BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13453, 1 June 1907, Page 5 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

A Wilderness WiNNK.n: By Edith A. {' Barnett, Methisen. London.Of th: settlement of the Western American wheat I country much ha* been said but little (enough written. The most omnivorous ? ; novel reader would find it; hard to Mine t; .■; J 'book that deal* exhaustively with the life, ' I ( or rather would have found it. hard before '5 % ["A Wilderness Winner" was published. I For here is the Western settler's life, in [all its sordid reality and desperate toiling, < ' • (without any redeeming feature —excepting the heroism of sacrifice. It is not wholly [correct, th© impression thus given, ami I many who have gone through the experi- | ence oi pioneering will mi: - the gleams f';. of sunshine which they themselves felt in, jit; but it is a very neat story and could 'only have been written by one who had |j [seen something of American settlement. \ , [The heroine. I'ha-be Leeth. a middle-class | • j English girl, goes out to a Western farm with a neighbour's son. who nad emigrated i': j years before and returned home for * [wife. There is very little plot, but, a ._ 1 i multitude oi incidents and numerous [characters, from the brave but disappoint- ■ i |ee' Phoebe, and her dull-witted husband, 17 'to the grasping Italian woman, whose ambition is for her children. All Phoebe's neighbours are grasping, unless they aie i English; and most of the English neigh-.. I hours have sadly degenerated. But the IstOry is full of thought, and the attitude of people at Home to the frontier life has rarely been better expressed. A., thus: — ' "They all were without any conception of a real wilderness or wildncss, or of b •land untamed by centuries of man's la- f .hour. What in that household was meant by the wilderness was a few square yards • i "jot" highly cultivated ground at the bottom of the flower garden, near the shrubbery, .where men were for ever sweeping and '{planting, where the shrubs and plants | j ! from the far quarters of the globe stood J , close together and fought for existence, J j I the head gardener having beforehand ap- I t pointed the winner. They all really believed that they came to wild life so soon "&• .'as they got out of sight of bricks and j mortarliterally bricks and mortar, for ;U crumbling stone walls, or matched roofs, -I;! s ior York and Lancaster roses climbing. |f "[seemed near enough to the beginnings of ,|j t, all things to enter into their scheme of a. ','; fjstate of nature. J " Here were people, not otherwise not- "~j; ably ignorant or foolish, who had never ||. { been at the pains to question their i(, ■. belief that our English country sides are, ■ and remain, in a state of nature; who a found it possible to forget that every inch ?• of English land has been cleared and .: ploughed, planted, and reaped, watered '- I'' I with the sweat and the tears, and strewn ? i- with the bones, of uncounted generations \ \ ©of ancestors. They did not know that the M '•commonest plants and trees are exotics, i) r I that the wild creatures have intermingled I :• ]with foreign stock only less completely I] " than the men who own them, that the ! i' fields ovei which our pair tramped were ' e little, if any, more natural thar the raill* way engine whose screams echoed a mile .. I. j away. Fertilised on the one hand, im- | | ss poverished on the other, it would take a, II '-'wiser man than Peter Ingraham to say |j e what, if anything, remains of our original |j a wilderness. . |' "In the matter of social arrangements <: | ] 1" also they pictured Phoebe in her hew .homo i : living a life not widely different from 'ji " their own. They were accustomed to ••! ; A plume themselves upon their simple life M '• close to nature. They loved to inveigh | j ?' against the artificial existence of town ] ] lt dwellers, congratulating one another thai? h J" in the country wheels ran otherwise and J 11 more "naturally." The wheels of life :ran I so smoothly and with so little jarring that > '■ their mistake was almost pardonable. I " Yet country life as the Lceth.s lived ':.'s• ie it is our latest and most difficult prod tic- i r " tion, unattainable by any backward or new | . civilisation. In a state not far removed f " from savagery men may—nay, —gath- ..* er themselves into towns, there to live in I such luxury as their age can afford, and -' ic more or less secure from pillage. But only 'f in the hand of many inventions wrought .