BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 14607, 1 July 1911, Page 10

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

'Love in Peraicketty Town.’ By S. B. Crockett. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Mr Crockett can hardly be said to have realised the expectations or to have lived np to the reputation that, in the early days, were raised and prophesied by admirers of ‘The Stiokit Minister’ and ‘ The Lilac Sun-bonnet.’ Perhaps it was that he had to share in the change in public taste that overtook that famous trio of founders of the Kailyard school—Barrie, Madaren. and Crockett —shortly after the publication of a solitary work of genius, known as ‘ The House with the Green Shutters.’ Whatever be the cause, however. the fact remains that there has been a. distinct cooling in the welcome once given the pathetically emotional and sentimental stories of Scottish men and women and youths and maidens of bumble degree. Barrie, as all the world knows, concentrated his chief after-efforts on the stage, with a success as wonderful as that he had attained in i:\erature: Maclaren continued for long in the Church of which he was an admired and conspicuous ornament; while Crockett gave himself up wholly to book writing. The celebrity of the last is less than that of either of the other two members of the trinity, but it cannot honestly be said that ho has received less than his due. There is nothing really great, nor approaching greatness. about Crockett’s many later novels. They are readable. interesting, and entertaining in patches, but they vary, and lag, and—too frequently—weary. They fail to grip, and they are palpably made ap. In length, contents, and style they are much the same, and everything betrays their purpose was to suit the exigencies of the weekly or monthly magazine. Still, if we must have light reading for the family circle, we think that of the best known—JJarvice, the Hookings, and Crockett—we prefer the last. He knows his Scotland and Ilia Scotch people; he has humor; he works no to a situation with deft and sure touch : and there are always those among his folk who have something to say that is worth listening o. In ‘ Love in Peraicketty Town’ we I ire taken to the good town of Longtown, j ■if some 20.0GG inhabitants, in the county ;ff Cheviotshire. The hero is Adrian Ross, the classical master at the Hirh School, and he tells his story himself. The head master. Dr Cassels, has three lovely daughters, who become the loval friends of the first assistant. Rees 'edges with a Miss Sheba Saunders, who s an excellent specimen of Crockett charicterisation, and the ministers whom he meets are also faithfully depicted. To Inis quiet- centre there comes a certain Heston Rjgg. an evangelist, accompanied bv a negro servant, a blue-and-cold Mercedes motor car, a travelling caravan, and a soloist (Miss Hester Vane), the whole being heralded by a “ Forerunner.” Rigg differs from most evangelists, in that he claims to be an anostle, the possessor of mesmeric, or hypnotic, force, and the de- ■: luncer of the ordinary run of church ministers of all denominations. He alone has power to draw men’s souls to the i;ag hj" as it is given by God in his Holy Book. It is a repellent busines, though probably true, even if exaggerated. Of r-oirrse, "he has hosts of converts —such conscious and unconscious, or deliberate and self-deluded, quacks always have. There is no gospel so vile and none so blasphemous that when propounded by men and women of exceptionally powerful and magnetic personalities has not secured its thousands of adherents. Human credulity to-day, in spite of 20 centuries of Christianity" and a generation of free rducation, is as amazing in its simplicity is it was at any time in history. ?o Rigg had his honest believers as well ns his indignant and angry denunciators. He was stoned as well as worshipped. Naturally, too, the women were his strong allies and support. He drew them as the magnet draws steel filings, and he treated j those who were young -and fair as the I young and fair have ever been treated by i these wolves in sheeps’ clothing. The | plot- turns on the struggle for the life and ■ soul of Mias January Cassells, who has become hypnotised by Reston Rigg and made a puppet in his hands. The moral of the story is that “this unknown, un- i controlled, perhaps uncontrollable, force which some call mesmerism and others j hypnotism, may be useful medically and | in the hands of the wisest and best men. ! But used recklessly it is wholly dangerous, j evil, and productive of consequences which no one can foresee, least of all the , man who has been spreading the poison j abroad.” i

'Captains and Comrade? in the Faith.’ By the Archbishop, of Canterbury. 6s net. London; John Murray.

