A CHAT ON BOOKS.

Otago Witness, 5 December 1900, Page 59

A CHAT ON BOOKS.

My Dear Readers, — "Love and Mr Lewi sham"' is the quaint title of a book wliicj I thoroughly commend to your reading. % is by H. G. Wells, a name which conjure* up the memory of books in which a phenomenal imagination has run riot — as, foj example, "The Time Machine," "The Island of Dr Moreau," "When the Sleeper Wakes," etc. Those of you, however, who have read his "Wheels of Chance • know how ruthlessly he can eliminate that! riotous imagination, and how utterly true to life and human nature he can be — a realist of the keenest, most practical school., He is, indeed, a curious study himself, this author, I always think. His wildest, most distempered flights of imagination are always so inwoven ■with practical details, prosaically and sensibly set forth, that? one is apt to forget the impossibility o£ the whole scheme, and to live for the mo-,' ment in^the strange phantasies which Wells' evokes for vs — mainly from the future. Ira "Love and Mr Lewisham," however,- we. realise how perfectly a master of conjecture may also be a master of realism. 4

Mr Lewisham, as we first meet him, is "assistant master in the Whortley Proprietary School. His wages are £40 a -year, ■ out of which he ,pays 15s a week, during term time, to lodge with Mrs Munday at; the little shop in the West street. Ho was called Mr to distinguish him from' the bigger boys whose duty it was to learn.]' . . . He wore ready-made clothes, his v black jacket of ri^id lina was dusted aW|C

the front and sleeves with scholastic chalk, and his face was downy and his moustache 'incipient, 'xhere was a quite unnecessary ■pah? of glasses on his fairly prominent nose —he wore these to make himself look older, 'that discipline might be maintained." { At the particular moment when this etory ibegins he was in his bedroom. "To , judge "by the room, Mr Lewisham thought Jittle of Love and much on Greatness. Over '/the 'head of the bed, for example, where Igood folk hang texts, these truths asserted Sheniselves : - 'Knowledge is power,' 'What [-man has done, man can do, 1 man in the second instance referring to Mr Lewisham. 'Never for a moment were these things toribe forgotten. Mr Lewisham could see jjthem afresh "every morning as his head came through his shirt." I A "schema," hung over the yellow box ,which served as a library, showed exactly the dates at which Mr Lewisham had arranged to pass his exams, and take his degrees with "honours in all subjects," so that at 24 he will-have mastered five or Ijsix languages, and besides being a prodigy f'of learning, will be able to attach many 'anystic letters to his name. A time-table provided a tireless list of pursuits for every — beginning at 5 in the morning — rwhioh was not occupied by his duties as rassistant-master of Whortley Proprietary School." There was one serious defect in j>tihat time-table of Mr Lewisham's — it permitted out-door study ! During out-door lltudy Mr Lewisham met Love ; and Greatness, alas, was forgotten ! He was only •18, you 'Will remember, and after making ' ylhe acquaintance of this pretty and charming girl — a London typist and shorthand Vriter enjoying a holiday — he discovers new charms in out-door study, takes Ethel for \n long -walk, is too late to take his duties \t school at evening ".prep.," creates a thereby, at which all the sleepy groans, and the school is wildly Excited, and is dismissed ! j jt Next we find him at the Royal College fof Science, South Kensington — a "science 'teacher in training," living on a guinea a ,Week, and passing rich and independent with the- knowledge of £100 in the bank. Aft. princely sum, from which he never drew VJav'e for books, instruments, or some necessity of the brilliant career in which he wbs clicking up paper certificates like a devouring flame." A career is now the end and of Mr Lewisham's life, as strenuously ■is it was three years ago, before Love diswovered him at out-door study and claimed "aim. Ethel hate vanished. She wrote Snce, never again, "and though 'he spent many an afternoon during has first few Months in London, wandering about Clap-

ham, that arid waste of people, .the meeting that he longed for never came."

Love became a mere memory — the career claimed Mr Lewisham once more, lighted, however, by a lurid glow which, -affords him much secret pride and satisfaction — Mr Lewisham has (become a Socialist ! He announces this -fact to the world by the purchase of a red tie in the first place and the reading of a paper on Socialism at a debating "society in the second. There is a certain Miss Heydinger, a fellow student, who seems likely to create a second episode for the student, but a dawning interest in spiritualism, which, curiously enough, leads to the discovery of Ethel as a medium, settles Miss Heydinger's chance. The straight poverty, respectability, social conventions, and grey rigidity of this London life are extraordinarily vivid in their portrayal. The sordid chicancery of -the spiritualistic circle, Lewisham's disgust at discovering Ethel in such surroundings, the chivalious instinct of protection on his side, and the desire for escape on hers, touched and iradi&ted by love which, if shallow and foundationless, deems beautiful to their young eyes — the termination of all this ascending scale of emotion in their marriage, is a wonderful- bit of realisation.

