LITERARY NOTES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCIX, Issue 11593, 31 May 1898, Page 2

LITERARY NOTES.

fCOKBICBPONDENT “ CaMTEBBURT TniES.”] LONDON, April 9. Mr Grant Allen has descended from the hill-tops to write a clever and ingenious novel,-in “The Incidental Bishop.” , There are no sex problems in it, and no struggling vith the conventional bondage of matrimony, the relations of opposite sexes arenormal, and the story can not only be safely put into the hands of the young person, but will entertain him, or her. Personation is the keynote of the tale. Tom Pringle, a rolling .stone, with some education, ships on board a vessel trading, as he believes, with the South Sea Islands. She turns out to be “ black-bitding ” for the Queensland plantations, and, in the effort to stop the traffic to flesh and blood, a young missionary, Cecil ■(Sisson, is shot by the captain’s orders. He dies on board, tended by Pringle, and when, to avoid capture, the natives are thrown overboard'and the ship blown rip, Pringle is discovered by a man-of-war unconscious, and .dressed in the .missionary’s clothes, which he bad donned to avoid the consequences of complicity in the acts of the-crew. • When he gets to Syney he is treated as the deceased missionary, and althoughJic always intends to make a clean breast-of it. something .turns up to prevent-Mm until his love .and marriage make a confession almost impossible. Eventually he becomes the incidental bishop of Dorchester, and the effects of the pangs of conscience the reader must discover for himself. In the latter half of .the tale the humour—and very delightful humour it is—is supplied by the little romance of the bishop’s daughter, a slangy, up-to-date girl, and a university undergrad, with a-Secretary of State as the deus ex ma china. Mr Livingston’s " Dearer Than Honour ” is a good story of prison life, although not equal in merit to his “ Scariet and Steel " or “Rip’s Redemption.” He states in his preface that the main circumstance of the story ' is an utterly improbable fact. The device by wMch the hero gets into gaol is so clumsy as almost to lead one to believe that the novelist has derived the idea from life—he ■ could have invented one so'much bettor.' Two men, Ludovic Ord and a Dr Finucane, arc rivals for the love of Janet Eeiiot. Ord’s father became insane owing to a fall when pig -sticking in- India, and was confined in of Finncaue’s father. Finucane Invents a cock-and-bull story of the insanity being hereditary in the family, and Ord, to whom Janet is engaged,. fearing the danger o? a marriage with her, can only think of one way of disgusting her utterly with him and putting himself out of th&reacii of temptation. He goes to immense troublcPto boro a hole through the wall of his house—he is a wealthy man, by the way—to a cabinet in the next house, abstracts a cheque book and a brooch, forges a cheque for £SO, is collared and gets three years’ hard. The only justification for the absurdity of this motif of the book can be its reality. When once Ord is chased down and In gaol the real interest of- the tale begins. The chaplain and tno warder of the gaol are capital characters, and Ord’s feelings and ezi periences seem life-like enough, while a touch of humour is imparted to his release by the suspicious attitude that his narrowminded bigoted sister and her prigs of children take up towards liiin. Sophia greets him with “ Oh, it’s such a cruel, cruel, shock. And, oh, such needless disgrace! A beard! So dreadful, to have one s own only brother coming out of a convict prison. The poor children ail forgive you in the sweetest way! They’re always talking to me about ‘ poor Kicked Uncle Ludovic in prison!’” SopMa twists everything her brother does: into the