Here is a book of sermons by the chief castor of the Anglican Church ui England. They hare “neither a consecutive char«cter nor a unity of purpose.” They have been preached at diffeirnt times, for diverse purposes. A good many of th. m arc memorial sermons —sermons in memory of Benson. Temple, Selwyn, Whitgift. Then there are anniversary sermons, dealing with the Cathedrals of Rochester. Ely, Wells. Truro, and Lichfidd Theological College. Three others were delivered at ;he opening of Church congresses, and one in connection with the British Medical l ’ougress at Portsmouth. A few are con■ornrd with general subjects, such as Sunday Observance, Prayer and Business, the New Year, etc. There are in all 26 sermon.-- in the volume. They do not impress is as being exceptionally brilliant, nor, indeed, as brilliant at all. They have not the swift, incisive eloquence of a Magee, vor the spiritual insight of a Moule, nor the blunt logic of a Temple, nor the poetic ihnrm and •pigrammatie brilliancy of an Alexander. We would not say that they are commonplace or platitudinous. They are rJain, sober, judicious s’atements of truths ind duties that need emphasis. Dr Davidson derives from the Scotch, and he inherits some characteristics of his ancestry. He has the caution, the coolness, the freedom from passion, -the dislike of rhetoric which we usually associate with dwellers north of the Tweed. There are no ‘purple patches” in these discourses. The -lyle is chaste and the expression of the .bought lucid. But one misses from them he surprise which is so cabstand Ing an clement and so great a charm in the greatest preachers. Dr Davidson's sentences follow each other in a calm, sedate sequence, and when you hear one you can pretty well predict what the next will be. But with the greatest preachers this is never so. One is never sure what may happen. And so the hearer's attention is not allowed to flag. But there is little of ‘his in Dr Davidson’s sermons. They flow on with the Heady, quiet rhythm of a river through level, grassv nv-adows. They are pleasant reading. They give evidence of a richlv-stcred mind and a spirit impressed with the high seriousness of life and its duties. They will be interesting to Anglican readers. Others, also, will find in them food for thought, and will be glad to learn how the chuff bishop of the English Church deals with some of the problems of life and mind that are asking for present-day judgment.

MASTER MINDS. “Humor is a sense of the ridiculous, softened and ameliorated by a mixture of human feelings.” —Hare. “ Thousands and thousands of laws there are, mightier and more venerable than those of passion, but, in common with all that is endowed with resistless force, these laws are silent and discreet, and slowmoving, and hence it is only in the twilight that they can be seen and heard—in the meditation that comes to all of us at the tranquil moments of life.”—Maeterlinck. Those who live on the mountains have i longer day than those who live in the valley. Sometimes all we need to brighten oar dav is to rise a little higher. “ Spirit and Soul.—ln Scripture the Spirit is the Divine breath as distinct from the body; the soul is the same breath thought of as enlivening the body.”— Gofcet. “You will never find a really refined and educated woman in any society wearing birds of paradise plumes, or similar spoils of an ignoble chase, in her head-gear.”-—Sir Harry Johnston. Amhitko —The desire of • shining and

THE WORLD'S GREATEST POSSESSIONS. In the course of a recent commemorative address in memory of the late Prof. S. H. Butcher, M.P., Prof. ■ Gilbert Murray said : We judge a scholar not by his output of books, not by his new discoveries, not by his weight of brute learning. We judge him by something that he is, and by a particular service that he thereby renders to the world. What that service is may be a little hard to describe. 1 have sometimes tried to put it to myself in this way. It seems that humanity, in the vast and chequered Journey on which it labors, from a dimly-discerned beginning to an unsurmised goal, is unwilling to lose the lessons of its experience or the mere charm of its memories; above all, it wishes, through the ordinary slough of living, through the many troughs of the wave, to keep as far as may be still vivid and undying the highest moments of its past life. There can be little doubt that the best life of Greece represents one of those highest moments. The business to which the world has set us Greek scholars is to see that it does not die. And how is that to be done? Some erudition is, of course, necessary; some originality of thought and certainly abundant freshness of feeling. But the main and the most testing duty that is laid upon us is that of living again in understanding and imagination the great hours that have once been .lived : to live them again, and so to comprehend and to interpret. The greatest possessions of the wo’dd are all of them always in danger of death. They die when there, is no one to care for them or understand them most. When one reflects what a frail and fugitive tiling the essential quality of high poetry or great 'thinking naturally is’, how easilycrushed out by the common pressure of life, or even destroyed by the mere elf or t of forcing it into a fixed groove in education, one begins to see where the normal work of a true scholar really lies. Not necessarily in original research, not necessarily in new ideas or vast accumulations of learning. It lies in keeping aiivo great things of the spirit which would otherwise die, and in maintaining in his generation some standard of sensitiveness bv which their greatness can be felt and judged A DICKENS DISCOVERY. A recent “Cambridge Review’ has two references to Dickons, whose topography is still the subject of eager investigation, and the principal one is a considerable article which appears to answer the question : “ Where was Mr Carker killed?” The other is a letter written by Swinburne to Mr S. C. Cockerell, who had 1 drawn the attention of the poet to an appreciation of Dickens by Tolstoy. Swinburne’s letter contains a reference to ” such malignant boobies and criticasters as G. H. Lewes and C 0.,” who, it seems, j had found some of Dickens’s characters , not quite lifelike, and it is possible that ; Lewes and the other boobies did not get ' on very well with On her. who annovs ! some modern readers. But Dickens had'a | way of redeeming his crude villains, such ; as Carker or Jonas Chuzzlewit, by sharp- j ening their apprehensions as the doom np- : preached, and he compels us to share; their sensations. Carker, after suffering ! under Edith Dombey's tremendous ver"- ; biage, made a great post-chaise flight from I Dijon to the coast, intending to seek a | ” remote country place he knew.” It will be remembered that lie halted at a little junction, where he encountered Mr Dombey, and fell back under the wheels of the express, and the writer in the ’ Cambridge Review,’ with the help of a i ‘Bradshaw’ of 1348, in which year Dickens ! completed the story, seems to" have found ■ the place. It is Paddock Wood, whence | a branch to Maidstone was opened in 1844, i and there is a letter extant from Dickens j to Forster appointing a meeting at that i station—“ and we will go thither in com- ! pany over a most beautiful little line of | railroad.” _ ’’H.H.B.” finds that the " mail ' express ” from Dover to London Bridge I which killed Carker passed through Paddock Wood just after three o'clock in the morning, but in the book it comes through , at four, and this alteration is very interesting, for it appears to be clear* enough . that Dickens made it in order that Carker might see the sun rise. I'cadi ~n ticrailroad may seem irrelevant, and we might surmise that in tho.-c < arlv o.i \ s in the romance of steam locomotives'appealed to the imagination as *’ ficrv devils " en.-iiv transmissible into the 'instruments of wrath.

