High Adventure in the Worlds of Art and Politics

When Francis Neilson gave its title to this full and fascinating autobiography, the two worlds he had in mind may have been the topographical two worlds of the United Kingdom and the United States, or the sociological two worlds of before and after the first World War. They may even have been the two worlds of penury and struggle and of affluence and creative scholarship. A more fitting title would have been My Life in Twenty-two Worlds, for there seems scarcely a phase of human activity in which, during that crowded and questing career, he has not played some part. Even in our time, when the normal expectation of life has been so much increased, it is given to relatively few men to pass four-score years, and to fewer to display as octogenarians that restless energy and incessant mental activity which marks Francis Neilson from his fellows. But equally, it is rare for a man to be gifted from youth with a physical presence and charm so dominating, a gift of exposition so lucid, and convictions so conscientiously reached and so courageously held. It would seem that Francis Neiison, like a second Cyrano de Bergerac, faced with so many modes of life, decided to be admirable in all. His one-time political opponents would dispute the word "admirable." They could not quarrel with the word "active," for in the story of his life-so faithfully, so frankly told-sheer activity jostles with versatility for pride of place in the category of his characteristics. The tale begins far from the worlds of conflict and creativeness where the manhood was to be spent. It opens with the revealing confession: "I was a poacher from the first, and Spring was the halcyon time of my boyhood." Its first paragraph is an initiation into the mysteries and mercies of bird-nesting in the quiet English county of Shropshire. ("This boy taught me to recognise the difference between the nests of a thrush and a blackbird. In collecting eggs one law he laid down was never to take the first because the bird might desert its nest .. .") The home was a modest one, even a humble one. Neilson's parents had married on very little, and had, perforce, to work hard. But they "had what was