The Bookman. 


“T am a Bookman.”—/ames Russell Lowell. 


No. 208. Voit. XXXV. 


Subscription rate 8s. per annum post free. 


PricE SIXPENCE. 
Published Monthly. 


JANUARY, 1909. 


CONTENTS. 
NEWS NOTES... 161 | Betwixt and Between. By | NOVEL NOTES— 


“ THE BOOKMAN” PRIZE COM- ARTHUR RANSOME 190 | The! Bond—The 


Bomb—Lewis 
The Works of Mr. Yeats. 


PETITIONS 165 By W. Rand—Joan of Garioch—David 

DE LA MARE ve +++ 191 Bran—By Faith Alone—Whither 

THE BOOKSELLERS’ DIARY ... 166 A Woman’s Last Word. By thou Goest--The Tramping 
THE READER— JOSEPH CLAYTON 192 Methodist—Colonel Stow 198-200 


Edgar Poe and Some of his Friends. Critic and Playwright. By W.F.P. 192 


By JOHN H. INGRAM ... 167 THE BOOKMAN’S TABLE— 
The Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe. Pall Mall—Lilies of 
nina Memories. By LEWIS MELVILLE 194 Piccadilly to Pall Mall—Lihes o 
By MARY BRADFORD WHITING 173 > > s of 
: : > ° Human Nature in Politics. By Eternal Peace—Some Poems o 
a (se Rousseau as a Lover. By F. G. Sylvestre Bonnard — London 

NEW BOOKS— BETTANY ... ‘ 195 Visions 200 -2 


The Spy. By EDWARD THOMAS 196 
Susanna and Catherine Winkworth. 


Mr. Winston Churchill’s New Book. 


By the EARL OF RONALDSHAY 188 _ NOTES ON NEW BOOKS —— 


The Voyage to St. Helena. By 


Dr. WILLIAM BARRY ... 189 Pen Portraits 


NOTICES. 


All communications intended for the Editor must be addressed to the 
Editor of THe BooKMAN, Str. Paut’s House, WARWICK 
SQuARE, Lonpon, E.C. 

No unused communications will be returned whether stamps are enclosed 
for that purpose or not, and to this rule we can make no exception, 


Hews Rotes. 


The February Bookman will be a Darwin Centen- 
ary Number, containing a special article by Edward 
Clodd on Darwin and his work, and many portraits 
This will be 
followed during the year byother Centenary articles 
on Edward FitzGerald in March, on Lord Houghton 
and his Circle in June, on Oliver Wendell Holmes 
in July, on Tennyson in August, on Mark Lemon 
in November, and on the literary work of Mr. 
Gladstone in December. The September BooKMAN 
will be a Dr. Johnson Bi-Centenary Number. In 
other months of the year we hope to issue Specia! 
Numbers dealing with prominent living authors. 
We shall publish in February or March an article 
on “Lord Rosebery as a Man of Letters,’’ and 
are arranging for an early date a very interesting 
illustrated number devoted to the life and writings 
of Miss Marie Corelli. 


and pictures of peculiar interest. 


Hermann Sudermann has surprised Germany 
with a new novel, which he calls ‘‘ Das Hohelied ” 
(The Song of Songs). Sudermann began his literary 
career as a novelist, and his first books were very 
successful in Germany. Fourteen years ago he 


left off writing novels and took to giving his message 


By W. E. A. 


. 197 NEW BOOKS OF THE MONTH 203 


to the world through the stage. The plays of 
Sudermann have had a wonderful popularity, but 
they have not rivalled the stir which his books 
created, and the interest with which his new novel 
has been received shows what a loss it was to the 


public when the novelist turned playwright. 


Humorists seem to be getting scarcer every year. 
We used to make up for our native deficiencies a 
little while ago by importing a good deal of humour 
from America, but we have had very little even 
from there of late, except Mrs. Wiggs and Mr. 
Dooley. One therefore, to “A 
Holiday Touch, and Other Tales of Undaunted 
Americans,” which Messrs. George Bell & Sons are 
It is a 


looks forward, 


publishing here at the end of January. 
book of humorous stories by Mr. Charles Battall 
Loomis, who enjoys a great reputation as a hu- 
morist on the other side of the water and is sure 
of a welcome on this. 


