NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 9, 10 July 1909, Page 13

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

"The Lowest Rung" : Together with "The Hand on the Latch," "St. Luke's Summer," and "The Understudy." By Mary Cholmondeley, author of "Red Pottage." London : John Murray. Miss Cholmondeley's title-page, comprehensive as it is, ta-kes no account of one item, which has a special interest of its own — the preface. It has already done duty as a magazine contribution, and has a personal interest, apart from its literary quality, to justify its republication in this volume of short stories. In that preface the author' deals with certain experiences which she. seems to share with every writer whose books have gained the distinction of being read. One ci these is that the authorship is claimed by others, in which case, however — as in the case of the claimant to "George Eliot's" novels — the inconvenience is usually the portion of the pretender in the end. The other is, the perpetual charge, not only that the characters have been taken from life, but from some particular individual. No two accusers may chance upon the same model, but each is convinced of his own perspicacity in recognising the original, and' is sometimes very indignant at the supposed liberty taken. Th-a idea that a type, to be conviooint;, must necessarily be a composite f'giu'e, is not conceivable to such criticr-. Sometimes they are curiously illogical. "I remember even now my shocked astonishment when a furious neighbour walked up to me and said, 'We all recognised Mrs. Alwynn at once as Mrs. , and we all say it is not in the least like her.' It was not, indeed. There was no shadow of resemblance. Did Mrs , who had been so kind to me from a child, ever hear that report, I wonder? It gave me many a miserable hour, just when I was expanding in the sunshine of my first favourable reviews." A clergyman, Mr. Gresley, who figures in "Red Pottage," fitted so many of the profession that he was identified over all the country, and a storm arose that the author still remembers. "1 was denounced by name from a London pulpit. A Church newspaper, which shall be nameless, suggested that my portrait of Mr. Gresley was merely a piece of spite on my part, as I had probably been jilted by a clergyman. I will not pretend that the turmoil gave me unmixed pain. If it had, I should have "been without literary vanity. But when a witty bishop wrote to me that he had enjoined on his clergy the study of Mr. Gresloy as a Lenten penance, it was not possible for me to remain permanently depressed." Some parishioners aypearer! to enjoy seeing (as they supposed; their own pastor pilloried., and even Sent supplementary Gresley - isms. O f tho clergymen, hitherto unknown thus singled out, she says :—: — "Their most adorable platitudes were chronicled and sent up to me, till I wrung my hands because it was too late to insert them in 'Red Pottage' ; for they all fitted Mr. Gresley like a glove." And in a note she adds : "One of these unknown correspondents wrote that their vicar had begun his sermon with the woids, 'God is Love, as the Archbishop of Canterbury remarked last week m Wtstminsler Abbjy.' '" Short as are the stories in this book, they are sufficient to indicate that the writer is no ordinary literary artist. And we do not think they deal with types so commonly met with as to incur the danger of supposed identification. Each one is sufficiently remote from the beaten track of daily life to have the interest of unfamiliar characters in an unfamiliar situation. In the first and longest of the sketches, the supposed narrator, in a kindly impulse, succours a wandering woman in prison garb, taking her for an escaped convict. As a matter of fact, the woman, who tells her life story, is a lady, who, acquiring the morphia habit while tending her husband in a lingering illness, has dropped to the foot of the ladder, and finds escape from her enemy only in a vagrant life in the open air. On this occasion she has changed clothes with an escaped convict who had broken prison to see a dying daughter, and who had been afterwards recaptured. But tho good Samaritan is far too clever to believe the woman's story. It requires no little skill to depict, as the author has done, by a multitude of delicate touches, the self-revelation of a self-satisfied and shallow intellect. The late Samuel Butler has done it to perfection in "Erewhon" and in "The Fair Haven," and Miss Cholmondelsy's work in this direction will bear comparison even with these masterpieces. "The Hand on the Latch" is a realistic story of a husband and wife in a solitary prairie home in a Northern State, „in the unsettled days of the Civil War. The man is a collector of taxes, and has a large sum of public money in his keeping. He covets the hoard, and plans a burglary of his own house, dying by the