| out through centuries of endeavour, only ■'] l 0 in the midst of deep peace paid for by '■ [ bitter conflict and hard fighting, may men > -g of wealth dwell safely, luxuriously, far | a . away from their fellows. j 8 " The fields were artificial, yet that aim- j m pie society was more so; not a step but i, had been planed and planned, and the f cement that held it above and below had J taken centuries to harden. That was jn. where error crept in all was so old that ; ,-e a narrow experience could conceive of noa thing older; all held so firm that it was Id hard to believe that it was less natural k- than sand tossed up and down by the v 1 ?d waves of the sea, or that it was prone to j :d totter under any shock less vehement than I sr that of the Judgment Day." | And poor Phcebe came to this: id " They faced the blue hills as they drove J il- homeward, and at their feet were fields | r. of flowers, springing oh by magic out of I is the recently frozen land; flowers of bril- .>| liant colours and with no leaves; flowers j a that disappear when the glory of their . L i IV blossoming time is over, and leave no trace ;| ie among after-comers who press closely be- '-"f as hind ; sliort-lived flowers of which all the J 1C earth is made, though they arc to the poo- j l S pie most times even nameless. They are * • | a " symbols of the lives of men who tame the ■'-■% wilderness. ■% oi ' "But Phcebe saw their beauty and reck- i* ie ed nothing of their meaning'; and her I >e spirits rose, and when she came to the f es homestead and the yard it was as though I Je Pete had laid bare a wilderness among the S "• flowers, and had mocked her by calling it :| m home. For of beauty there was no more. Zl vr The first steps out of savagery must al- I 1 ways be backwards. ;-vf '." The earth was littered with rubbish ' \ .' and dirt, most of it wood, though there I . was not a tree in sight. Near at hand , was a large barn, and beyond another ■ ! wooden building, *eemingly a stable, for j " the horses, loosened from the shafts, were y'f , ' i turning thither. A field with sprouting coin '; ; lay bevond the barn; yet in this cleared 0 i ground", where Phcebe had thought to find i her garden, there was one blade of promise. • : j c And when, with a catch at her heart, she ; ; c . j looked- towards the place where she thought • ? lie her home should be, she saw only two or ;| a ]ithree one-storeyed, low, plank buildings, ne that should have been tool-sneds or hen- -] e . houses. The trampled, befouled earth crept /, n . up to those drab-coloured walls." r*> : . ",- : I The Religion' of Coxsciotjsness : Byi F. Reginald Statham. Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner and Co., Ltd., Gcrrard-street, London, W. To those who are interested in. what Mr. Stathajn calls the attempt "to i reconcile existing theological formulas with I modern convictions," this plea for a Su- i preme Consciousness will come with wine ;■; so | force. For though orthodox thinkers may li-say that he begins where they leave off, they ial will observe and sympathise with his inj voluntarily shrinking from materialism. ra To quote his own words:—"The complaint * often made that Europe is proceeding under full sail into an age of materialism is justi- ■■■) ,' fied. The fact is so; the thing was inevit3U' able. When, however, this is admitted, It , ig- will be well to see exactly where we are likely to be led'. The fact of consciousness , ; no is one of the most obvious facts of our ' , at existence; it may very well be said to be :rv the highest known fact of that d existence. If we materialise consciousness, l( j i if we regard it as a manifestation of mat- ' er, where shall we find ourselves landed? lU t . . . If the consciousness which is so indisputable a fact of our daily being is n „ a part, an off-shoot, of that Supreme Consciousness which is the All in All, is it to be , n _ beheld that this consciousness of ours is u t a thing which terminates with those changes 0 of matter which we associate with the idea a of death? That this is more than a permissible hope seems to become apparent -.... er . from the doctrine of the conservation of : | force. If physical force is indestructible, .;,I ,1, . how much more the moral force which j i to takes the imprint of personal effort after <j righteousness?" . j 'at ThbMkssaok: By A Democrat.—Gordon he and Gotch, Wellington. This is a drsserta- j ,ed tion upon "political, financial, and social . | 0 f reform," the purpose of which is to show , j "how to cease borrowing and to live withc in our means." "Single Tax" and. paper 'money appear to be the panaceas. - . '.' .■'■■:'.:'' ~- : yM