AMONG THE BOOKS

Sun (Christchurch), Volume V, Issue 1360, 22 June 1918, Page 4

AMONG THE BOOKS

BOOKS REVIEWED. THE SUPREME INTERROGATION —WHERE? "Where—are our dead?" asks "Rita" (Mrs Desmond Humphreys) for herself and the tens of thousands bereft by the war. She refuses derisively all would-be solace relating to "white-winged angels and streets of gold and pearl, and all the rhapsodical frenzies of the Hook of Revelations." Where? she repeals intensely, is that laughing hoy, those myriad laughing lads, whom the Juggernaut of bailie has obliterated. And, as will be already anticipated by the discerning reader, "Rita" warns the sorrowing of the futility of expecting to find real comfort in creeds and doctrines, sects or churches. Religion she believes to be a word grossly misunderstood, creeds and churches anachronisms of a most misleading kind. Particularly the Church—the distinction is hers. Its outlook upon the problems of Time and Eternity is still a narrow outlook that declared the discoveries of astronomy as blasphemous. The Church has very definitely failed to rise to its tremendous responsibility; will continue to fail until it gets without the walls of the Thirty-Nine Articles. We hasten to explain that though this outspoken woman holds such views: holds that true religion has nothing to do with church or creed or dogma or priestly arrogance —she nevertheless can look forward to communion with the Teacher "whose call sounds through all the discordant notes of creation." Tehe Power that sends us to one world, she feels, may well be trusted to take us into another. And the real thing—the only vital religion? "God and Man—that is what religion means, and what the Soul accepts apart from external symbols and ceremonies. That—and the recognition of man's own responsibility, the separating of mind from matter."

A deep and a vexatious problem, friends, and here in this volume, "The Wrong End of Religion," a serious attempt to probe it to its recesses. "Rita's" arguments are along familiar lines, as has been indicated. At least she may be credited with sincerity and courage. Wlio can satisfy the supreme interrogation?

("The Wrong End of Religion." W. Westall & Co., Ltd. Simpson & Williams.)

Very Neat Nothings

Readers who remember the excitement of the "Lost Naval Papers" will be a little disappointed with the same writer's "Jitny and the Bovs." There was thrill in the former book, and a breezy, rattling style. Detective Dawson, too, was a vigorous creation, and the picture of the English Secret Service was entirely soothing to our national pride. In "Jitny" the ink is too thin. Jitny is a motor car. "At first she was simply 'The Bus.' But the Bovs one day saw an American kinema film, depicting two tramps in their 'Jitny Bus,' and she became at once seized of a name which, though in itself meaningless, seemed in some subtle fashion exactly to describe her endearing qualities of undignified, noisy, but ever-faithful efficiency." As for the boys--well, they are certainly clean, healthy, engaging young specimens of the comfortable middle-class, but that hardly entitles them to till a book. If, on the other hand, their history is intended mainly for youthful readers, its chief merit will be entirely lost. Bovs read for "the yarn," and instead of a yarn this time Bcnnet Copplestone gives us simply a happy family—bantering, affectionate, ' objective, self-sufficient . . . and not even tragic when overshadowed by the war. Incidentally, however, there is a sly dig at the super-patriotism of the Scots, another at the universal neglect of history in the schools of the Empire, and an admirable picture of the Anthill (London) when suddenly stirred by the giant slick of Avar. But as an illustration of the author's style, take the following brief picture. The farmer had reached his second childhood without having ridden in a motor car—and (he boys suddenly opened the throttle:

"lie rolled dizzily in his place. hut only for a.moment. As the speed his back stiffened, his crippled frame cast off the bonds of rheumatism, he laughed, shrill, jerky cacklings; from his throat, too, came strange, weird calls, the huntingcries of a forgotten generation . .' . Peter, alarmed, checked Jitny, but the old man called lustily upon him to hasten, to give her the spur, to keep her head to the fences. . . .

*Forrard, forrard, forrard, yoicks. hark away, hark away, hark away!' He was drunk with the wine of speed." (John Murray, through Messrs jWhitcombc and Tombs.) "That" Versus "It."

Words fail us. In the course of three hours, and the space of 300 pages, we have groped our way fearfully from the Irish Question to the mysteries of negro Voodoo. We have seen a poacher's skull cracked in Ballyhar, a syndicalist riot in Paris, a succession of tribal wars in Africa, and, while our hair stood on end and our hearts turned sick and cold, have been witnesses in a blood-bespattered dungeon below Paris, of the last encounter between That and 11. II is an effort even yet lo gel our eyes back to norma! focus. Not to terrify you 100 much, "That," we may as well explain al once, is the Power of the Ape, "II" the relatively beneficent Magic of the Snake. Madame des Rarres, a Haytian demi-monde living near Paris, was Ihe High Priestess of That, Charlie Shandross, an Irishman and our hero, had become accidentally possessed of It. To unite Jt with Thai, lo hold in one hand the Magic Hod of the Snake, and in the oilier the diabolic Image of the Ape, would mean absolute mastery of the negro world—Africa, the West Indies. Central America, and something like half of I'.S.A. II was worth trying for. Heaven knows: btil Madame allowed nothing for failure. She forgot, like the tempter of Providence in Mrs Shelley's "Frankenstein," that the Power of the Ape had an ugly recoil. At the critical moment That shrank snarling back from It—and Madame in a second or two was a few bloody rags on the ground. ". • . Who will deny that "The Hod of

REVIEWS AND NOTES

the Snake" (by Vere Shortt and Frances Matthews) is an epochmaking book? (Our copy conies direct from John Lane.)