Mr. Andrew Melrose is publishing at the end of 
January “ Heinrich Heine: Poems and Ballads” 
a new rendering by Mr. Robert Levy of a large 
selection of the lyrics and ballad poems of the “ Buch 
der Lieder.” It is an undertaking to which Mr. 
Levy has for some years past given the leisure hours 
of a busy commercial life, and those who have read 
his translation say he has succeeded where so many 
have failed in catching the delicate, pensive, mock- 
ing, elusive spirit of his original. 


162 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


For much assistance in producing this present 
number we are indebted to Mr. John H. Ingram. 
All the portraits of Poe and his relatives and friends, 
the facsimiles of his writing and the sketches and 
photographs of places associated with him, have been 
kindly supplied to us by Mr. Ingram from his unique 
and valuable collection of such portraits and pictures, 
and are his copyright property. Alexander Smith 
said that Poe was “the most incorrigible black- 
guard of genius that has appeared in either hemi- 
sphere,” and the Edinburgh Review, praising his 
work, described him as “a blackguard of mark.” 
That was in the late ‘fifties and the mid-’sixties, 
and we owe it to the enthusiastic devotion and 
careful research of Mr. Ingram that nobody dreams 
of disseminating those slanders to-day. When he 
issued with Messrs. A. & C. Black, in 1874, his four- 
volume edition of Poe’s Works, the ample Memoir 
with which he prefaced it shattered and scattered 
once for all the cloud of lying and scandalous stories 
with which the unspeakable Griswold and _ those 
unscrupulous sensation-mongers, his many disciples, 
had darkened the poet’s name; as the Spectator 
said at the time, he rescued Poe “ from the reputa- 
tion of something like infamy.” In 1880 Mr. 
Ingram published the exhaustive and admirable 
biography that remains, and must remain, the 
standard “Life of Poe’’; it has gone through 


(Photo by Edgar Salomon. Mr. John H. Ingram. 
Author of “ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” 


Mr. A. G. Gardiner. 


Editor of the Daily News, author of ‘‘ Prophets, Priests, and Kings.” 


Photo by Reginald Haines. 


many editions, its accuracy has never been shaken, 
and every subsequent biographical sketch or article 
concerning the poet has, admittedly or not, been 
based upon it. 


This were a good life-work for any man, but 
Mr. Ingram has much other and excellent work in 
literature to his credit. He edited the ‘‘ Eminent 
Women ”’ series of biographies ; has edited several 
editions of Poe’s works; and an edition of Darley’s 
“Sylvia,” for which he wrote also a biographical 
sketch of the author; he has written biographies 
of Oliver Madox Brown and of Mrs. Browning, and, 
amongst other books, one on Christopher Marlowe 
that won the high commendation of Mr. Swinburne. 
He has just written a biographical introduction to 
a reprint of Poe’s Poems for Messrs. Routledge’s 
Muses’ Library, and is revising the famous four- 
volume ‘Standard”’ edition of his ‘‘ Works of 
Poe,’’ which Messrs. Black: will presently reissue. 
For some years past now Mr. Ingram has_ been 
engaged on a Life of Chatterton which is almost 
ready for publication. At a very early age his 
interest in Chatterton was aroused by the fact that 
his mother, when a child, lived amid certain per- 
sonal friends of Chatterton, and that he frequently 
heard her talk of what they used to say about 
him. He has been as thorough and as painstaking 
in searching into Chatterton’s story as he was in 


| 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


unravelling Poe’s; has discovered new facts of 
iniportance, and will include in his volume certain 
poems that were published by Chatterton, but have 
never since been reprinted. 