-MISCELLANEOUS. Mr Werner Laurio has uea.ly readv an illustrated book entitled • Wit a i.fie ’Lost Legion Ln New Zealand.’ by Colonel G. Hamilton-Browno !’’ Maori Browne "i, late commandant in the Colonial Forces. Though cast in tho form of a romance, tho Look contains the author’s rcauuß scences of the wars in Ne v Zealand tram 1356 to 1871. Bleak House, BroadstuiTs, a favorite residence of Charles Dickens, and the house in which he is believe.! :o havewritten almost the whole of ‘ David Ciqv perrield ’ and parts of several others of his most famous works, was to be so! 1 by auction this month Jim- <. It is now an attractive house will: nfi - old gardens, and occupies the best situation at Broadstairs. Mr John Carlyle. Aitken. of Get. house, a nephew of Thomas Carlyle, has ju;t dud, at tho age of 67. He was son oi the late Mr Aitken. of The Hill. Dimitries, whose wife was the youngest risicr of the Chelsea sage. Mr Aitken devoted much of his time to historical research, and was of great assistance to numerous authors. His unde. Dr John Carlyle, made hb home at The Hill. Dumfries, for a. long period, and Thomas Carlyle was a regular visitor there. Bronte lovers will he intcres-od to learn, says the ’Yorkshire Rost,’ that tho house in which Charlotte Bronte was born at Thornton, near Bradford, is shortly to bo offered for sale by auction. The house is part of a property which is coming into the market in connection with the closing of a trust, and is contained in a lot consisting of the dwelling-house and shop, 72 and 74 Mamet ran-et, Thointou. at present in the occupation, of a butcher. No. 74 is the birthplace of the famous

authoress. The little unpretentious cottage is a familiar sight to the residents of the district. Not only was Char lotto born at the little cottage, then used as tho parsonage horse, but also her brother Bran well and her sLurs Emily, Jane, and

”To promote greater familiarity with Shakespeare s work- among all classes oi the British Empire” is the avowed object of the British Ennuie Shakespeare League. Recently they gave, a reading of ‘Richard ll.' in tho theatre of University College, The general secretary of the society, .ur John Beamish, stated in an interview that the society had branche.-'. ail over the Empire. “There are other societies,” ho said, “ named after great poets, but none that bears a gtcater name than ours. Wo consider that the best way to make people love Shakespeare is by getting the finest modern Shakespearian elocutionists to read his plays aloud. We have already held over a hundred readings this season in various pans of tho kingdom.” Ladv Ritchie, the daughter of Thacknray. fias discovered an unfinished MBS. of a story by her father. It hears the title ‘The Knight of Borselicn.’ with drawings by the writer. She has also found a second MSS. (also incomplete), entitled ‘Cockney Travels,’ describing tours which the author undertook in the West of England about 70 years ago.