Seventy Years among Savages

SEVENTY YEARS AMONG SAVAGES. By Henry S. Salt. (George Allen & Unwin.) 12s 6d. Net.

Mr. Henry S. Salt is well known as a first-rate scholar, a literary critic, a sympathetic interpreter of Shelley, Thoreau, James Thompson and Richard Jefferies, an atheist, a social reformer, an upholder of the rights of animals, and a vegetarian by conviction. The title of his present book shows that he has a certain grim humour of his own. He has lived seventy years among his fellow-men, and finds them so little advanced from barbarism to civilisation that they are savages. He does not give us a definition as to what, precisely, civilisation is. But while the dead flesh of slaughtered oxen, sheep and swine forms the staple of our diet, and women are furred and feathered with the skins of beasts and birds, and “preserved” pheasants are butchered in the battue, and the old anthropocentric superstition survives that man is separated from the lower animals by the possession of an immortal soul—man will continue to be barbarian. Fortunately he concentrates much of his condemnation into an “Argument” at the beginning of the book, and we pass on without being terribly upset to his various delightful talks which begin with reminiscences of his own early phase of savagery at Eton.

The fact is Mr. Salt is a gentleman and not a bore, and while he holds certain convictions with enthusiasm, he does the honours of his literary house with grace ; so that, while you are politely aware that he is burning to make all sorts of improvement in his surroundings, you pause with him before his collected portraits and hear his racy anecdotes, and find him an engrossing and fascinating cicerone. You laugh heartily when he pictures you short-sighted “Billy Johnson,” of Eaton, chasing a hen down Windsor Hill thinking she was his hat. You are delighted with his story of Mr. Dobell, the bookseller, who finding a valuable book abstracted by a keen collector, sent in a bill for it, which was promptly paid. But when he chats to you familiarly of ” household names,” such as De Quincey, Meredith, Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, F. D. Maurice, W. M. Rossetti, and the rest, he holds all your attention, and his views on things in general charm you with their presentment no less than from the fact that they are so refreshingly different from your own.

Plain English, Vol. 2 No. 30, January 29, 1921, p. 98