Apart from the numerous evidences of English 
and American interest in the Poe Centenary—in 
France, where Messrs. Calmann-Levy’s translations 
of Poe by Baudelaire rank among the classics, M. 
Davry js issuing a monograph on Poe, and two 
lectures that M. Calvocoressi is delivering at the 
Sorbonne will appear in the Mercure de France 
on February 1. In Germany, essays on Poe's 
centennial position are announced by Herr Leopold 
Katscher ; Tauchnitz has the Tales and Poems on 
sale with a new memoir by Mr. Ingram ; and Herr 
Philip Reclam, junior, who includes Poe’s works in 
his ‘ Universal Bibliothek,’ publishes a memorial 
article in Reclam’s Universum for January. 
From Budapest and Lisbon come translations of 
the Poems into Hungarian by Zoltan Ferencz, and 


into Portuguese by Colonel Greenfield de Mello. 


Mr. Eveleigh Nash is publishing this month 
“Fair Women of Fontainebleau,” by Frank Hamel, 
author of “ Famous French Salons.” 


Mr. W. L. Courtney has written a new play—one 
that deals with Brittany and Breton legends—-which 
is at present in the hands of Miss Evelyn Millard. 
Three or four of the plays in his “ Dramas and 


Photo by Elliott & Fry. 


Lady Grove. 


Author: of Human Woman.” 


Photo by Elliott & Fry. 


Mr. W. L. Courtney. 


Author of ‘‘ Dramas and Diversions.” 


Diversions ’’ have been put upon the stage. “ Kit 
Marlowe’’ was produced both by Mr. Arthur 
Bourchier, at a matinée, and by Mr. George Alex- 
ander, who has since frequently played in it. Mrs. 
Patrick Campbell produced “ Undine” at Liver- 
pool, and after touring with it, eventually brought 
it out in London at the Criterion. ‘“‘ On the Side 
of the Angels ’’ was presented by the Pioneers at 
the Royalty Theatre some little time ago, and 
“Gaston Bonnier ’’ was written for and produced 
by Professor Hubert von Herkomer at his theatre 
at Bushey. The first piece in the book, originally 
called “‘ Charles IX.,’’ was written for and accepted 
by Sir Henry Irving. He announced his intention 
of performing it after ‘‘ King Arthur,’ but its 
appearance was delayed. He thought of putting 
it on the stage on two subsequent occasions; and 
on his death it was, with other plays, bequeathed 
to his sons. 


“Richard Wagner to his Artistes” is the title 
of a new volume of Wagner's letters which has just 
made its appearance in Germany. The publica- 
tion of this interesting work, which includes letters 
to Karl Klindworth, Lilli Lehmann, Amalie Materna, 
Hermann Levi, Hans Richter, Felix Mottl, and 
others, is due to the enterprise of the publishing 
firm of Wahniried, and deals fully with the artistic 


development of Bayreuth. There are altogether 


~ 
# 
— 


164 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, 1909. 


about four hundred letters, most of which have 
never been published until now. The famous 
correspondence with Hans von Wolzogen is given 
to the world for the first time. 

In recent years Mr. Comyns Carr’s literary 
activities have been concerned almost exclusively 
with the theatre, and he is now engaged on a fanciful 
comedy to be written partly in verse, which he hopes 
to complete during the next few months. His 
earliest dramatic essay was a play founded on Mr. 
Hardy’s novel, “ Far from the Madding Crowd.” 
This was followed by an adaptation of Hugh Con- 
way’s “‘ Called Back.’’ But Mr. Carr’s more important 
dramatic works have been in verse, chief among 
them being “‘ King Arthur,’”’ produced by the late 
Sir Henry Irving, and “ Tristram and _ Iseult,”’ 
presented a year ago at the Adelphi Theatre. 


If only every one kept a diary, how much fuller 
and better even our best books of reminiscences 
might be! Mr. Comyns Carr kept no diary, it 
seems, and for such details of incidents and con- 
versations as are contained in his “‘ Some Eminent 
Victorians’’ he has had to rely on his memory. 
““T did once, long ago,” he confesses penitently, 
“make an experiment in that direction, but I failed, 
chiefly, I think, because I could not make up my 
‘mind as to the form and character which such a 
record should assume. I found the task of merely 


recording events intolerably dull, and to chronicle 


' Photo by London Stereoscopic Co. 


