"Ecuo po Panis." By Lawrence Housman. Cape. 7s. 6d.
Mr. Housman describes his dialogue as a "study from life." It is a memory of a conversation with Oscar Wilde, partly a report, and partly an invention. By it Mr. Housman wishes to convey to us a picture of human dignity triumphing over failure. In so far as his book is an essay in charity, he wins the reader's sympathy. But, in an epilogue, he seems to go so far as to deny human responsibility. He dwells on "pathological trouble' and on. problems of conduct that should be "studied from the medical rather than from the criminal standpoint."
This is, indeed, to put out the lights of hope. Hitherto, human beings who have done evil have at least had the consolation of believing in the possibility of their redemption. The thief, the drunkard, the profligate—Christianity has in one instance after another brought hope into their lives and made new creatures of them. Mr. Housman seems to share with many moderns a disbelief in the power of the human soul to achieve salvation. Or is it only one vice that is due to "pathological trouble." Could Mr. Bottomley not have kept honest. on account of some pathological doom? Is the j drunken motorist a predestined inebriate incapable of being other than he is? Possibly, -all vices have their -pathological aspect, but the great teachers have never left us in doubt that the choice between good and evil is a very veal and a very terrible privilege of the human soul. _If it Were not so, why should anyone take the trouble to denounce Pharisees? They, too, in a meat sure are probably suffering from pathological trouble.
At the same time, Mr. Hous-man's over-emphasis of pathology may do good as an exaggerated way of putting the case for more humane an intelligent treatment of prisoners. Their treatment, he declares, should be ''health-giving in character and purpose." I doubt, however, if he realizes -sufliciently that, if society segregates men like Wilde it is largely for the sake of those who are little more than children. The problem of society is to save the innocent and at the same time to help the vicious to save themselves.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.