The Bookshelf.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 25, 21 June 1911, Page 45

The Bookshelf.

By

DELTA.

BOOKSHELF FEUILLETON. A !f»rd Based on Real Life. IN the Messrs. Methuen's Spring List we noticed a novel entitled “Griffith Colgrove’s Wife,” and the publishers footnote set us wondering as to what “much discussed literary episode” the book was based upon. Well the book has not yet reached us, but glancing through our beloved “Spectator,” we. came upon a review of the work, and to our great regret discovered that Mr. Fitz Stephen, (its author, had for fictional purposes, reincarnated the personalities of the late Thomas Carlyle, and his unhappy wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle. Griffith Colgrove is represented as * self-made man of letters of immense industry, encyclopaedic knowledge, and great driving power, .narried to a woman ef much higher social status than himself, who naturally looks forward to charing to the full, any honour, social or literary that may accrue to his undoubted great merit as a writer. And, as the story proceeds, the reader becomes more and more convinced that here is no story ef fiction but a rechauffe of incident and happening of real life. The “Spectator” critic confesses that Mr. Fitz Stephen has handled his subject with fairness and discretion, and that as a picture of MidVictorian literary and political history shows attentive and careful study, and also that the story is extraordinarily ininteresting by reason of the many famous personages who pass and repass throughout its pages. But we ask, and we ask it in all seriousness, are there not enough subjects for any novelist ofrepute to choose from, without pillorising two hapless -creatures who have surely expiated any sin of domestic infelicity they ever committed in this life. Thomas Carlyle in what ever strata of society be might happen to have been horn, would have been a domestic tyrant. And the manner of Jane Cirriyle’s death should prove that her constant irritation -was the result of indifferent nervous health. We strongly deprecate this raising of the honoured dead for novel writing purposes. For whatever may have been the cause of their domestic infelicity it is at least an infelicity into wh’ch no nice minded reader would wish to probe. “It would be extremely interesting,” says the “Spectator,” “to know how this book strikes a reader ignorant of the tragedy on which it is based as that yvould afford the truest test of its merit as a story.” We shall in another issue review this book more fully, as it will Shortly Teach us. Mr. Masefield as a Novelist.

We ■cannot remember ever coming across any book of Mt. Masefield’s in this Dominion, nor have we met many readers who have ever even heard of him. And yet he is a writer of great distinction, and famous for the beauty of the language he employs and for his power of visualising for his readers, and as few writers can, any scene in which he wishes to demonstrate to the life any subject' upon which he is dilating. But hitherto Mr. Masefield has been best known as a poet and a writer of stories ■of sea and travel. Now, however, he has ■written a long novel, entitled “The Street’ of To-Dav” (Dent), which seems to have ex-cited the ire of Mr. R. A. Scott-James, who, in a review in the “Daily News” of April 10, says:—“Ths change from Mr. Masefield, the writer trr poems and stories, to Mr. Masefield, the Wophet'-idealiSt, is a considerable one. Tt is significant of the way in which our modern intellectual life swoops down on whatever talent it finds, and absorbs it into one or another of its forms of nervous agitation. If there is anyone who ought to have been shielded from this vampire of arid intellect it is Mr. Mase-field—-the Mr. Masefield who has so essentially the instincts of a poet, whose love of beautiful things was a passion, vboSe mind seemed to have the virtue of simplicity and directness, and that faculty of spontaneous reaction to the concrete which makes song and health.”

Bhrawm Into the -Great Social Conspiracy. But Mt. Masefield has been drawn away from himself and trapped into the great social conspiracy, the end of which

is to turn every soul towards a self-con-scious analysis of the social organism and the individual organism—towards introspection and cultural art on the one hand, towards realism and problematic humanitarianism on the other. Social problems are appropriate to the art of hard-headed persons like Mr. Shaw or Mr. Galsworthy. But to the more highly sensitised nature of a poet like Mr. Masefield they are disorganising, devastating nightmare. Present such a man as Mr. Masefield with the sight of human misery, and the perception becomes for him shuddersome, unendurable. Present him with thoughts about the present discontents, and those thoughts are translated by him into an Inferno of feelings, diabolical, and scarcely to be exorcised by breathing the name of “ Beauty.” If these things are to be faced it must be with the strength that comes from daylight, from contact with the normal. But Mr. Masefield has cultivated within himself a shadow life where beautiful symbols hold sway, and thus, when the evil things of modern life are revealed to him, he endows them also, as he pursues them, with grotesque, phantasmal shapes.

