The Bookshelf.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 20, 17 November 1909, Page 46

The Bookshelf.

By

DELTA.

REVIEWS.

Open Country: A Comedy with a Sting. Maurice Hewlett. London: Macmillan and Co.). ZTTX R. HEWLETT is to the fore 4 1b nguin as the advocate of free 3I A love. That he writes sub- / limely and inimitably about nature and most of her mundane things, and that his heroines,* generally speaking, are models of pagan, or intensely human femininity, we cheer fuly concede. But we contend with all sincerity, and without any idea of posing as an extreme purist, that the teaching of his hero (John Senhouse) is purely pagan, and therefore injurious from a moral point of view. “ Open Country ” has been written, primarily, in order that the author’s past readers may renew their acquaintance with Senhouse of “Halfway House” fame. As a delineator of nature in all her moods, and often as a philosopher or an idealist, we not only admire but respect John Henhouse. But we abhor him as a teacher of youth, and in particular as a teacher of feminine youth. “ Sanchia Josepha Percival” (the heroine of this ctory) is declared by Senhouse to be a reincarnation of th.it goddess whom the ancient Greeks called Artemis, and the Romans Diana. The second villain of the book, who plays Endymion to Sanchia’s Artemis, is a certain Nevile Ingram, who has never been denied anything in his life that he set his heart upon. Senhouse. in spite of all Mr. Hewlett’s glamour, plays the part of the Sidonian Mentor in this so-called comedy. The rest of the dramatis personae are merely incidentals necessary to the action of the piot. Those readers acquainted with the classics, and with Mr. Hewlett’s inimitable skill in the art of moving Iris players in any game of life, and particularly that of the game of love, will follow the move s of this modern Artemis with conflicting emotions according to the clarity of their moral outlook upon life. When we think of a Saiu'hia Josepha Percival, Faciiliced on the altar of love to a Nevile Ingram, we cry out, with Othello, of ‘‘the pity of it.” 'I hose readers who are not acquainted with the classics will do well to beg, borrow, or steal a Lempriere, before reading this book, as Mr. Hewlett, though not so obscure as the late George Meredith, is as subt’e in expressing his meanings as that great master. We do not purpose to divulge the whol‘ of this story, but advise all adult readers to buy the book, (this is no book for youth), ami judge for themselves who was most to blame for the sting in this comedy. We are emphatically of the opinion that at John Senhouse’s door lies the blame of the whole matter. Sanchia. camo to Senhouse as wax, therefore with him lies the blame that on her mind was left “the impression of strange kinds, by ill moulding. W'e respect Senhouse where he says: “No harm can ever come to a good woman. No; but horrib’e evil is done the world when such an one is put in peril. The moral sense is shocked. the standard falls; if the Hag Hi. s still it flies as a braggart and a liar. Women in his view are so infinitely higher than men. being capable of lengths of enthusiasm and sacrifice which men never become aware of, that mere honour is stultified if such a danger is allowed. The state of a man becomes revolting if such a danger is allowed/’ But: we despise him utterly from a moral point of view, when his pupil becomes as a “ god unconcerned with the good and eri! which temper and try the confidences of men.” But a fig for Mr. Hewlett’s paganistic vapourings. These ancient gods and goddesses were but myths, and only typify what is worst in man. For though Sanchia Josepha Percival were ea»t in the mould of an Artemis, she would never have come to life if Senhouse had not breathed into her. And if Senhouse had • cast himself in the role of a Perseus. Endymion would have slept on unkissed, and untempted, and this modern representation of another garden of Eden tragedy would have been spared the reader. Exit John Senhouse as falsa teacher. \ .With John Senhouse’s «pirited protest

against modernity we are more or less in sympathetic agreement. The State as the Whiteley of England, with the heads of departments as shopwalkers, and with the English people as forced buyers, would be indeed, we think, a worsening of present conditions. After State socialism Mr. Hewlett prophesies anarchy, then poverty temperance and sincerity, redeunt Saturnia regna. This he declares is his Cumaean plan for England’s salvation. We regret that space forbids further mention of John Senhouse’s forecasts, views, opinions and philosophies, ami can only reiterate our advice to readers to buy the book, which, but for its pagan tendency, and in spite of its pagan tendency, is a literary feast. We are indebted to the courtesy of Macmillan and Co. for our copy of “Open Country,” which is very “ open country ” indeed.

