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F A curious feature of our profession is the paucity of attention given to its human elements. We are too prone to lose sight of the fact that a library's place in the social fabric is determined not by technics or administrative niceties, but in the last resort by the anima, the personal spirit which lies behind them. With, for example, Draynefleete's new branch library we are familiar through photo‐graphs and drawings; we approve its contemporaneity of style, its brisk aseptic social “tone”. But do we ask ourselves whether it is a creative library? Do we give thought to the personal relationships involved—between members of the staff, between the staff and the public? Is there a sense of confraternity, of oneness of purpose? Units thrown together by chance or destiny, we spend a large part of our allotted span within the walls of a library, doing a job, liking or resenting it; yet this vital aspect of our work seldom comes under scrutiny.

ENGLISH literature has never been notably rich in biography. We have Boswell. We have Lockhart. We have the vigorous, piquant Aubrey, the gentle Walton, who turned a life into an elegy, the ruthless Froude who upended Carlyle. But such achievements, splendid as they are, are isolated examples. As a nation we have not, in the past, shown much comprehension of the fundamentals of the art. We had not, in fact, until Mr. Strachey published his famous preface to Eminent Victorians, realised that biography was an art. During the reign of Victoria the craft of the biographer sank to its lowest ebb. Idealism was in the air. Ruskin and Tennyson had hymned the beauty of Goodness. Carlyle had instructed the nation in the ecstasies of hero‐worship. Puritanism and antimacassars and a copy of the egregious Bowdler were in every home. Biography suffered as biography must inevitably suffer where morality has ousted plain speaking. Of biography as the process of assembling, from a mass of data, the elements essential to a shapely narrative; uniting the relevant characteristics together into a warm, living, recognisable and interesting portrait; charting the inner development of a human personality: of biography in this sense the Victorians had practically no conception. The Victorian biographer combined the duties of sexton and stonemason. He came both to bury his Cæsar and to praise him. His biography, a tissue of laudation, half‐truth and pious concealment, was one long distended epitaph. If the subject, being human, had been cursed with human fallibility, the fact was not insisted upon. If, like most of us, he had been ungodly enough to exist below the diaphragm, the defection from grace was glossed over or even concealed. Lives of great men, ran the current tradition, remind us that we can make our lives sublime; and the biographer indulged freely in hagiology and proselytism. Biographies of this sort—and the bookshelves of the period were cluttered up with them—were not only false to life. They were not only sentimental. They were, in nine cases out of ten, both ill‐composed and ill‐written. They were vast, indigestible, wersh, forbidding. They were tasks undertaken without artistic scruple or discrimination, and completed without artistic satisfaction.

STATISTICIANS tell us that since the war the proportion of male births has strikingly increased, and there is a theory that this increase represents the will of the Life Force working to remedy the ravages of the war. One wonders how much the recent vogue for walking, games, nude‐culture and hazardous exploits is attributable to the same cause. The significance of the hiking movement, which arose in war‐racked Germany and swept across the world, will not be overlooked by the social investigator of to‐morrow. It is true that there have always been hikers. But they were a small and scattered and unself‐conscious clan, usually nature lovers or naturalists, who walked, so to speak, casually and for the fun of it. Your latterday hiker is rather a hierophant of a cult. He has turned walking into a technique which he practises with a grim relish. He is distinctively—often clamorously—dressed. The heavy shoes, the iron‐shod stick, the aching feet, the perspiration, the sun‐vexed neck, the backbone cracking beneath prodigious impedimenta: the picture has been familiarized by the humorous journals from Punch upwards.

THE destruction caused by aerial attack to a number of libraries in different parts of the country is not really news. Tens of thousands of people know the facts regarding their own districts, but the news is now coming through regarding the general situation, and, on the suggestion of an American correspondent, we present here a picture based on various reports. A certain vagueness here and there may be due to the censorship of the Press Bureau, who have had the material before them.

Libraries in converted shops, in village halls, in mobile vans, are common enough on both sides of the Atlantic—and from America we even hear the majestic news of a library on a peanut handcart. But libraries in tube shelters are something new under the sun—or moon. Who could have foreseen such things ? Yet they had to come. When Londoners, undergoing the heaviest bombardment in history, defied all laws and rules by taking possession of the tube platforms and stairs—not by storm, but by the mildest of infiltrations—it was quickly evident that a new social situation was in being. People spending from eight to fourteen hours a night on a station far below ground had to have food, sleeping facilities, medical attention, recreation both physical and mental. A new organisation had to be created, and created it was, partly by central planning and partly—it is our English way—by brilliant improvisation.