Then comes the awakening — slow, dreai'y, sad, as such awakenings made at the very beginning of what is a life-long compact, must be : the callow poet, whose worship poor Ethel, in her yawning through empty days, encourages ; the intellectual friendship with -Miss Heydinger which Lewisham falls back upon to fill up the mental blanks of his uncongenial marriage are all so natural. (Shipwreck at last seems imminent. Interested to an almost painful point in these two young creatures with no one to help or advise, no one to cling to in all the sad shadows of their own mistakes, we sigh with relief to find Nature taking human nature into a new haven of new hopes. The anchor slips down into still water : what if the ambitions, 'hopes, and schemes i earlier years have been mercilessly jettisoned during the storm? There may remain other joys.

Mr Lewisham, pondering, sadly enough, over the new outlook, soliloquises :

"And yet — it is almost as if Life- had played me a triek — promised so much — given so little ! . . . No ! One must not look at it that way ! That will not do ! That will not do.

"Career! In itgelf it is a career — the most important career iv the world. Fathei! Why should I want more?"

"Things Seen," is the $itie given to a

volume of articles written by the late G. W. Steevens and collected from, such sources as the pages of " The New Review," "National Observer," "Blackwood," etc., etc. Their scope is varied. Zola and his work is the theme of a clever dispassionate criticism. "The New Tennypon" gives with no uncertain sound Steevens' s convictions on the subject of v 'ln Memoriam." "Tins puny, womanish complaint that can neither weep hot tears nor keep dry eyes might be set in the loveliest language ot poetry, and that would avail nothing to save it. . . He has invented here a new language — the language of the refined Sentimental Coward. He tumbles alternately into fine writing and obscurity. . . So that there results a stiange admixture of final and immortal phrasing, with dark and maukish affectation." And here are some lines from " The Jubilee " to interest us :

"Another clash of music from beyond the railway bridge, and we weie looking at what all England was longing to look at — the colonials. But first a scarlet-plumed figure on a white horse pacing up the street, and all the street breaking into a roar as he came up. Roberts ! Three cheers for Roberts! Bobs, Bobs, Bobs! What a proud and beautiful horse, that hardly felt the ground it trod on, and what a man ! Hard-bitten, sun-tanned face, the white moustache sitting firmly on the firm mouth, bolt upright, yet easy in the saddle — Lord Roberts Avas every inch a soldier and a captain of men. When Sir Charles Napier first heard Braham sing he went up to him and said: 'Sir, it is men like you that make men like us.' It is men like Lord Roberts that make Queens like Queen Victoria.

" The cheers sank, but they did not die, for before there was time for that we were looking at the colonials. In the carriages we saw the square, strong, invincibly sensible faces of the men who are building tip great nations, new big Englands, on the other side of the world. Between the carriages rode and tramped the men who guard the building and who carry British peace and British law into the wildest places of the earth. Lean, hard-knit Canadians ; long-legged yellow Australians, all in one pace with their horses ; giant, long-eyed Maoris, sitting loosely, and leaning back curiously from the waist ; burned South Africans, upstanding Sikhs, tiny little Malays and Dyaks. . . White men, yellow men, brown men, black men' — every colour, every continent, every race, every speech ; and all in arms for the British Empire and the British Queen."

" The New Humanitarianism " is a splendid paper, in which the sham sentiments, sham philosophies, sham humanities are held up to 'scorn in all their naked paltriness. "All our Victorian sentiments, all our movements, all our humanitarianist talk trend in one direction — towards the conviction that death and pain are the worst of all evils. . . The same blind horror of physical pain may be found at the root of half the 'isms' of the day. As the savage virtues die out, the civilised vices spring up in their place. . . The duel was h'ssed out of England because it killed the body : in its stead reigns scandal, which kills the soul. Sport, which slaughters beasts, is yielding to betting on professional athletics, which fritters away the minds of men. . . An educated woman, a. good" woman, will grieve for a week if her child is to have a mole cut from its cheek, and cairnot bear to see the operation. But she will dress herself carefully and attend a ti'ial for murder."

"From the New Gibbon" sua^ests its subject — the decline of the British Empire. It is a splendid article, which appeared in "Blackwood," February, 1899. I must make one quotation from it. I wish I could make a dozen, so cleverly and truly does the writer — who little thought how soon his interest in Mie Empire that he loved was to be severed — point out the

grave defects of our time. " The new methods of trade cheapened everything, and especially clothing, to a price within the compass of the poorest ; but in doing so it rudely broke the tie which bound the lower classes to theii homes. The wife who had been wont to pass the evening in the manufacture of garments for her children now bought them at some great emporium, and, emancipated at once from the necessity of work and the practice of frugality, devoted the evenings to idle gossip or empty frivolity. . . The happy home of .the British plebeian passed from a realifcv to a proverb and from a proverb to a fable, and the fair picture of the past gave place to a blur of drunkenness, indolence, and disease."

Equally to the point are the few paragraphs devoted to society in this trenchant summing up of the decline of the British Empire. I cannot resist quoting a few lines : " The court, as a standard of polite manners, had almost ceased to exist. The retired life of the venerable Victoria during her later years left the leadership of fashion vacant, and the landed nobility was too poor as well as too proud to struggle for the vice-regency. >The field of so-called society was left open to any adventurer with the effrontery to usurp it. Thus arose an inner circle of fashion, or, to call it by its ... more appropriate name, of smartness, based neither upon birth nor elecrance of manners, but rather upon a bold and clever arrogance, and supported in the general estimation mainly by brazen advertisement."