Mr. J. Comyns Carr. 


Author of “ Some Eminent Victorians.” 


LA CARRIERE- 
& Blo .OUVERTE- a” 
AUX - TALENTS 4 


LIBRIS: 
“CLEMENT: SHORTER: 


i 
= 


L 
Book-Plate. 


Mr. Clement Shorter’s new book, ‘‘ Napoleon and his Fellow-Travellers,” 
is reviewed on page 189. 


the thoughts and reflections which those events 
suggested proved altogether too formidable. But 
it is the neglect of the dull diary that I have often 
since regretted.” 


Rita’s new novel, ‘‘ The House called Hurrish,”’ 
will be published this month by Messrs. Hutchinson. 


“Conquering the Arctic Ice,’’ by Captain Ejnar 
Mikkesen, leader of the recent Anglo-American 
Polar Expedition, is announced by Mr. Heinemann. 


We regret that in reviewing “ Tan and Teckle ”’ 
in one of our Christmas Supplements we gave the 
publishers’ name as “ Oliphant, Anderson & Revell.” 
It should have been the Fleming H. Revell Co., 
and we offer our apologies for the error to them and 
to Messrs. Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier. 


Mr. Heath Robinson’s three illustrations of ‘‘ The 
Raven’”’ and ‘The Bells” (an enlargement of one 
of which we reproduce on our cover) are from the 
beautiful edition of Poe’s poems that Messrs. G. 
Bell & Sons published last year, and we are much 
indebted to them for their kindness in permitting 
us to reproduce them here. Our thanks are also 
due to Messrs. A. & C. Black for permission to use 
the illustration from “ Arthur Gordon Pym,” which 
originally appeared in their 4-volume edition of Poe’s 
works ; and to the Pear Tree Press for Mr. James 
Guthrie’s delicate drawing of “ Eulalie,” one of his 
many illustrations to their recently issued selection 
of the poems of E. A. Poe. 


j NS, \ 
4 
t 
t 
* 
, 
as 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


165 


“THE BOOKMAN” PRIZE COMPETITIONS. 
JANUARY, 1909. 


Answers to these competitions (each! on a separate sheet bearing the name and address of the sender) should 
be forwarded not later than the 15th of the month to 


‘The Prize Page,” THE Bookman, Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, Warwick Square, E.C. 


I.—A Prize or HALF A GuINEA is offered for the best 
quotation from English verse applicable to any 
review or the name of any author or book 
appearing in this number of THE BOOKMAN. 
Preference will be given to quotations of a 
humorous nature. 


I1.—A PrizE oF THREE NEW NOVELS is offered for 
the best passage from English literature ex- 
pressing or indicating the writer’s love or dislike 
of dumb animals. 


III.—A PrizE oF HALF A is offered tor the 
best review in not more than one hundred 
words of any recently published book. Com- 
petitors should give the names of authors and 
publishers at head of their reviews. 


IV.—A copy of THE Bookman will be sent post free 
for twelve months to the sender of the best sug- 
gestion for THE BookMAN Competitions. The 
Editor reserves the right to use any suggestion 
submitted. 


RESULTS OF COMPETITIONS 
FOR DECEMBER. 


I.—The Prize oF HALF A GuINEA for the best quotation 
is awarded to Miss Lizz1E Q. ALLEN, of 15, Glen- 
brook Road, West Hampstead, N.W., for the 
following : 

ARTHUR B. TALBOT’S TRANSLATION OF 
“OMAR KHAYYAM.” 


“Shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl 
His creaking couplets in a tavern hall, 
And I not sing ?”’ 
Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 


We select the following from the many other quota- 
tions received : 


FROM POLE TO POLE. By G. STABLEs. 


‘““The maid was in the garden 
Hanging out the clothes.’’—Nursery Rhyme. 


(Miss E. Gray, 4, Bulstrode Street, London, W.) 


TWO ENGLISH QUEENS AND PHILIP. By Martin Hume, 


‘How happy could I be with either, 
Were t’other dear charmer away.” 
The Beggayr’s Opera. 


