More Changes, More Chances
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1925. 8vo. ix+427 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
A NEWSPAPER editor has been described as a man who knows where hell is going to break loose next and sends a reporter to the spot. During the decade covered by this second volume of Mr. Nevinson’s experiences — from the end of the Boer War to the outbreak of the Great. War — that veteran British journalist, either by choice or by assignment, was a spectator at many of the most dramatic events of the time, and frequently a participant. He saw men, women, and children killed on the streets of Moscow by sharpshooters in the attempted revolution of December 1905. He was present at the opening of the first Duma a few months later. He visited India during the political unrest and the flood and famine of 1907, saw the Congress of Surat dissolve in disorder, and walked or rode through multitudes of living skeletons. He was mobbed and arrested in his own London in the ‘Votes for Women’ campaign. He was in Belfast when Sir Edward Carson signed the Solemn Covenant which bound its endorsers never to recognize a Home Rule Parliament, and he was in Berlin on the day when Bethmann-Hollweg announced that the neutrality of Belgium had probably been violated a few hours before in accordance with Germany’s deliberate design.
But if Mr. Nevinson’s volume is what Americans irreverently call a reporter’s notebook, it is also a book of travel and adventure, and, above all, the record of a crusader. He writes with every effort at accuracy, but with no pretense of detachment. This attitude is shown with special vividness in his account of what he terms the ‘main enterprise’ of his life—his attempt, partly successful, to free the natives of the Portuguese territories of Angola, in West Central Africa, and the islands of San Thomé and Principe from slavery. Undeterred by warnings that grew more pointed as he approached the port whence the slave ship was to sail, he fell victim to poison in the port itself, but was assisted to the vessel and reached the islands along with the unfortunate blacks who were doomed to hopeless exile.
Mr. Nevinson has two great passions — humanity and scenery. If his sympathy and his sense of justice find vigorous and varied expression in scorn, enthusiasm, indignation, and sarcasm, his love of natural beauty or magnificence evokes passage after passage of colorful rhetoric rising to poetic eloquence. This earnestness is not inconsistent with a pervasive humor which bubbles up in the most unlikely places, as when, depicting the conditions that followed the declaration of the general strike in Moscow which ushered in the three days of bloodshed at the end of 1905, he observes that families which had looked forward to a happy journey home for Christmas encamped for a fortnight in the waiting-room of the railway station, ‘the atmosphere becoming every day less and less like the perfumes of Arabia.’
Some of Mr. Nevinson’s assertions invite challenge. For instance, he regards Bulgaria as defender rather than aggressor in the second Balkan War. He also refers to Lloyd George’s speech on the sudden appearance of the German gunboat Panther at Agadir as prompted by Asquith and Grey. Sir Edward’s part in the affair was limited to approving an advance copy of the speech.
Few men could write an interesting autobiography of four hundred pages limited to ten years. Mr. Nevinson has done it admirably.
ROYAL J. DAVIS