NEW BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9154, 8 September 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEW BOOKS.

Robert Elsmkre. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward (Macmillan's Colonial Library).— After reading this book, one ceases to marvel at the immense success achieved by it in England, and the fact becomes clear that it is not altogether due to the advertisement " Robert Elsrnore" has received by Mr. Gladstone's review that an eighth edition is now being printed. It is written with a very unusual power and intensity. The authoress is completely possessed by her theme, and it hurries her headlong through no less than 604 pages of close print. It is said to have been longer still in the original manuscript, but the publishers insisted on having it cut down by a third. The purpose of the book is to try and put Christianity on a new basis, more consonant than the present with modern thought and scientific knowledge. It is an attempt at compromise between Christianity and Atheism. Mrs. Ward discards the idea that Christ was divine and the story of His resurrection, and agrees with Arnold that "miracles don't happen." "The problem of the world at the present moment," she makes her hero say, "is—How to find a religion? some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding societies and keeping man's brutish elements in check." In another place she tells us that the task before us is "to reconceive the Christ." Her hero, Robert Elsmere, has " tumbling, reddish hair," and is " nearly six feet tall, with a long, thin body and head that amply justified his school nickname of the ' darning needle."' He is an intensely emotional, eager, energetic young man, possessed from boyhood with a strong literary bent. He has much to do with Oxford and Oxford men, and during his student days there "he surrendered himself to the best and most stimulating influences of the place." He was strongly affected by the religious revival which was in progress at the time, and this eventually leads him to become an Anglican minister. He interests himself in his parish duties, and there ho finds time to interest himself also in natural history, and he reads Darwin.

" Imagine," he says to Langham (an Oxford friend), " I had never read even ' The Origin of .Species' before I came here. We used to take the thing for granted, I remember, at Oxford in a more or less modified sense. But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force oneself to understand the whole hypothesis, and the grounds for it, is a very different matter. It is a revelation."

" Yes," said Langham, and ho could not forbear adding, " but it is a revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with her revelations." Gradually Elsmere falls under the influence of a freethinking squire, who is a profound scholar and one of the leaders of the advanced thought of the day, and who had written a famous book—"The Idols of th' 3 Market-place"—which assailed the strongholds of popular English religion. This Elsmere reads, and the result is that " over the young idealist soul there swept a dry, destroying whirlwind of thought. * * * hi the stillness of the nightthere rose up weirdly before him a wholly new mental picture, effacing, pushing out., innumerable older images of thought. It was the image of a purely human Christ a purely human, explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity." As he does not now believe the dogmas of the Church, he resigns his orders, and, in company with a few kindred spirits, starts working in the East End of London. "He was already known to certain circles as a secedcr from the Church who was likely to become both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the Nineteenth Century on disputed points of Biblical criticism had distinctly made their mark." The Easterners are rather suspicious of him at first, and one of them says, " Seems like a parson somehow; but he ain't a parson.'' " Not he," says another ; " knows better. Most of 'em as comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of gojd-goody as an egg's full of meat. If he were that sort, you wouldn't catch me here. Never heard him say anything in the 'dear brethren' sort of style." "Scratch him, and you'll find the parson," says a third. " They're always just hunting for souls, like Injuns for scalps. They can't got to Heaven without a certain number of' em slung about 'em." Elsmere is shocked by the literature at an atheistical club frequonted by these men, especially at a comic illustrated history of Christ, and he lectures to them upon the real character and surroundings of Christ, and how " He is risen" not in reality, but ideally. Of the resurrection, he says:—"ln the days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate fancy of a fow mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurree tion. How natural and, amid all its falseness, how true is that naive and contradictory story." Another work he undertook was the scientific Sunday-school, an iden taken from a hint in one of Huxley's Lay Sermons. All these labours tell severely on a constitution never robust, and at the close of the book he dies of consumption. The squire had gone mat!, and died shortly before Elsmere. There are a number of other characters in the book, which are drawn with rare skill. Elsmere's wife, a strict Christian, is one of these, and her gay and musical sister, Rose, is another, In addition to these more important characters, there are numbers of crisp little sketches like the following:—"A famous journalist, whose smiling, selfrepressive look assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires." There is no plot in the book, but there is great variety of character, scene, and incident. One scene, by the way, is very risky, and is much like what one would expect to find in Ouida or a French novel. Robert Elsmere, in fine, is a very extraordinary book, full of subtlo force and originality. It will amply repay careful Bjudy, and should be read along with Mr. Gladstone's review, in which the central idea of the novel is fully discussed. Fraternity ; a romance by an anonymous author (Macmillan and Co). —This is another novel with a purpose, which is revealed in the preface. In it the writer states that, standing in the People's Palace in London, her (for the writer is evidently a woman) heart was filled with joy at this wonderful fruit of an " impossible story"— this visible outcome of fraternity in the nineteenth century. She longed for such a palace for her own people (the Welsh), when suddenly the thought struck her that "the true delights of the sons of men," such as poetry, music, learning, needed no stately palace, and that men by true fraternity could receive these pleasures from each other without cost, if each would but give what he could. There is nothing very remarkable about the story, nor is there much plot or sensation ; but there are some very fresh and pleasant descriptions of Welsh scenery, life, and character, and the book concludes, as all novels should, with marriages and happiness ever after. The authoress is brimful of patriotic love for her mountainous little country, and readers can spend some very pleasant hours in her company wandering about among Welsh scenes and Welsh people.