r ‘ prison faint ” in a way that would be exj ciuciatingiy funny if it were not so painfully I true. But with the release of Ord from j prison, the interest of the story dies away | again, although Janet, Finucane and he ; meet face to face in the presence of death. ! After all Ord’s misery the author has re,j served a happy ending for him and Janet. , Mr Robert Hichens did well to call his ' row farcical novel “ The Londoners,” “ an absurdity/’ for after the first few chapters of bantering satire on the blase curled darlj ings of society, it degenerates into the up- - roarious farce of the modern stage, the chief requisites of which are a large house, a- number of performers, numerous doors, midnight and cross purposes, tliat land the leading S actors in all sorts of fixes. A character not unknown to dramatic farce the woman dressed up as a man—figures largely in Mr It irhens’s literary extravaganza. She is described as behaving at a crisis like a per- ; s--n on the stage, and looking everywhere • but in the direction where there was someI bedy to Lie seen. She is not singular in that ■ respect, all Mr Hichens’s Londoners have | the same peculiarities, and lose all semblance ' of reality in the extravagance of their actions. I There is very little plot. Mrs Yerulam, a | leader of society, ;s anxious to get out of it : just when her friend, Chloe van Adam, an I American divorcee, visits her. Chloe, comI ing into the drawing-room one “not-at- ! home ” day, finds it filled with visitors, and is introduced all round by Mrs Vemlam as Mr van Adam, a role she continues to play j until her husband arrives on the scene. Mrs j Yerulam rents for the Ascot races the palace I of the Bun Emperor, who has become a mil--1 lionaire by the manufacture of buns, and enj tertains there a very composite company, all J of whose movements are suspiciously watched | by the minions of the Bun Emperor. The | fun soon becomes as fast and furious as a “ knock-about ” farce and as broad. A i Duchess is surprised in the hall by her spouse, • who suspects her of an intrigue with a coun- ; try lout, with Her lap full of the heterogene- | tus contents of a penny-in-the-slot machine, and a wild pursuit takes place up and down stairs, in which all the characters joiri, and

ui the midst of which a sporting lady empties the contents of her six-shooter into the hall. More humour is evolved from such comic incidents as the turning of the hose on a discomfited guest, and the confinement of the Duchess in a mushroom house. Mr Hichens’s performance is like that of the comedian who sits down on his hat upon the stage, it raises a laugh, but it is not art. There are clever remarks and amusing episodes scattered throughout the book, and the first chapters arouse pleasurable anticipations in the reader’s mind, but I cannot say of the doings m the Bun-Palace that “ it is the best fooling when all is done.” The 11 Medicine Man of the same author, that Sir Henry Irving intends producing shortly, will have to be on o much higher plane if it is to have a long jun. Mr L. F. Austin transfers his services from the “ Sketch ” to the “ Illustrated London News,” where he will take the place of the late James Payn. A somewhat severe critic, speaking of the reminiscences of G.A.S. and James Payn, in the “Illustrated," styles their column the note-book of their anecdotage. Mr J. A. Steuart’s “ Minister of State " is so popular that it is being reprinted already, and Mr Crockett’s “ Sticldt Minister," after passing through eleven editions, is now to be published by Mr Fisher Unwin at half a crown. The edition de luxe of Byron, the first volume of which Mr Murray will issue directly after Easter, and which was limited in England and America to 250 copies, was so much in demand that 350 copies at least could have been disposed of, and a species of allotment had to bo made. What is the most valuable volume in English literature? Mr Sidney Lee answered the question in his lecture the other day, on “ Bibliographical Problems connected with the Elizabethan Drama,' before the Bibliographical Society. It is the first folio of Shakspere of 1623, for to it exclusively we owe our possession of twenty of Shakspere’s masterpieces. Had the first folio never come into existence, as it did seven years after Shakspere’s death, the world would have been the poorer by ‘ The Tempest,” “Measure for Measure,” “As You Like It,” “ Twelfth Night,” “ Julius Csesar,” “ Macbeth,” “ Cymbeline,” “ Antony and Cleopatra,” “Winter’s Tale,” “ Coriolanus,' and ten others. The first folio was produced by a syndicate of two printers, father and son, and three publishers, co-operating with representatives of the acting company which owned Shakspere’s manuscripts. It was printed by William and Isaac Jaggaid, the two printers of the syndicate, at their press m Fleet Street, near St Dunstan’s Church. Printers’ and readers’ errors accounted for the discrepancies among different copies of the book, of which several had previously been noticed by bibliographers. But a unique irregularity, which had not hitherto been noticed, distinguished one of the two copies which now belong to. the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Mr Lee exhibited by permission of the Baroness the copy containing this unnoticed irregularity, which he believed he was the first to discover a few weeks ago. The copy had found a home for more than a century and a half in the library formed by the Sheldon family, at their house at Long Compton, not very far from Strat-ford-on-Avon. It still bore the Sheldon arms on its cover, and had manuscript comments in a seventeenth-century hand. The Sneldon library was dispersed in 1781. The unique feature of this Sheldon copy was that the concluding passages of “ Romeo and Juliet,” and the opening passages of “ Troiius and Gressida,” were printed twice over at different parts of the volume. Judging from the position of the duplicated passages, and from evidence of pagination, it was probable that the printers, while the work was in process of production, at first intended that “ Troilus and Gressida ” should follow “ Romeo and Juliet," instead of preceding it at a long interval, as in ordinary copies. This uncertainty as to the arrangement of the plays was of interest, because the arrangement in ordinary copies of the first folio •had been religiously adhered to by most of the later editors. The clumsiness of the printers in supplying in the Sheldon copy so signal a proof of their hesitation, and merely accidental procedure in fixing on an order for the plays, gave that copy an interest in the eyes of collectors something like that attaching to the “ Vinegar- ■’ or “ Wicked ” Bible, work* which owed their market value to an oversight on the part of the correctors of the press. Mr Lee estimated that, of some 220 copies of the first folio which are extant, only thirty are in a perfect condition, some twenty have small defects, and as many as 150 copies are seriously defective. The Daniel copy, which the Baroness Burdett-Coutts purchased in 1864 for £716, was probably, when cons’dered in all in its aspects, the finest copy extant.