Qi j,aaiwii*C fiyrtevi*. There are two persons in the book who, in -different ways, work to wards an ideal which is presumably Mr. Masefield’s ideal. It is a scarcely defined ideal, known as “the beautiful and the noble.” the state of things desired by the tiny mmority of the -world -which alone, in Mt. Masefield’s aristocratic view, is civilised. Mrs. Drummond is a clever,, sympathetic, industrious woman of forty-sewn, “ beautiful from character, n«t from feature,” who believes that the disease and ugliness of the world may 3>e gradually cleaned away by disinterested concerted effort. Lionel Heseltine is an enthusiast, represented as a man of vast power, who believes that the world may be set right by the organisation of science and its application to life; and that as society is mainly moved to action by hysteria, it only requires a man strong enough to engineer its hysteria and direct it to useful ends, lie sets himself to organise this hysteria by means of a weekly newspaper—it as called “ Snip-snap”!

Lionel Heaeltine moves in a strained atmosphere of turmoil. It is quite evident that modern life has got on his nerves. If he enunciates certain ideals thus: “ Hardness. Truth. Keenness and quickness of mind. Indifference to pleasure. Honesty and energy in work. Hatred of dirt in all its forms. Loathing of idleness in all its forms. Belief in the power of man to perfect life”—it is throughout evident that it is the negative side of his ideal which has become most real to him—the side which is developed from irritation, hatred, contempt and the mania of making all that he dislikes into a phantasm of evil. “Let’s come away,” he cries, when he is evidently yielding to his nerves; “I can’t face London faces. Faces which know nothing and care nothing and are ■nothing.” His knowledge of bacilli makes the sight of a fly a torment. “Live flies. With every tiny foot clogged with pestilence. Little tiny death on wings. Plague’s swan shot. Mrs Drummond. I’m afraid of flies.”—“London’s nervous work. .. . Martyrdom is the only thing likely to make Paradise endurable.”

He is overwrought. The habit of tracking down evil and ugliness distorts everything he sees into evil and ugliness. He becomes intolerant, unsympathetic, contemptuous, bolstering himself up with a vague ideal of his own power to perfection, and completely blind to the commonplace human excel-

lencies which redeem much superficial ■oeaamess and add character, variety, and good fellowship to life. He ean never feed any exhilaration at the tumultnous procession of London t raffic. He has only an eye for its meanness, for the men “staring straight ahead, vacantly, with common faces, and eyes glazed .... waiting for the waitress of the tea shops down the street.” As if it were more discreditable to wait for the waitresses than to dance attendance on Rhoda Derrick! The Charm of Woaaena. The fact is Hint HeseTtine is not only suffering from violent neurosis: he is evidently in a state of erotomania. He cannot meet a well-dressed woman without becoming conscious of a “want in his life.” It seems “wonderful” to him to be talking with dainty and fastidious ladies. “In a theatre, if one chose one’s piny, a man could sympathise with a woman; he could feel tender to the heroine; and mentally vow himself her champion.” To carry him off,

it was only necessary for the brainlev* Rhoda Derrick to flirt and be prettyi she flirted, and she carried him off, to her cost and to his.

Having married her, he becomes so absorbed in his work us to neglect her. She resents this neglect, and leaves him; he hail married an immature girl, merely beautiful and “vivid,” a woman “incomplete.” It was left for the mature and wise Mrs Drummond to mother him, and to rescue him from his despair when marriage and work fail, to show him that the “perfect life” “is “no thundrous thing, clothed in the lightning, but something lovely and unshaken in the mind, in the minds about us, that burn like a star for us to march by, through all the night of the soul.”

There are persons who cannot qualify as doctors because they cannot bear the sight of blood. Mr Masefield’s sensitiveness is of that order. But we do not want him for a doctor. Abundantly and brilliantly clever, as much of this work is, we feel that he. in dissecting society, is pronouncing upon it just as a surgeon might who complained that bodies do not assume the Apollo shapes of our dreams, but, on the contrary, are all made of gore and festering wounds.”

In the absence of the book it is not possible to convict Mr Scott-James of unfairness. But John Masefiefd must have changed greatly to merit this criticism. There is, perhaps, no poet of repute living, that has seen more of the ups and downs of life than has John Masefield, who was poet and story writer when working before the mast. Highly sensitive, Mr Masefield must be to have written the stuff he has. neurotie we have never known him. And if in the contemplation of modern social conditions he has let himself go a little outside emotional limits, it may be accounted unto him as a virtue. The almost total lack of ideal, is, in our humble opinion, the greatest cause of the deterioration of modern society. “Votes for Women.”