The Smiths of Valley View. Being Further Adventures of the Smiths of Surbiton. Keble Howard. (London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell and Co. Auckland: Wildman and Arey.) Keble Howard, like Jerome K. Jerome, marvels at the scant and contemptuous attention the great middle-class of England receives from novelists as a field of exploitation for fictional purposes. “To write of the middle classes, in short, is a confession of mediocrity,” says this author. “ They do not understand, you see, how much more difficult it is to get an effect without flying to extremes. They admit, readily enough, that the middle classes are the mainstay of England, but venture to write about them, save in the blessed spirit of satire, and artistically you are forthwith doomed.” But Mr. Howard, with a courage worthy of his aforetime reputation, defies popular disparagement, and in this sequel to “The Smiths of Surbiton,” proves conclusively that in this seldom exploited field, there is material that, handled in a natural or an ideal manner, could not fail to imbue the reader with the conviction that not only is an incalculable amount of good raw material going to waste, but that in •this class is to be found embedded the roots of those virtues that have made England what she is. Men’s hearts, from which all the virtues worth the counting, spring, become atrophied by repression. Tiie upper class has by repression almost lost its heart, because it has learned to look upon repression as a mark of high

breeding. The lower classed, God help them, as a whole, have little or no expression that is not brutal or sordid, because they, too, have brought repression io a sombre art. So that any writer who wishes th depict English life at its best and worst, in the most natural and in the most utilitarian surrounding,must go to its middle class, first casting off the spectacles of modern prejudice, and with a perfectly open mind. The sex problem novel has lost its first grip on the public - —the morbidly or impossible sensational is doomed, the sentimental no longer satisfies, and no material now remains for successful manipulation but the historically romantic or the topical. But what the reading public never tires of is the being brought into touch with the usage, and the heart of life. And, owing to •the repression of the upper classes, and the brutal indifference of the lower’ classes, it is impossible to get into touch with the real heart of life except through the medium of its middle-classes. How interesting, how lovable, and how worthy in many ways of emulation is this class, which, kindly hearted, and with no insensate social or political ambition to curtail its expression, has time to cultivate its neighbours’ acquaintance, and the wherewithal and the will to minister to its poorer neighbour’s needs. Of this class are the “Smiths of Valley View.” By their medium we are shown marriage as an ideal state, children who love and honour their parent's, servants whose greatest ambition is to be worthy of their employer’s consideration. There are chapter’s purely sentimental, chapters that have an element of the tragic in them, chapters that overflow with humour, and wisdom, chapters utilitarian, and chapters that are wholly homely and graphically descriptive of the life and feeling of the great middle class. Suburbia, to us, in future, will instead of being regarded as the happy hunting ground of the satirist, be regarded by us as the readers’ aosis in the desert of prurient or mediocre literature that is at present flooding the market of fiction.

Peter-Peter: A Romance Out of Town. Maud Radford Warren. (London and New York: Harper Brothers. Auckland: Wildman and Arey). A more delightfully humorous exposition of an old nursery rhyme than this story of “ Peter-Peter, pumpkin eater, Who had a-wife and couldn’t keep her; So put her in a pumpkin shell And there he kept her very well.” could not we'll be imagined. The actors in this dainty farce which brims over with bright humour and smart dialogue are Peter-Peter, his wife, his wife's sister, his wife’s sister’s lover, his friend the editor, and their boarder, the beautiful school-mistress. Out of this

cast, and the old couplet the reader muetl fashion for himself a romance of sorts. If he is lacking in imagination, we counsel b-irn to do as we did, viz., rdad the book, which will amply repay his expenditure of time and money.

The White Prophet: Hall Caine. (London: William Heinemann. 2 vols., 4/ net.) There is a great difference of opinion amongst the great “ Home ” critics as to the merits of Mr Hall Caine’s much discussed book, “The White Prophet.” Avowedly written to dear up some of ■the misunderstandings that prevail between east and west, it is not only ineffective, but actually mischievous in tendency, according to the criticism of those two eminent writers, Dr. William Barry and Mr Douglas Sladen, whose criticisms we append. Mr. Sladen says:—, “ It may be asked bow I had the audacity to write a novel simultaneously with one of the greatest living novelists, upon the same subject, and from an almost diametrically opposite point of view. I do this because I think that; Mr. Hall Caine has been misinformed', and has committed a great injustice. As the father of a soldier, and as one who has spent six months on the spot studying the question, I felt bound to challenge the false light in which he presents the British Army of Occupation in Kgypt to the public.” While Dr. Barry stigmatises the book as playing to that gallery Mr Hall Caine so dearly loves, and whom we are bound to say so dearly loves him.

