Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe

[p037] Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’). Chatto & Windus, 15s. The republication of Hadrian the Seventh, which was first published in 1904, cannot be without interest to the student of Jabour history. Baron Corvo’s unusual work has long been accepted by literary critics to be of a largely autobiographical character, although it embodies his aspirations as well as his achieve- ments. But it has not been recog- nised that in this story of the priest who becomes the first English Pope of Rome since Hadrian VI, there is to be found an interesting apprecia- tion of the Labour Party in its early years, and an account of several Socialist and Labour leaders who were known personally to the author. A. J. A. Symons in his Quest for Corvo which was an attempt to tell the story of Corvo’s life, failed en- tirely to follow up the evidence of his hero’s Socialist and labour associa- tions, although he discovered that

[p038] 36 in 1893 Corvo had come into con- tact with H. H. Champion at Aber- deen. Champion differed from Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald and others who were to become leaders of the Labour Party in his strong antipathy to Liberalism. At the be- ginning of the 1890’s, however, both he and Hardie had the object of founding an ‘Independent Labour Party’, and when it was founded in 1893 Champion contested Hardie’s control of the new _ organization. Having stood as Independent Labour candidate for Aberdeen in 1892, where he _ unsuccessfully opposed James Bryce, Champion retained his link with the city with which he had family connections. He was running a small weekly paper called the Aberdeen Standard, and he added Corvo to its journalistic staff. An article by Corvo on ‘The Architec- ture of Aberdeen’ (not listed in Mr. Cecil Woolf’s recent Corvo_ biblio- graphy) appeared in the issue of November 30. Early in 1894, how- ever, the association ended when Champion, having been driven out of the LL.P. by Hardie and his col- leagues, and being in poor health, decided to emigrate to Australia, where he remained until his death. In Hadrian the Seventh, published a decade later, Champion and others appear under recognisable pseudo- nyms, and it is clear that Corvo sympathises with Champion’s critic- nsms of the Liberal tendencies of the founders of the Labour Representa- tion Committee. Indeed, the L.R.C. appears in the novel as the ‘Liblab Federation’—an interesting descrip- tion at a time when Ramsay Mac- Donald was just concluding his secret agreements for electoral purposes with the Liberal Chief Whip. Corvo lists its newspaper organs as the Sal- pinx and Reynards’s, in which we may readily perceive the Clarion and Reynolds’. The editor of the former, Robert Blatchford, is thinly disguised as ‘Comrade Matchwood’; and Cham- pion himself appears under the pseudonym of ‘Dymoke’-—a name which is understood when it is remembered that Dymoke is the family name of the holders of the hereditary title of ‘King’s Champion and Standard-Bearer of England’. It is significant that in the novel the hero ‘Rose’ (i.e., Corvo himself) is’ attacked by various labour leaders LABOUR REVIEW—February-March, 1960 as an associate of ‘Dymoke’, and ‘Dymoke’ himself is _ flatteringly described as— The only capable fighting man ever possessed by socialism .. . spunged upon for 15 years by socialistic cadgers, sucked dry, ruined, and cast out, a victim of socialistic jealousy and treachery. In the plans laid for a Social Revolution, towards the end of the 19th century, that man had been named commander-in-chief. This reminds us of Champion’s part in the Social-Democratic Federa- tion in the 1880’s, when he was regarded as the potential military leader of the expected insurrection. In the novel, a Scottish labour leader boasts : Don’t someone remember I was the one that stopped the traitor’s letters, and gave information of his treachery? If it hadna been for me he would have bought the bally show with his Tory gold. Here is a reference to the struggle between Hardie and Champion in- side the ILL.P. in 1893, when Cham- pion was under heavy suspicion of working for the Conservative Party, and when letters of his were inter- cepted and used as evidence against him in the final process of his elim- ination from the movement. The labour leader cannot be identified, however, as Keir Hardie himself, but seems to be an amalgam of several Scottish leaders of the time, including one who had a temporary job on the Aberdeen Standard, which incidentally appears under the pseu- donym of Social Standard. A good many more identifications could be made, but enough has been said to show that one side of Corvo’s career has been completely neglected by the biographers and by the liter- ary critics, whose minds appear cap- able of comprehending only a part of their legitimate subject matter. HENRY PELLING. Modern Russian Soviet Prose. A Reader, edited by Ronald Hingley. Allen and Unwin, 12s. 6d. - Ronald Hingley, the man behind the BBC’s course of Russian lessons, has rendered a service to students by compiling and annotating this series of extracts from _ Soviet Russian writers. As he says in the introduction, many who have learnt to find their way through the 19th- century classics find themselves baffled when they attempt post- revolutionary prose, owing to ‘the extraordinarily wide vocabulary used by Soviet authors’ and ‘the frequency with which they employ popular, vulgar, slang and dialect forms or constructions’. Writers whose work is represented and commented include Babel, Pil- nyak, Sholokhov and Leonov. Two extracts, the content of which is par- ticularly interesting, are those from Galina Nikolayeva ‘(The Death of Stalin) and Vladimir Dudintsev (‘An Inventor in Trouble’). B.P. Not So Clever Dick