The World Crisis, 1916-1918, by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1927. 8vo. xviii+297+277 pp. Illus. 2 vols. $10.00.

THREE years ago this reviewer, in discussing the earlier volumes of this history, spoke of the writer as a man of genius. Now he would call the man a writer of genius. For, however opinions may differ as to the value of Mr. Churchill's Protean labors in the war as Private Member, Minister of the Crown, Soldier, First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions, and unwearied instigator, prodder, pusher of every man or method susceptible of advancing the Allied cause, none will dispute the enormous interest of his history or the flexible dexterity of a narrative which sweeps through the six continents and the seven seas, and yet never completely disentangles itself from the personal history and fortunes of the narrator. There is an Ego at the centre of Mr. Churchill's Cosmos, but if it lessens the stature of the statesman, it exalts the effects of the artist.

What a life it is to make history and then to write it; to buttonhole the supreme actors in the world's supreme drama and then to paint their pictures in colors of your own choosing! Readers of history who recall the portrait gallery in the stately corridors of Clarendon will remember what an accent of reality is added to the likeness of Squire Cromwell when the historian recounts his conversation with that racy Radical in the lobby of the House. Mr. Churchill's narrative is full of such personal snapshots, and yet, by a subtle dissemination of his personality, he seems never to depart from the objectiveness of his chronicle or to interrupt the progress of history. His gift of evoking a remembered scene and of etching the quick lines of a personal sketch are alike remarkable. It is not for nothing that Mr. Churchill's water colors sell in Paris even when freighted with a less distinguished name.

Mr. Churchill's talent for controversy does not fail him here. His enemies maintain that he slips through politics like an eel, but as an historian his opinions are nothing if not definite. He has his views about Robertson and Haig, Henry Wilson, Gough, and the rest, and he states them. Not for him is the rôle of the august historian apportioning praise and blame without favor. He hates his enemies, sticks by his friends, and damn the reader who disagrees! The muck and sweat of the fight are still on him. He is a man's man, and plays the game hard.

If the World Crisis is not a final history, it is a contribution to finality. No one else has written so burly a story of the Great War. The judgments may not be ultimate - the writing is.

A clever commentator in the Atlantic remarked some time since, regarding the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, that if the war didn't produce an unsinkable ship, at least it produced an unsinkable politician, and we will hazard the opinion that this book of his will be afloat and in repair when all but a fraction of the histories now written of these great events will be flotsam and jetsam on the shores of Time.

ELLERY SEDGWICK

Fire under the Andes, by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1927. 8vo. xii+331 pp. Illus. $4.00.

You wonder how anyone could have hit upon a title so reticent of its meaning - until you read Miss Sergeant's book; and then you marvel at the felicity of her choice of words, a felicity that extends from title-page to conclusion. Her fire under the Andes you learn through a quotation from Emerson and her own painting of a series of American portraits - is nothing but the light and warmth at the heart of things, the vital sparks of heavenly and earthly flame, which are as essential to human fulfillment as hydrogen to a balloon or springs to a coach. The title, you find, is most happily descriptive of the book.

To illustrate the need and power of fire under our mountain ranges of rock, Miss Sergeant takes fourteen contemporaneous figures - all living but Miss Amy Lowell - and subjects them to a biographic treatment very much her own. She counts it 'out of keeping with the sharp biographical method now in fashion,' and so it is, if 'sharp' must imply the exposure of all that is unlovely. If 'sharp,' on the other hand, may relate to penetration of vision and clearness of outline in recording what is seen, Miss Sergeant is out of fashion chiefly because so few can compete with her in these particulars.

In contrast with Mr. Mencken - one of her subjects - Miss Sergeant alludes to herself as 'a dissident from the race that is being superseded, as one who has assimilated certain aspects of European culture.' Is it not precisely because she is thus a sort of amplified New Englander that the spirit behind her technique and in large measure determining it is what it is? Does not her unlikeness to the biographers of the latest mode lie in her willingness to extend a prevailing admiration and respect to the subjects she has chosen, her unashamed readiness to reveal these feelings? Her first act of discrimination is in choosing a subject - whether it be Pauline Lord or Mr. Justice Holmes, Amy Lowell or Paul Robeson. Her sympathies and comprehensions are broadly catholic. Her final discriminations