BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 12883, 4 August 1906, Page 9

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Manhood, Faith* and Courage.' By geiuy Van Dyke, D.D. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Dunedin: New Zealand Bible, Tract, and Book obciety. These sermons, Dr Dyke tolls us, were written for a church in which there are a great many young men, and afterwards pteached in college chapels at Harvard, Yalo, and Princeton, the three leading universities of the United States. There is nothing dogmatic, ecclesiastical, or theological about them. "Their real aim is nothing else than to help people to be food, which," he adds, "is the hardest Uid finest thing in the world." Eleven lermons constitute the book, and each is worth reading. Sermons, we believe, are out of date. A few people, perhaps, listen to them, but nobody reads tnem. We are all so highly educated, so advancod, so superior, ana wo stand so much on the new form that we cannot sit at ease on the old bench. In these days of science primers and motor cars, board schools ana materialism, your youngest son will teach you more about the beginnings, of things and the future of humanity than your fathers learned in a long and not unlaborious life. As for the cynics of five-and-thirty—male or female—they have sounded the depths of all mysteries, have answers to all pro Hems, and will discuss and dismiss the First Cause and the Ultimate Goal almost while you wait. To the last the be-all and end-all of existence is sex, which they elaborate for the delectation of votaries of " art for art's sake" and lovers of unsavory detail in general. Whether the number of those people he exaggerated or whether the world is really so selfish and animal a° we are at times tempted to affirm is, possibly, open to denial, but 't »s not going beyond our premises to affirm that in the United States, the Homeland, and the colonies, to say nothing .>f ti-o Continent, there is either a real or an affectation of disdain for the ministrations of the Church, particularly for that part of them that is concerned with pulpit utterances. Kemembering, however, the clamoT and chaos for which Church authorities are partly responsible, we cannot wonder that the thoughtless and ignorant, who, when all is said and done, constitute the majority, are led to neglect the. public observance of religious duty and to deride the deliverances of ministers and professors. All of which is regrettable. We believe there is &r. enormous loss to the moral stamina of a community where indifference to and defiance of Christian Church teaching prevail; whilst from the intellectual and literary aspect we should have a higher, happier, better outlook of life and conduct did we occasionally refresh our brains and hearts with a dip into the ripened thoughts of cultured Christian writer and teachers. There is nothing that need repel the most fastidious in Dr Dyke's little book. The man of large heart and trained mind and sympathetic common sense is apparent in each address. The hearer, or readeT, is not bothered with the unthinkable and unknowable Ail he is asked to accept is something he cannot well deny—the fact of his own existence. Man is here and man has to live his life; how, then, shall he live it T The question is legitimate, and the answer is reasonable. Thu essential worth of man as mart is the writer's starting point, and the reality of (. hrh t and his gospel in the affairs of this l'fe and the life to come are its keynote ard goal. There are only eleven chapters, any of which may be read in half an hour. They are simple, direct, eloquent; there is scarcely a word that needs to be rend twice; they are as practical and timely as they are free from pedantry and show of learning; and they evidence, at the 3ame time, the man of thought and reading. "I go abroad through the Christian world and back, through the ages like cm who walks through the long-drawn aisles and mysterious, crypts, and manifold cha pels of some ' magnifical cathedral. ] see and hear manv things that astonisl and perplex me. There are strange pic hires on some of the walls, and strange in cense rises from some of the altars. There are sacrifices offered which are carnal, and materials used which are not spiritual But these human props and incrustationwhich have gathered about Christianity are disappearing and dropping away. Be hind them rise the mighty, aerial walls Through the passing words of error an" folly framed by the lips of men, like tht sound of the sea, like the voices of ;:iani waters, rises the Creed of Christendom.' We should" like to think that these ad dresses will have a wide circulation.