BOOKSHELF FEUILLETON.

Mr. J. P. Grossmann’s splendid articles on deforestation, which appeared in serial form some time ago in the “ Weekly Graphic,” are now’ to be had in book form at the modest price of eighteenpeuce. The striking illustrations,which served both to embellish and illimine Mr. Grossmann’s text, are included in the booklet, which will be heartily welcomed, not only by those who read the articles as they appeared, but also those vdiio from dislike of reading anything in instalments have not yet read them. So impressed are we with the evils of deforestation as depicted by Mr Grossmann, and the urgent need in our midst of some regular and scientific scheme of afforestation, that we cordially wish this reprint the wide circulation its subject demands.

BOOKSHELF NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Those readers who are privileged to receive “ The Times ” regularly will scarcely recognise in the writer of a short trenchant letter to the “Times” of July 7, on “English M.P.’s and Indian Anarchism,” the writer of some of the most popular novels about India ever published. Airs. Steele’s best, perhaps, was “On the Face of the Waters,” a story which dealt with the siege of Delhi during the Indian Mutiny. Her latest, “ A Prince of Dreamers,” contained a. masterly portrait of Akbar, the greatest of the Mogul Emperors, and the builder of the great red fort at -Agra. Another work of hers deserving mention is “India Through the Ages.” We express no opinion on the question raised by Mrs. Steele in her letters beyond saying that it seems unnecessary to assume there is disloyalty in every question asked in Parliament which appears to criticise Che action of the Indian Government. ■* A feature of “Life” for October is the third of a series of unconventional pictures of monarchs. Alphon-o, the King of Spain, was snapshotted by the “Tatler’s” photographer in he act of pacifying his eldest daughter. Mark Twain’s onslaught on Shakespeare has given a fillip' to the old Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, and a Mr. W. S. Booth has published “Some Acrostic Signatures of -Francis Bacon.” The “Dial” comments on the performance as capabfe of being taken ‘ for either the jeu d’ esprit of a wag or tha insane utterance of a monomaniac, were it not that the author is regarded by his friends as a rational being writing in a serious mood. If anyone has the curiosity to make the experiment, he will be surprised to discover how easily, by the Boothian mode of procedure, acrostic signatures, whether of Bacon or of Booth, or of any one else, can be ciphered out in any piece of prose or verse, oven in the columns of his daily newspaper. “The Garden of Women" is the title

Mr. Dion Calthrop has given to a volume of essays that he is publishing this winter. He has a new novel in hand Which will be ready for next spring. Mr ICalthrop, by the way is firmly opposed ito the sevenpenny novel, and declares that nothing but disaster can follow on flooding the market with fiction at a. price which cannot pay either author or publisher. ’Litterateurs in America are sorely grieved that Dr. Eliot, the ex. President of Harvard, and the man the United States wanted to send as Ambassador to England, should lend himself to anything so banal as the preparing of a list of the hundred “best books,” says Galbraith in the current number of the “Bookman.” The words of an English author recur in this connection. They were to the effect that such a list of books is a pretty silly thing for any one to set before himself, for the reason that a man who really cares for books will read them all, while the man who doesn’t care for them, is not likely to be helped by the list. Galbraith ventures the opinion that an ignorant but ambitious person would be likely to get [more Teal good from the informal reading of the books that most appeal to him than from the uninspired and painstaking perusal of a set of books that he neither understands nor appreciates. Dr. Eliot’s list is original in having omitted both the Bible and Shakespeare, which he declares every one has read. But if a census were to be taken it would be safe to say that at least sixty out of every hundred have a very rudimentary knowledge of either the Bible or Shakespeare. Dr. Eliot’s list, we are told, is not yet complete, but we append the list as it now stands: “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.” “Journal of John Woolman.” “Fruits of Solitude,” by William iPenn. Bacon’s “Essays” and “New Atlantis.” Milton’s “Areop.agitica,” and “Tractate on Education.” Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici.” Plato’s “Apology,” “Phaedo,” and “Crito.” “Golden Sayings” of Epictetus. “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.” Emerson’s “Essays.” Emerson’s “English Traits.” The complete Poems of Milton. Jonson’s “Volpone.” Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Maids’ Tragedy.” Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi.” Middleton’s “The Changeling.” Dryden’s “All for Love.” Shelley's “Cenci.” [Browning’s cf ßlot in the ’Scutcheon. Tennyson’s “Becket.” Goethe’s “Faust.” [Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.” iAdam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations. ’ “Letters” of Cicero and Pliny. Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Burns’ “Tam O’Shanter. ’ Walton’s “Compleat Angler” and of Donne and Herbert. “Autobiography of St. Augustine.” (Plutarch’s “Lives.” Dryden’s “Aeneid.” “Canterbury Tales.” “Imitation 'of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis. Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” “Arabian Nights.” But when all is said and done, the opinion as to which are the hundred best books must always remain a matter of individual opinion, as there is a great Catholicity of tastes in the matter of best books. Sir John Lubbock, years ago, compiled a list of the hundred best books Which the Routledges publishes, which jve are told can now be bought at a quarter of the original cost. It remains to be seen whether the American venture will prove more successful than the English. Here is an unusual poem: THE DIRGE OF THE FOUR CITIES. “The four cities of the world that was: The sunken city of Murias, and the city of Gorias, and the city of Finias, and the city of Falias.”—“ Ancient Gaelic Chronicle.” Finias and Falias, Where are they gone’ Does the wave hide Murias— Does Gorias know the dawn? .Does not the wind wail In the city of gems? Do not the prows sail Over fallen diadema

