club-footed fumbling of the author of the pitiful Mirrors of Washington. There is a difference between a blunderbuss and a Lewis.

The visual images of the men under discussion is clarity itself, Bishop Gore, for instance, carries about with him "a permanently troubled conscience." The phrase lives in his face. It is not the face of a man at peace with himself. If he has peace of mind it is a Peace of Versailles. . . . He has the look of one whose head has long been thrust out of a window gloomily expecting an accident to happen at the street corner. And General Bramwell Booth, the hard headed practical idealist, the fanatic possessed with such an unpopular loathing for sin, "listens with the whole of his attention strung up to its highest pitch, his eyes wide open staring at you, his mouth pursed up into a little O of suction, his fingers pressing to his ear the receiver of a machine which overcomes his deafness, his whole body leaning half across the table in his eagerness to hear every world you say." And so on through the twelve sketches which fill the book.

The problems of the chaotic state of the Church, and each man's position in abetting or allaying the confusion is put with force and no mincing of words. It takes means. And whether we agree with him or not we must respect his opinion as the fruit of intelligent thought.

All through the book runs the threnodic tone of something being wrong with the Church. "It is impious to think that heaven interposed in the affairs of humanity to produce that ridiculous mouse, the modern curate. No teacher in the history of the world ever occupied a lower place in the respect of men. . . . He figures with the starving children of Russia in appeals to the charitable as a object of pity. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed but the shepherd also looks up from his pit of poverty and neglect, as hungry as the sheep, hungry for the bare necessities of animal life.

"This is surely a tragic position for a preacher of good news, and a teacher sent from God."