The expansive Sir George Newnes has launched two more ventures on the literary sea, already crowded with picturesque argosies. The “Ladies’ Field” and “The Wide World” are the latest barques to leave the stocks. The former is not, as one would imagine, a ladies’ sporting paper, although it does deal in a minor degree with dogs, fishing and hunting, and other outdoor recreations in. which women indulge. It is on much the same lines as the “ Gentlewoman” or the “ Queen, but got up in exquisite style, printed on superfine paper, with most artistic illustrations. By far the greater part of the “Ladies’ Field” is devoted to dress, and there is little that is original about this elegant sixpennorth, although its arrival was heralded with a great blast of trumpets that announced the newcomer as “a new paper, a newspaper, and a ‘Newnes paper.’” In “The Wide World” (another 6ci magazine), on the other hand, Sir George has struck out quite a new line, and one tliat is sure to be intensely popular. “ Truth is stranger than-fiction ” is the key-note of the magazine, which contains no fiction whatever, hut stories of weird adventure and descriptions of the remarkable in nature, the plain, straightforward narrative of wellknown travellers, explorers, naturalists and so forth. The romances of fact are illustrated in tho vast majority of cases by photographs that fully justify the adjective on the cover, “ Astounding." Those accompanying the “ Tragedies of Mount Blanc,” by Dr Lunn, and “ Devotees,” by Captain Howard, arc quite unique. In a remarkable budget, crammed full of good things, perhaps the best are “ The Naturalist Abroad,” an account of Mr Savillc-Kent’s researches; “The Cruise of the Slaver Carl,” “Houses in Air and Water," the experience of Professor Haddon, all of which will have a special interest for Antipodeans; “How tne North Pole will be reached by Nansen,” “ A Battle Royal with a Tiger,” and the “ Romance of Seal Hunting,” by Sir George BadenPowell. If “ The Wide World ” can preserve the lugh standard of its first number—and I see no reason why it should not do so, and become a regular storehouse of all tho marvels of this world —I anticipate that its circuit tion will soon leave that of other magazines far behind. ; “ UREA J THUS OF TTfF, GHETTO.”-