LITERARY GLEANINGS. Who said Art does not pay? Of the 2000 copies of the Norman Lindsay book published recently at half a guinea (and a little more), only 170 now remain unsold. Of course, the profit for the artist may be smaller than most imagine. It probably is. Rut 500 sales a week for pure art is generous going for lands still struggling with the virgin bush.

Frank Harris's limited "Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde" has just been reprinted in New York in a cheaper edition. It is well that a sympathetic friend and able writer should lay the facts before such of the reading public as care to have them and at least try to settle the whole matter once for all. Surely few will add to Mr Harris's comments on the personality of Wilde, and in all probability not many will find much more to sav of his talent as a writer. The book is rendered doubly interesting by a long letter from Bernard Shaw to Mr Harris, virtually a series of memories. These are excellent reading.

Ten nights in a barroom is a regular thing in Washington now, according to Frank W. O'Malley, writing in the April "Century Magazine." You sleep there, always with a fool rest, though perhaps unpillowed. O'Malley says that Master Francois Villon would be turned down cold if he showed up at the desk of the New Willard and asked for a lodging for the night—any night.

Dr E. J. DiHon, in "The Eclipse of Russia," which Messrs Dent and Sons are publishing, claims to have known " the entire secret" of the Kaiser's relations with the Tsar since 1905, and to have become involved in Russian politics in many ways. " Witte and myself," he says, in giving an outline of the work, " were to have been bombed one Saturday by two men who had already slain two of my friends, and he and I should have been inevitably blown up opposite Witte's house, had noi the two murderers quarrelled the day before with their suborner and cut off his head with a big penknife! The Tsar and his Minister refused to allow the machinery of justice to be set in motion. I'myself read the Tsar's secret arbitrament."

So many collections of verse are appearing, says a waggish American journal, that writers of it are in danger of running short of titles. Our poetry editor generously offers a few suggestions—all, as yet, uncopy righted:— "The Green Burn." "Clocks mid Sardines." "Shoelaces." "Out oi' a Dry Well." "The Midday Moon." "Balustrades and Barnacles." "Hope Dust." "The Faded Fence." "Auricles and Ventricles." "Stone-deaf." "New Umbrellas." "I.ccs oi' a Bass-drum." "Whispers and Whirligigs." "Why Wait." "Little Infinitudes." "Longish Lyrics." "The Thins on the Hook." "Pensive Steam-pipes." "Skyscrapers and Crocuses." "Final Finalities."

"Modern courts ore satisfied," writes an American divine in the latest examination of the Teuton atrocities, "with two forms of testimony, but the German atrocities are evidenced by five kinds of conclusive proof," i.e., the testimony of men and women telling what they have seen and heard—"that is a high form of evidence." Then there is the testimony of little children "too innocent to invent what they arc not old enough to describe . . . because children are unprejudiced their testimony is the highest form of proof known to modern courts." The testimony of the photograph, which is absolute: "The sunbeams move in straight lines, they tell no lies"; and finally, from the journals and diaries of the German soldiers: the testimony of the Germans themselves. Examine the witnesses he calls to the bar, and. like Theodore Roosevelt, you will want a madhouse opened for the defectives who are still not convinced.

The latest "Century" contains an article by Harold Spender upon 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British Premiers since the time of Walpole. The house was built by the man who gave his name to the street, and not an auspicious name: Sir George Downing, who received the ground and his baronetcy for betraying old Puritan friends to Charles 11. Pepys called Downing "an ungrateful villain." His mansion passed into the possession of George 11., who offered it lo Robert Waloole; and Walpole, with a greater sjiow of honesty than we would expect from such a man. took it upon condition that it would belong in perpetuity to the First Lords of the Treasury. Mi - Spender describes its interior, and recalls some few of the many famous scen.es which its walls have witnessed. Over the War Cabinet room presides the presences of Francis Bacon, in a portrait by some painter not named.

Interpolated in a recent lecture by Sir Waller Raleigh in London was the following caustic analysis of the "defeatists": The people who do the half-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angry at being deprived*"of their personal ease and independence; or elderly, pensive gentleman, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer lit for action, and being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and lake the temperature of the war every morning, and then rush-into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing but a change in diet, and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of hearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame of England, "dear for her reputation through the world," is less than nothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enough themselves hut delight in startling and depressing others. These are not the people of England; they are the

parasites of the people of England. The people of England understand a fight. "Now I want you to obey me—just for once," said Coningsby Dawson in playful earnest to his father in a lyric liille letter written in midocean as he sailed, his furlough em\ed, back to France to enter the trenches for the third time. "I want you to write a book. . . . There are fathers in America who are soon to become the fathers of soldiers. Tell them how to bear up; let them know they're soldiers too—the braver kind of soldiers who are left behind." W. J. Dawson obeyed. In response to this tender command of Coningsby, his son, he has written "The Father of a Soldier." It tells the simple story of a son who went away to war and the consequent mental evolution of his father from fear to happy fortitude and then lo a quiet exultation. It is an inspiring book, says an American journal, a gentle book, a book full of twilight moods and silvertinted phrases—wrought throughout with a specialist's regard for rhythm.