WHAT SOCIETY READS.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 455, 13 March 1909, Page 9

WHAT SOCIETY READS.

. 15 .., a , m, ' sta ' ie i according to Mr. Raymond lilathwnyt, "to imagino that Society people, or the 'smart sot,' are mindless, ignorant idiots; on the contrary, they are the very reverse"; and, in an interview winch he nad with Mr. A. L. Humphreys, S-i V nte ,> • -Polished in "Great J noughts, we are told who are Society's chief intellectual and spiritual pastor; and Blasters 111 the opening years of tho twenu'l.i ccn -^ r ' Humphreys: liicj Novelists come first, both with men and women. Hichens, Galsworthy, E. F. Ueiison, Mary Cholmondeley, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, Coiian Do.vlo, \V. W. Jacobs, Jack London, Lucas Maiet, Miss a! X). Sedgwick, I'.linor Glyn—these are their favourite novelists, liufc then, of course, many socioly people specialise in their reading. I'sychic literature nowadays is wonder-

fully popular—Christian Science, spiritualism—and so 'Jack Silence' has had a great vogue, as also have I' , . W. Bain's adaptations of Eastern stories. . . Arthur Machon's books aro very popular." An enormous number of young Society women and girls aro keen readers of Walter Pater and U. L. Stevenson's writings and Georgo Meredith. As to poetry, .Browning and Tennyson have, according to Mr. Humphreys, "subsided." "Swinburne and Kossetti survive."

(< As regards religion, Mr. Humphreys says, tho larger portion of Society, or that portion of it which makes itself heard and felt, is not seriously religious or orthodox in any sense of tho word as England generally understands it":

"Maeterlinck has practically preached a new gospel, to Society. Hub tliero has been a remarkable decrease in tho sale of religious books during tlio last ten years. 'Omar Khayyam' takes tho place of older teachers with many of them, and Marcus Aurelius." Englishmen, Mr. Humphreys adds, are more unchangeably sportsmen than they are anything else. "There are," he said, "thousands of upper-class Englishmen who never open a book who still como in here for 'Haudley Cross,' Jerrock's or Sponge's 'Sporting Tour.'" He tells of one customer who said the other day that he had never read any other book in his lifo than 'Handley Cross," and never wanted to. No book of genuine humorous interest, Mr. Humphreys went on to saj l , is ever passed by. Those books of Martin Ross and Miss Edith Somorville's are always popular, as also are E. V. Lucas's and Mr. Dooley's. Ihe great fauty Mr. Humphreys has to find with Society from tho literary point of view is that "they are possessed of no good woiking habits with books, as shown, for instance, in their neglect of such a mine of literary and intellectual wealth as the Dictionary of National Biography": and tliero is Murray s Dictionary also, "which has never had the support it so well deserves, unci yet it is tho best dictionary of Quotations in tho world." ■'