Mr Zangwili lias readied high-water marie in his “ Dreamers of the Ghetto,” a hook to be read and re-read and pondered over, a ■book in which the. humanity, philosophy and the spirituality of Hebraism are blended in a most masterly and artistic fashion. It is a ehronide of dreamers, who have arisen in the Ghetto from the establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking up in the present; a series of character studies of the great Jews of history, and of the artistic typification of many soids through which the great Ghetto dream has passed, diverse in individuality, in date and in environment, yet all inspired by that great dream of the Jewish race that has not come true. Mr Zangwill has taken some crisis of thought in the career of each of his great Jews, and made it the centre of a short story illustrating his hero's character and the inward world nigs of his soul, contrasting the intolerance and bigotry of the Jews with their obstinate patience, undying hope,keen emotion and lofty ideal. Thus, in Joseph the Dreamer, he gives us the conversion of Fra Guiseppe to Catholicism, his love for Helena de Fran chi,

and his martyrdom in Uriel Acosta, the tragic story of a Portuguese Jew who bad given up all he cared about in life for the sake of his race, and went to share exile with them in. Holland, only to find himself cast out as a freethinker by the superstitions Rabbis. In the Turkish Messiah the rise and fall of that strange impostor, Sabbatai Levi, hailed by thousands in the East as the Messiah in Cromwell’s time, is admirably described, with all the mystery rand ecstasy that the subject demands. In the Milker of Lenses the conflict between love and philosophy rages in Spinoza’s heart. In Maimon the fool and Nathan the Wise we are brought into contact with Mendelssohn land Lessing. But to the general reader, not deeply versed in Judaism or philosophy, the most attractve of the Dreamers Will bo Heinrich Heine, Disraeli and Lassalle. These three characters arc magnificently contrasted. Heine is seen on his mattress grave, and a visit of his little Lucy, a blend of the real heroine of the little episode with “ La Moucbe ” enables the author to give “ a sort of composite conversation-photograph’ of the great poet, in which irony, wit, phantasy, despair, cynicism, poetry and poignant humanity succeed one another rapidly in what is half a soliloquy and half a farewell address to the “Liebe Ivleine.” Mr Zangwill has used many of Heine’s own words, blending them so skilfully with those which his own keen imagination and sympathy have put into the mouth of his hero as to present a unique and vividly real portrait of Heine, that must be studied by all who wish to understand the widely different and antagonistic moods of the suffering poet. The following passage gives a very happy idea of Heine’s conversation: “Fascinated by bis talk, winch seemed to play like lightning round a cliff at midnight, revealing not only measureless heights and soundless depths, but the greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of a picnic, the listener had an intuition that Heme’s mind did indeed, as he claimed, reflect, or, rather, refract the All, only not sublimely blurred as in Spinoza’s, but specifically coloured and infinitely interrelated, so that he might pass from the sublime to the ridiculous with an equal sense of its value in the cosmic scheme. It was the Jewish artist’s proclamation of the Unity, the humourist’s “Hear, 0 Israel’” Beaconsficld, on the other hand, is not made to open his lips, for he is “ The-Prim-rose Sphinx,” seen in the hour of his star, back from the Berlin Congress, bringing peace with honour. The author looks behind the statesman’s facial mask, and is oppressed by a sense of something shoddy, of tinsel and glitter, and flamboyance, and the sphinx yields up his secret —the open secret of the Ghetto parvenu, but looking again he perceives something subtler and finer, audacity crowned by empery, the supremacy of the individual will. Disraeli is “ the appointed scion of a chosen race,” his face is transfigured, and he becomes —beneath all his dazzle of deed—a Dreamer of the Ghetto.

Very real is the picture of Lassalle, the peoples’ Saviour, whose Titanic labours on behalf of the working men of Germany and the world, are interpreted by his love episode with Helene von Donniges, leading to his death in a duel. But though in his dying agony he thought bitterly “There will never be justice for the people. I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters,” the movement he had' all but abandoned for the, Heiene was to become a great power in the State under the evergrowing glamour of Ms memory. The “Dreamers of the Ghetto” ; s a magni ficent reply to the furious unrkasomng antiSemitic feeling that lias manifested itself in Paris ever since the Dreyfus affair. It is a timely reminder to the world that there are other Jews besides Mr Shent per Shent and Mr Unredeemed Pledges, that in shaping the destiny, of the world Jews have played no insignificant part, and that today, as the Primrose Sphinx says, “half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew.”