And the spires of dim gold And the pale palaces Of Murias, whose tale was told Ere the world was old* Do women cry, Alas . . . Beyond Finias J Does the eagle pass Seeing but her shadow on the grass Where onee was Falias? And do her towers rise Silent and lifeless to the frozen skies; Fill the twilights of Finias With love that has not grown cold Since the days of old? Hark to the tolling of bells And the crying of wind? The old spells Time out of mind, They are crying before me and behind! I know now no more of my pain, But am as the wandering rain Or as the wind's shadow on the grass Beyond Finias of the Dark Rose: Or, ’mid the pinnacles and still snows Of the Silence of Falias. I go; or am as the wave that idly flows Where the pale weed in songless thickets grows Over the towers and fallen palaces Where the Sea-City was, The City of Murias. —Fiona Macleod, in the “ Pall Mall Magazine.” The current number of the “Bookman” contains an admirably written centenary notice by Walter Jerrold, of the American poet and novelist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Summarised, after abstracting the information as to the poetnovelist’s parentage, education, individual tastes, traits, etc., the article is but an elaboration of the sprightly lines which head the article, and the beautiful dedicative verses by Whittier and H. C. Bunner, which serve to embellish the text and which we append. The article is splendidly illustrated from old prints, amongst which are a series illustrative of the dramatis personae that formed the company at the “Breakfast-table.” Here are the sprightly lines that head the article: “This time three geniuses, Al! to grace her favourite city: The first a bard; the second wise; the third supremely witty. So said, so done; the three in one she wrapped and stuck the label: Peet, professor, autocrat of wit’s own Breakfast-table.” And—“His still the keen analysis Of men and moods, electric wit, Free play of mirth, and tenderness To heal the slightest wound from it.” In short, Oliver Wendel Holmes “Lived to show that wit may be Divinely kind, Divinely wise; That looking on earth’s misery. The clearest are the kindliest eyes.”

EPIGRAMS FROM NEW BOOKS

Meg of the Salt-pans: May Aldington. (Everett. June, 1909. 6/.) I find that the more she learns the more overpowered she is with her ignorance, and I think that is a true test of real humility. Love is the one thing in life which is the same for the rich as for the poor. It is the one touch in the world which makes us realise the equality of all in heaven. Marriage means a constant obliteration of self, a constant “give up.” Time is a wondrous healer, and sometimes we are kinder to our women folk by our absence than by our presence. Women begin their hell, or their paradise, when they are married. It's arranged like that. A fickle woman is as tiresome as a wet summer, but a fickle man's a despicable beast. Temperance? .... Well, it seems ter me that no man can live without eatin’ and drinkin’. If a man was ter say he would eat nothin’ only bread, we should lock ’im up till ’e come to ’is senses.