The new book, A Tramp’s Sketches (Macmillan), by Stephen Graham, which has just been issued, is significant, to my mind at least, because it is a sign of that spirit which today is more and more making itself felt⁠—in protest against the universal octopus of a squalid commercialism. It is a sincere plea for spiritual beauty in modern life, the cry of an honest man who has gone into the wilderness to find more space, who seeks, however, not to wreck, but to recreate. One may quarrel with the form and detail of his plea, but that it is wholesome, big and needed, no one can deny. The writer’s passionate worship of Beauty, his love of simplicity, his charity, his courage, all these make a strong appeal. He has in him poetry and vision; he strikes fearlessly; he is an honest rebel in vehement revolt; but a sane one. His deep conviction is felt in every description, in every adventure, in every comment and suggestion, and his message is one the world may well listen to as at least a little bit of stimulating leaven against the sordid commercialism that oppresses life everywhere today. Lord Dunsany, oddly enough, makes a somewhat similar plea in the English Review for October. The note sounds, indeed, from many quarters. It is in the air⁠—a warning and a prophecy. Ostensibly these “sketches” describe the writer’s pilgrimage with Russian peasants to Jerusalem; but actually they are the notes of a spiritual pilgrim going towards the New Jerusalem. For he is no common “tramp”; there is genius in tramping as there is in painting pictures or in playing tennis. These are the notes of spiritual aspirations interpreting the incidents of the enormous journey that he made on foot, and to “review” the incidents merely would be to miss the real meaning of the book and thus give a false impression of its writer’s purpose. Details of the journey are to be published later, and will form a continuation of the work begun in his Undiscovered Russia⁠—the full story of the places visited along the Black Sea shores, of the life of the pilgrims on the way to the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre and at the Shrine itself. The interesting, and I would say the important, things in this book are the inner experiences of the tramp who is in rebellion, for to be a tramp, in the writer’s meaning, is to be one who has escaped⁠—from the conventional moulds of life. “He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation to the life of his time.⁠ ⁠… One reads every day such phrases as ‘our commercial, national and imperial welfare’⁠—commercial first, national second, imperial third, and spiritual nowhere.” Here is the keynote of this vital but modest little book. And a hint of the earnestness of purpose which lies behind it may be gathered from the fact that the author did not merely join the pilgrims on the way, or meet them at the Shrine, but first went into Northern Russia and lived for months among them; lived as a muojik, let their thoughts and feelings soak into him until he understood them by inner sympathy⁠—and then, as one of themselves, made the great pilgrimage of many thousand versts on foot to the Holy City. “It is not so much a book about Russia as about the tramp⁠ ⁠… the wanderer and seeker⁠ ⁠… who has gone out into the wilderness.⁠ ⁠… It is with life itself that this volume is concerned,” and his observations upon life may be listened to for what wisdom is in them, because he is in such tremendous earnest, because he loves Beauty for its own sake and because he is constructive as well as critical. “Never in any preceding generation has the young man standing on the threshold of life felt more unsettled.⁠ ⁠… Never has he cast his eyes about more desperately for a way of redemption or a spiritual leader. For him, as for all of us, the one requirement is to find out what is the first thing to do⁠…the essential thing, after which all other things naturally take their places.” Thus he writes after summing up the results of his many experiences and adventures. And he answers his own question thus: “It is not to wreck thc great machine”⁠—of modern commercialism⁠—“it is not even, as I think, to build a new machine⁠ ⁠… The one way and the first way is to use and subordinate the present machine, to limit it to its true domain, and let it be our true and vital servant”⁠—a plea, in other words, for proportion, for higher ideals, less fever for gold, less ugly, hurried rush in the worship of that Moloch, Progress, a little more room for Beauty and inner spiritual endeavour; briefly, for simpler living.