I commenced what, but for a sense of humour, I should call my career at a small, isolated library in the provinces. We were a specialist library. We specialised in non‐specialist material. This may seem mere playing with words. But it is not. The establishment, like myself, was the inheritor of a tradition that libraries were meant for books, not trade journal files, abstracts (whatever abstracts might be), schedules, reports, theses, plans, specifications, blue‐prints, bibliographies, bibliographies of bibliography—all that fried string which (see recent conference papers passim) some malapert knaves are now strenuously wishing upon us.

Concerning this business of testimonials: I daresay those of my readers (if I have any readers) who are chief librarians (if any of them are) will agree with me that it is fraught with difficulties. When, as a mere counter‐hand, and lamentably few in the pod, so to speak, I first summoned up the temerity to appeal to the Overlord for the usual formal bouquet, it never occurred to me that I was subjecting him to a grave ordeal. For how—short of outrage to his immortal soul—could he be expected to dilate upon me? My shortcomings were, as Professor Saintsbury said of Donne's, “gross, open and palpable.”

WHAT of the novelists? The war has brought them a wonderful opportunity, a new world bursting with fresh, unhackneyed, living material for their pens. Will they take it? Not yet perhaps. So far our Elder Novelists have pursued their even tenor with majestic disregard of the fact that the old world, their world, has collapsed on its foundations. But for the young writer who has the gift of clear sight, and can forge the right instrument of expression, there is no lack of matter. Aerial combats, mine‐sweeping, A.A. gunnery, munition making, the work of fire services and the various A.R.P. organisations, evacuation and the new social conditions it has created—all this is of our time, it is history in the making. So far only John Strachey has broached it. For others, that excellent volume Their Finest Hour points the way. Here the narrators are unsophisticates, amateurs, but their sheer sincerity and the vividness of their subject‐matter make their essays compelling. The fireman's masterly understatement on arriving at the blazing inferno of the Docks: “Well, this is a bit of a —!—”the remark of Mrs. Hart of Bethnal Green, whose house had been bombed: “Our house doesn't look like much now! Just a dirty heap for the dustman to carry away”—the pilot bawling into his radio phone: “Oh, look what's coming, dearie, hordes and hordes of nasty Messerschmitts!”—these things come with the sharp tang of reality, besides which the cultured cadences of the professional writer look shabby.

I SUPPOSE the question uppermost in the mind of a reader seriously considering the state of fiction at the present time must inevitably be: where are the successors to the thrones at present filled by the older writers? One by one the old school are passing from our midst. Have we, among the younger writers, any qualified to occupy their positions, to inherit their prestige and authority? The names of Mr. Walpole and Mr. Priestley immediately spring to mind. They have reputations. They write abundantly. They are talked about. Their work sells. They are the typical traditionalists of modern letters, the inheritors of a long and fairly continuous tradition of technique and subject matter. They are craftsmanly novelists. They are stylists in their way. They are quiet, urbane, efficient and conscientious. Neither possesses any profound depth of feeling. Neither possesses, as yet, that infallible instinct for character by which, and by which alone (as Arnold Bennett insisted) a novel can reach greatness.

“I LOVE the great despisers,” said Nietzsche, “for they are the great adorers.” If my attitude towards Mr. Squire, Mr. MacCarthy and the other grandees of contemporary criticism appears to be lacking in respect, let me, at the outset, give as my explanation the fact that I happen to cherish good criticism and am grieved to see the art falling into disrepute. For no interested observer can fail to be impressed with the circumstance that the delicate process of literary criticism, in latterday hands, is fast becoming tarnished and stale. Gosse and Walkley, whatever their limitations, were the last of a noble line; passing from us, they left, so far as I can see, no inheritors of their tradition. This is a serious loss. For criticism, despite Whistler's scoffs, may be necessary if the arts are to exercise their maximum influence upon the mind of the nation. Art is an apocalypse; but without the intercession of the critic the artist, so far as the majority of mankind is concerned, is a Memnon casting his music upon the desert. Moreover, criticism, at its best, has an independent and quite precious value of its own. “The adventures of the soul among masterpieces”—the definition may be jejune, but it holds at least a kernel of truth. We are not, perhaps, considering the full implications of the phrase, an artistic nation. The fates have denied us that integrality, that great continuity of achievement which distinguishes the literature of, say, France and Russia. But we have had our moments. We can point to periods of an intense national flowering of the impulse. And if we can boast of no critic with the gesture, the amplitude of a Taine, “we have at least a perceptible if frequently broken lineage of good criticism. Dryden, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Gosse: these were, in the finest sense of the word, critics, men equipped with rich sensibilities and with minds that waxed radiant at the contact of literature: interpreters, illuminators, in whom criticism was itself a centre of creativity. And now?