The women’s movement still keeps on its militant way and its leading members are at present actively engaged in arranging the great international procession which is to take place on the Saturday before Coronation Day. At a conference of women teachers, held at Aberystwyth, a resolution was drawn up expressive of their desire to possess and exercise the Parliamentary franchise. Apropos of this desire. Miss Adela Pankhurst has enumerated many reasons other than those hitherto advanced, as to why, in the interests of children, this body should be given the franchise. Miss Cicely Hamilton and Mr G. K. Chesterton have been exchanging amenities on the women’s “question,” and Mr Chesterton, with his usual mental agility, has steered wide of the real question. and indulged in doubtful compliment. Tuesday, May C, was a momentous day in the history of the woman's movement, for on that day the second reading of the Conciliation Bill should have passed the <' minions. An article that makes exec’’ t reading is that in which Sir Georr* 1 Kran's address, given at Clieetham HiiL Manchester, at a M omen’s Suffrage meeting, is given at length. Speaking of the “Bill.” Sir George said that be had heard it discussed in the House of Common* in an entirely academic spirit. Tt was now discussed with less laughter and more heat —significant signs these, to the ini tiate. By the time these pages appear in print, the fate of th- Bill will be known. The £100.(100 fund has reached the respectable total of £1*30.741 15/. “Votes for Women.” which may be had, posted direct, for fi/fl a rear, should be read by every woman who has tile be it interests of her sex at heart.

Mr. Speaker’s Tavern Evening*. “When released fawn his official duties, Mr. Speaker Onslow, the third of that name) would steal away from Westminster to enjoy his pipe and a glass incognito in the chimney corner of the Jew's Harp, a famous tavern and bowling alley in Marylebone Fields. Hie site of which is now merged in Regent's Park. As the great man wan driving to the House of Commons one day in his state coacli. his identity was accidentally revealed to the landlord, who insisted on the occasion of the Sneaker's next visit on treating him with the deference due to his exalted position. But his secret having been betrayed. Mnrleybone and its diversions know tho First Commoner no more.”—“The Spoate-

ere of the Housg. of Corpmons,” by \ I. Basest. W?th fi’i'.e o:;' tlra ißustr 1 tions by John- Lane, and a - portrait of every Speaker where one is known to exist. Lane. 21/ net. Some New Thackeray MSS.

It will be of great interest to Timekeryans to lehrn of the discovery Lady Ritchie, of ol unfinished MSS. by her father. One entitled “The Knights of Borsellen,” is part of a mediaeval romance, accompanied by the author’s own drawings; whilst the other Mil., “Cockney Travels,” describes towns in the West of England by coach and rail about 1842. This new material, which will appear in the first instance in “Harper’s" Magazine and in "The Cornhill,” will, subsequently, be included in the “Centenary B'ogiwphieal Edition of Thack'.iay’s works.” Two Interesting; Ecoks.

Messrs Macmillan have issued Mr’ J. Stuart Hay’s study of “The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus,” with an introduction by Professor .1. B. Bury; ami also Ur. Thomas Hodgkin’s new book, “The Trial of our Faith,” which consists mainly of lectures delivered to fellow members of the Society of Friends. Among new works of fiction issued by this firm we notice “Trevor Lo-rii.-hlp," by Mrs Hubert Barclay; and “Klaus Henrich Baas,” by Gustave Frenssen, translated from the German.

The Amazing Duchess. On April 8, Messrs .aiantey Paul published Mr Charles E. Pearce’s story, bearing the title of our headline. The Dudleys of Kingston, the Chudleigh, as she was often called, was one of the great figures in the early Georgian days. The “Globe” says:—Her daily life kept the wits and gossips well occupied with scandal and small-talk ; her secret marriage and her subsequent trial for bigamy furnished an exciting case lor West; minster Hall, which roused almost, as much interest as the far more important process against Warren Hastings, j,en years later. Her career is said to have given Thackeray the original Beatrix Esmond. Mr Pearce gives us a better idea of the life the Eighteenth Ceil: tury than many of the more sober of.the historians; at an; rate, we can honestly Bay that his book kept us from bed until an unconsciously late hour. It does not contain one dull page. “The Amazing Duchess” is published in two volumes, at 24/ net. Interesting to Students of Criminology. On page forty of “De Prufnndis,’ (Wilde), Us author says: . “ Ma-ny ‘prisoners,’ on their release, carry their prison about with them into the air. and hide it as a Secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into- nine hole and die. It is wretched that they should have.to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong-, of society that it should force them to do so..