hand of his wife, who is ignorant of his scheme. It i& a grim story, and a powerful touch is added by the hint of an unlooked-for happiness that migh-u have been his — had he kept to tho path pf rectitude. "'Saint Luke's Summer" is an idyl of happiness too long, deferred, and of a kindly deception to avoid painful dis- j iMusionment. "Aunt Emmy" is a pathetic figure, with an old-world charm of her own. "The Understudy," a tale of supreme self-sacrifice, has an interest which is almost too painful. A book like this is a welcome relief in the crowd of average and under-average fiction which brings weariness to the reviewer. "The Vicissitudes of Flynn." By Bart Kennedy. London : George Bell and Sons. Mr. KjennedyV* "baker's dozen" of previously published novels include four in which the word "tramp" figures in the title. Above all things he loves a Bohemian, and so airily^ do debts and other responsibilities settle on the hero of Ids latest volume, that it might almost have come into the '"tramp" category. Flynn re a big muscular lighthearted andi determined Irishman of literary leanings and ambitions, who is introduced to us on his first arrival in London, which he designs to capture. "He was a man of boundless optimism." In thirteen chapters we have as many episodes of his varied career, in which artistic financing occupies a large place ; for, whether his income was small or large, Flynn, whoso tastes were expensive, including a well-stocked cellar, always lived beyond his means. Tho chapters, apparently written for serial publication, are uneven and not very coherent. It is characteristic of the "book that the reader suddenly stumbles upon the hero as a married man. Chapter VI. begins : "Flynn, to his astonishment, found himself married. He had met a clever little girl who laboured under the delusion that he was a grand man generally, and a person of genius in particular. The baronet had attended the wedding, and e\ery thing had gone with a swing." This is as it should be. No one caD imagine Flynn deliberating before taking any decisive step, not even it atrimony ; nor can it be conceived that he could carry on a formal courtship. In our next view of him he i 9 sustaining, with inexhaustible ingenuity, an exciting v eiege by bailiffs. As«the story proceeds, -and children, come about him, he mellows a little ;~and at the^last he hae a'

house to himself in a charming country spot, with a whole acre of ground as garden — where to the despait of the neighbouis, all the tramps and discharged convicts of many counties resort, secure of a friendly reception from the sympathetic Flynn. Of all the book, portions of chapter VI., giving an idyllic picture of English country life, appeal to us most. They are saturated with love of nature and of '"the open road. ' Flynn's summer-night vigil in the park, from the hour of the evening nightingale to that of the morning lark, is a delightful piece of writing. "Teresa." By Edith Ayrton Zangwill, author of " The First Mrs. Mollivar " and "The Barbarous Babes." London : C4eorge Bell and Sons. (Whitcombe and Tombs.) Mrs. Zangwill has written a story that, unlike the majority of novels, will leave a well-defined impression on the reader's mind. Its interest lies in characters and relations a little out of the common, and is admirably sustained to the end. Teresa, brought up by her mother in extraordinary ignorance of life and it^ duties, has been trained in a somewhat rigid and artificial estimate of moral values, and refers all things unquestioning to her mother's standard. She ;r.; r. married at eighteen to a doctor and •world-rover, who has led her and her mother to suppose that his outlook on the world is the same as theirs, when it is in fact almost the opposite. He has rated Teresa, quite correctly, as "a jiirl, and a preternaturally simple one at that," and she, who has walked quite blindly into matrimony because her mother has found a partner for her, is won disillusioned, and the simplicity •which bad proved an irresistible attraction to her husband wearies him. He accepts a high-salaried appointment in New York, and she is parted from her mother, finally, as it turns out. Her simplicity is almost too insistent, and is almost unchanged by the marriage relation, so that she seems at times lacking not only in common-sense, but womanliness. 