'Old Lim Lucklin.' By Opie Reid. London : Hodder and Stouphton. Dunedin : New Zealand Bible, Tract, and Book Society. Mr Reid, in the above, opens up no new ground, but he manipulates the old material with vigor and freshness. The picture of the village philosopher—sometimes black, and always untidy—who leans his back against the country store, or his arms on the fence, or sits on a tree block, discoursing to a crowd of interested men, boys, and women, or else to some particular neighbor, on life, death, politics, marriage, love, religion, cockaghiing, newspapers, theatres, Prohibition, home training, girls, and the like, is familiar to readers of current American literature. " Old Lim" is to be met with elsewhere, we know, but it is to some out-of-the-way, straggling township " down south," or *i,back east," or "out west," in the States, that he belongs. He is apt to weary us when we take him forty-three chapters at a time, but once a week in a newspaper he has his uses. The make-up varies ; he may be a " hay-seed," a barber, a saloonkeeper, or an " Uncle Josh," but the voice and the philosophy and the humor are the author's own. " Old Lim" says many wisa things and several witty things, only we seem to have heard some of them before. To those, however, who like their humor and anecdote dished up in this manner Mr Eeid will prove welcome. •The Sign of the Golden Fleece.' By David Lyall. London : Hodder and ' Stoughton. Dunedin : New Zealand Bible, Tract, and Book Society. The thirteen stories which make up the above have probablv done duty elsewhere, and had Mr Lyall never written anything belter they might not have been republished in book form. They purnnrt to tell of lower middle class life as it is lived in a cheap London square, but though true in nart the romantic element that Enters robs them of reality, and creates aji unnatural atmosphere. This sort of tale has been told with greater approach to fidelity by many writers, and Mr Lvnll cannot be regarded as a serious competit r for their laurels. His tales savor of the magazine for select family reading, and ' we dissent from the literal accuracy of the publishers' note, which says :—" The truthfulness of the book as a description of one side of middle class life in London is beyond question." The miseries of this class have no Miss Bethia always ready to touch them away at the crucial moment, and chambers do nrt change from sordid to noble in a few moments, and good luck dees not come gushinply round the corner just when it is wanted. We do not doubt the existence of Mr Lyall's men and women, but we question his portrayal of them. And is it customary for women of the lower middle classes to have daughters of eighteen when the mother is only thirty-five years old; And do these same women address theh. one solitary domestic a? " Arkles," q] ** Brown," or " Smith " ? If so, it is j pity the domestics do not resent whal ean only be deemed a snobbish imitatioi of a questionable upper-class custom. Whi not Marv. or Jane, or Annie, or, failing these. Miss? Mr Lvall's sketches are fai too slight to convey an accurate picture, o: lower middle class life in. London. What book- hrlred to make the Labrv M.P f? , Vn thi- rperiion Mr W T. S'wid fai rhp Jure number of the ' Rpview of Re ■new?,' provide? av ar-wer bv the sym pyium m'thnd. s-veral of the work's r? fenders* in Parliament tell'ns in a few ?ent ences- what literature influenced them ii their early enntrs. Mr John Burn." begai big library by buying Voltaire's ' Charles th< Twelfth* for a penny in the New Cut, Souil London, and from it he learnt the secret o physical endurance and indifference to cold John Stuart Mill made him a Socialist b; iiia failure to refute the arguments of th fiooaliste. Buskin aad Carfrle complete*

srhat. Owen had begun. Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' he found buried in 3and under the fcundatioas of an old engine shop at Akasra, on the west coast of Africa. His library at Battcrsea is his workshop. Mr John Ward, the navvy M.P., says: "When I was first taught to read, the Bible vras my chief source of inspiration. . . .-"'Pilgrim's! Progress' comes next. . . . The first book that struck my imagination was Scott's 'lvanhoe,' which I read when about twelve years old. i About this time I devoured—not read, that's | too tame an expression—' Robinson Cru- j soe.'" "I think," says Mr Keir Hardie, I M.P., "my mother's songs made the! strongest impression upon me, combined with the teles and romances of my grandmother, whose father hud bt«n out in the rising of 1745. The first book I remember reading was Wilson' 6 'Tales of the j Borders,' and these tales took hold of my imagination and created within me a love of the tales and traditions of Scotland, and, for that matter, of other countries, which abides with me still." Mr Thoinas Burt, | M.P., writes: library there were two or three odd volumes of Channing's works. Unt oi ihtte contained essay 6 on Napuleon, Fenelon. and Milton. These essayß I devoured greidily ; that on Milton I read over and over again." Mr Stephen Walsh, M.P.. says: "From very early years Shakespeare has been a prime and constant favorite. Falstaff, Brutus, Mark Antony, Cassius, quaint old Dogberry, and the tender, half-petulant, yet I innocent old Verges—all these have been I almost living realities with rce. The first ' book I ever bought was a shilling volume of ' Pilgrim's Progress,' over thirty-two years ; ago, although I was then a Roman Catho- i lie." Mr F. W. Jowett, M.P., saye: "The ' book which (1) made me want to read was ' lvanhoe'; (2) led me to think and reflect was ' Past and Present'; (3) made me a Socialist was 'Unto This Last.'" [ Eduard Von Hartmann died on the 6th | of June at his villa at Lichterfelde, near i Berlin. The Berlin correspondent of 'The ! Times' says that Karl Robert Eduard Von j j Hartmann was born in Berlin on February 23, 1842. The son of a distinguished gene- : ral in the Prussian Army, he entered the Guards Artillery Regiment in 1858, and ob tained his commission as an officer bi 1860, but was compelled to retire from the service in 1865 in consequence of a malady of the knee, which made him a cripple for the remainder of his life. Devoting himself to intellectual pursuits, he received, in 1867, the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Rostock, which disjiensetl him from residence. Two years later Hartmfinn published ' The Philosophy oi the Unconscious,' his first book, and the one upon which, despite the author's protests, his reputation mainly rests. This work, in three volvmes, bad alreadv reached its tenth edition by the year 189(5; and its success was due as much to the originality of the title and the diversity of the contents as to