Society .takes upon itself the right to inflict a|ip'Mlipg p.inlshmenj on the ijfclivi'-b ual. but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. Whn the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is.to nay, it abandons him at the very moir.eat when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really 'ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, or irrenicdial wrong.” Wanted the Winner.

“A pessimistic young man dining alone in a restaurant ordered a boiled lobster. When the waiter put. it on the table it was minus one claw. The pessimistic young man promptly kicked. The waiter said it ws;s unavoidable—there had been a fight in the kitchen bettveen two lobsters. The other one had torn oil one of the claws of this one, -and hail eaten it. The young man pushed the lobster away from him.

"‘Take it away,’ he said wearily, ‘and bring me the winner.’” —Four Hundred Good- Stories, by Robert Rudd Whiting. Simpkin, Maishell, and Co. 3/6. The 'Bismarck Way.

“Goschen was successful in inducing Bismarck to take a leading part in conceiving measures for the rectification of the Graeco-Turkish Frontier. It was doubtful if ‘moral support’ to Greece against Turkey would suffice. ‘Why, then,’ said Bismark,-‘she must have- immoral support!”. The life of Joaekim Goschen, by the Hon. Arthur D. Elliot. Two vols. Longmans; 25/ net.

REVIEWS. The Unknown God: By B. L. Putnam Weale.* (London: Macmillan, and Co. Auckland: Wildman and Arey, 2/6" and 3/6.) We have never lixed Putnam Wealc better than in this book, which should be read by. every missionary and helper of missionaries . throughout Christendom, and outside Christendom too. In a narrative which brims over with absorbing interest from start to finish, Mr. Weale outlines missionary methods in China, and reveals a state of things disereditalffe alike to international missions and English officialdom. z’ The hero. Pqul Han rock, sets out to China as a missionary, fired by high ideals, and being comparatively wealthy, is above suspicion - tliat- he has adopted hisi calling as a - means of subsistence. But when he reaches Waytvay the headquarters of the English mission lie is attached to, he is disgusted and’ dispirited, both with the calibre of his colleagues, and the. methods in vogue for the conversion of the individual the Western ’ so contemptuously , styles as

“the, heathen (,'hinee.’’ He is .confronted, too, at qxery , turn with the‘superiority of Eastern thought and philosophy as compared to the Western. His experiences, and they are many, and in turn depressing, inspiriting, exciting, adventurous, weird, revolting, amazing and dangerous, teach him 'that all Western religions are the. same to the native of China, gild that it. is only the missionary’s personality that counts. He must be endowed with the quality of supreme courage, for he will be facing moral and physical dangers every hour of his sojourn there. He must be endowed, also, with , that tenacity of purpose -and action that is the secret of England’s Empiric success. He must see the Chinese through Eastern eyes, talk to them in the Chinese vernacular, think and reason with them according to Eastern methods and expressions of thought, insist, not upon miracle but on man's power to circumvent the evil or subdue to useful purpose the forces of nature, lead a elean life, act strongly, consistently, promptly, yet humanely and —leave the rest to God,’ who is father of all. Speaking of the insidious spread of Islam in China, Mr. Weale sayk: — "It is a remarkable and noteworthy factthat while- Buddhisnr and Taoism and Confucianism have been much written upon, the history of Islam in China is almost eonipletely unknown. This is partly due to the fact that, though the Chinese annals are clear about the Persian and Babylonian religions which travelled across High Asia in the remote past to . tlie shores of the Yellow Sea only to perish, none of their books, as far as has been ascertained, record a single word about the introduction into China of the Mohammedan faith. Yet it has been well said that this faith has taken a deeper root in China than any other foreign faith, and there can be no doubt that, for steadfastness of purpose and influence on the social' and' moral character of the Chinese, it has no foreign equal.” Then follows an - admirable account of the invasion of- the native of Islam into China.- Space forbids further mention of a book that is deeply impressive, widely instructive, and undeniably authoritative on the subject under discussion. There, is, of course, the usual love interest that marks the novel. But though the love interest lias features out of the common, it is subordinated to the real motif of the book, which is at once to point out that Protestantism has,; in- China, a serious and an insidious. foe in Islam, and the weakness, nav the utter inadequacy, of Protestant defence. And as will be needless to' point out to the thoughtful reader, other interests, more or less important, according to the value set bv individual readers uponspirit versus- matter are involved in the success of British missionary effort in China. We cordially recommend "The Unknown God,” which we have received from Messrs. Macmillan and Co.; as a distinctly profitable investment.