'Her cousin Betty, who studies medicine and becomes a clever doctor, is a far more satisfactory all-round character. There is an interesting picture of American stage-life, the doctor's literary ambitions leading him to write a play which brings him into somewhat dangerous relations with an attractive actiess. The curiously ill-matched pair are brought into something like normal relations with the advent of Teresa's first child, and the threads are ingeniously gathered up at the close. Original as the conoeption of the heroine's character is, and ably as it is realised, we think it still is an. element o£ weakness in a clever and thoroughly readable book. "The Voice of God Unheard, and the Reason Why." By John A. D. Adams (of Dmiedin), Barrister-at-Law, Author of "The Church as Revealed in .Scripture." Duuedin : Gordon and G-otch. This book seems to have been suggested by Sir Robert Anderson's work, ' 'The Silence of God," which has attracted much interest and attention in theological circles, and has passed through many editions. While expressing great .appreciation of that writer and his work, !Mt. Adams disagrees with him on certain, points, not so much on the principles laid down as in their application. 'In less than 280 pages, our critic, like certain characters in Paradise Lost, "reasons high" Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate— l'i\cd late, freewill, foreknow ledgo absolute, Of happiness, and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame— and though we would be sorry to add with the poet, "Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy," which would bo untrue, or that the author has "foimd no end, in wandering mazes lost," we oannot discover that he 6heds :>ny new light on the wide range of subjects traversed. Theologically, he ie not easy to "place," he seems to have 'Dowicistic tendencies, and his hand is against all the churches. Fantastic writers like Pember and Soltau are respectfully quoted, but no authorities of recognised standing. A paraphrase and restatement of me whole Scripture history occupies the greater part of the volume, but we do not see that it is of much expository value. The general argument of the book seems to be that miracles have not ceased, and that Divine revelation is continuous. It is obvious that the answer to either of these propositions must depend very greatly on the manner in which the terms' are denned. "New Zealand, the Islands of the Blest," is the title of a pamphlet printad at Waterford, Ireland, containing, among other matter, the text of an address delivered by the Very Rev. P. J. Power, late of Hawera, while on a visit to Ireland, to the Catholic Young Men's Society of Dungarvan. It is somewhat florid iv style. New Zealand is "a land where men eat bread without scarceness, and lack nothing." It "leads the very van. of progress, legislated for by statesmen the purest on earth, who are fired by every highest and noblest enthubiasm." And Bracken was "the sweetest poet, not only of New Zealand, but of the Southern Seas." Wh:il a pity that, even in Australasia, this latter* fact is "not understood" ! The School Journal for July for ill standards makes a feature of Arbor Day, and some of the extracts on the biibject have literary merit. For the higher standards there is an article on Shackleton'e Antarctic expedition. Specimens of writing of boys who have shaken their nerves by the cigarette habit should be an instructive objectlesson. Lest it should make similar sufferers lose hope, examples ar*e given of the writing of the Fame lads less than a year later, after abandonment of the vice. '"Piccadilly," the London literary correspondent of the San Francisco Argonaut, says that there are signs of the awakening of a social conscience in the writing of novels. "The student of social forces," he says, "will say that fiction is the most important of all branches of modern literature. It is not only a lever in so far as it persuades and compels ; it is also an index and a reflection of the sum total of social evolutionary force. Appealing to the great masses of people, it stimulates them to action either by the direct and dramatic presentation of. new ideals or by the fidelity with which it pictures even the most familiar conditions. Fiction is alike a spur and a reproach." After indicating several recent writers as .examples ot serious treatment of social problems, he goes on to say : — "The influence of Mr. Chesterton upon the new literature must not be forgotten. Mr. Chesterton is the only essayist whose writings are snatched red-hot from the press and universally read. His popularity is infinitely greater than that of Bernard Shaw, because Mr. Chesterton believes every word he says and Mr. Shaw does not. Mr. Chesterton writes from a big heart, but Mr. Shaw writes from a powerful but a weirdly distorted head. No one has even accused Mr. Shaw of wishing well to any one. No one ever suspected him of benevolence. He is the master imp in a literary Brocken and his malign antics make us shiver. But Mr. Chesterton brings a whole-hearted laugh with every stroke, and when he persuades his reader to confess that he — the reader — is an ass, it is a salutary experience, and one whose benefits are unmixed with bitterness. And so the new note in .English literature may be said to be one of social conscience. It is the precursor of a fuller sound, and it comes none too soon for national salvation."