the curiosity of the age. Based upon an imalgamation of Schopenhauer's doctrine of will with the metaphysic of Hegel and the i po.-.itiveness of Scheliing, Hartmann's work endeavored to trace the source of all existence to the conflict of will and reason as the two attributes of the unconscious. . The conception of the unconscious, by which Hartmann described his ultimate metaphysical principle, is at bottom merely a new and mysterious designation for the absolute of German metaphysicians, which, by reason of its manifold ambiguities, lends itself to extensive manipulation. Hartmann himself, only a few years ago, wrote an article in which he distingu'shed tio fewer than nineteen different senses of the ' Unconscious.' Shorn of the illusury empirical illustrations which rendered it interesting, . Hartmann's ' Unconscious,' as a metaphysical principle, emerges as a combination of the metaphysic of Hegel with that of Schopenhauer. But Hartmann differs from Schopenhauer in making salvation by the " Negation of the will to live " depend on a collective social effort and not on individualistic asceticism. The conception of a redemption of the unconscious also supplies the ultimate basis of Hartmann's ethics. " Epistemologically," it has been said of him, " Von Hartmann is a transcendental realist, who ably defends his views and acutely criticises those of his opponents. His realism enables him to maintain the reality of time and so of the process of the world's redemption." The publication in 1879 of Hartmann's ' Phenomenology of Ethical Consciousness' excited almost as much attention as his first work, and was followed, in 1881 and 1882 respectively, by ' The Religious Consciousness of Mankind in the Stages of its Development' and ' The Religion of the Spirit.' These works were preceded by various other preliminary treatises on religious philosophy. In 1886 there appeared his ' German Esthetics since Kant,' the sequel to which was ' The Philosophy of the Beautiful," published the following year. One of his last works of importance was ' Die Weltanschauung der j Slodernen Physik,' published three or four | years ago. Eduard Von Hartmann had lived for the last twenty-one years at Gross Lichterfelde, near Berlin, where he owned a villa in which the greater part of his life's work was done, and in which he died of an illness which had confined him to his bed since the beginning of May. He leaves a widow and several grown-up children. Some of Mr Andrew Lang's verse in oldtime manner might, a contemporary assertm, have deceived even Scott. Those most capable of innocent deceit are themselves not. proof ngainst imposture. Scott deceived us more than we always remember. Need'ng a quotation for a chitpter heading, and John Ballantyne being unable to find it. " Why, Johnnie," he said, " I believe I can make a motto sooner than- you will find one," and forthwith dashed off one of his own. And from that time, whenever nr-mory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, Lnckhart tells us, he had recourse to his own imairination, and declared it * Anon,' or ' Old Play.' Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name. This is one of his quatrains styled ' Anon,' audj a constant puzzle to the literary stu-

dent. In Mrs Fothergill Robinson, whose death occurred on June 1, there passed away one who, before her long illness, was intimatelv connected with artistic and literary liie in London. Born in 1839, Julia, the second daughter of George Richmond, was by temperament and training an artist, and under the direct teaching of Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert she early learned to draw with unfailing accuracy and delicacy. Her mind was also open and sensitive to literary impressions, and as a girl she acquired a, real knowledge of the great English wirters. John Ruskin was so struck by her serious industry that he half-laugh-i ii'gly put it to the test. -First, she was to raid' right through and master Sjienser's ' Faerie Queene'; and second, she was to : make with a pen an exact copy of Albrecht i Durer's line engraving of St. Hubert. Both tasks were taken in hand and done, and i the line for line copy of the St. Hubert, i which took two years to accomplish, w;*s I so accurate as to be mistaken, years afters wards, by an expert for a very fine proof , impression of the engraving. Her friendt ship with John Ruskin was lifelong. In . 11869 she marrv d, most happily, one who r fully shared her tastes, and the house of i I the late Vice-Chancellor of the Duchy of - I Lancaster became something of a centre for e I people interested in art and letters. Mrs i | Robinson was a capital hostess, a brilliant ? | and witty talker, and full of vivacity, inr J heriting many of her father's social r I Those who remember her before sorrow a , and sickness darkened her life recall a p?r----i I sonality of rare charm ard a mind bright n j and fu.il oi kindness and thought for others.