(Miss May Trayler, Wembdon Road, Bridgwater.) 
ADVENTURES IN A NOAH’S ARK. By A. W. B. 
““ Water, water everywhere.’’—S. T. CoLERIDGE. 


(John M. Judd, 31, North Road, West Bridgford, 
Nottingham.) 


II.—A PrizE oF THREE NEw NovVELs for the best six 
mottoes for the New Year has been awarded 


to Miss N. PEEL, 15, The Grove, Whitworth 
Park, Manchester, for the following : 


1. ‘‘ Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.”’ 
at. L. STEVENSON. 


2. “‘ If thou hast friends give them thy best endeavour, 
Thy warmest impulse, and thy purest thought, 
Keeping in mind, in word and action ever, 
The time is short.’-—HEzEKIAH BUTTERWORTH. 


3. “‘ A few more smiles of silent sympathy, a few more tender 
words, a little more restraint on temper, may make all the differ- 
ence between happiness and half-happiness to those I live with.” 

STOPFORD BROOKE. 


4. “ Then gently scan your brother man, 
Still gentlier sister woman ; 
Though they may gang a kennin’ wrang, 
To step aside is human.’’—Burwns. 


5. ‘‘ Our best is bad nor bears Thy test ; 
Still, it should be our very best.”—R. BRowninc. 


‘6. “Do the Duty which lies nearest to thee! Thy second 
Duty will already have become clearer.”-—CARLYLE. 


Very good selections have been received also from 
Mrs. Leslie (Eddleston, N.B.), Miss J. A. Jenkins 
(Liverpool), Miss Winifred Du Vernet (Wandsworth 
Common, S.W.), Mrs. H. Caby (Fordham), Mrs. Charles 
Wright (Sutton), Mrs. John R. Young (Mablethorpe), 
L. A. Wilks (Scarborough), J. H. Langlois (Leeds), and 
others. 


III.—A Prize or Har A Guinea for the best review 
in a hundred words of any recently published 
book is awarded to M. WINDEATT ROBERTS, 
of Chudleigh House, Bideford, for the following : 


SOME EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BYWAYS. 
(Blackwood.} 


The essays collected under the above somewhat misleading 
title are the work of an able journalist. Mr. Buchan vindicates 
the eighteenth century from the false charge of stagnation, 
and shows it to have been, for Scotland at all events, a period 
fraught with the gravest of issues. He champions its unpopular 
statesmen, and his sound and kindly judgments are dictated 
by a rare good sense. His style is the antithesis of what he 
calls, in an article on the subject, “‘ the apocalyptic style,”’ or 
suburban sublimity but he is always instructive, some- 
times entertaining, and occasionally suggestive. 


By Joun BucHAN. 


The best of the unusually large number of other 
reviews submitted are these: 


THE STORY OF A LIFETIME. By Lapy PRIESTLEY. 
(Kegan Paul.) 


Charming is a word which can be misapplied in literary 
criticism, but it is the term which gives a true conception of 
Lady Priestley’s book. As the daughter of Robert Chambers, 
she moved in the brilliant literary and scientific circle for which 
the Edinburgh of her girlhood was famous. As the wife of Sir 
William Overend Priestley, M.D., she enjoyed the friendship of 
scientists and celebrated personages. This volume must de- 
servedly take a high place among recent autobiographies. It 
refreshes, elevates, instructs, and amuses the reader. 


(Miss E. A. Stevenson, The Valley, Trinity, Brechin.) 
2 


166 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, I909. 


TOGETHER. By Rospert HERRICK. 6s. (Macmillan.) 


‘ Together "’ is a book to be read with discrimination. It 
gives a vivid picture of American society, but one is not always 
sure of the author’s standpoint—whether he writes as prophet 
or merely as looker-on. The end of life is self-expression. The 
weak and incapable must go to the wall. The husband is the 
provider, and can only work at his best when he feels the spur 

of necessity. This is the justification for the wife’s extravagance. 
Marriages are generally ill-advised. The remedy is to get back 
to the simple life of the plains. 


(Thomas E. May, 46, Killigrew Street, Falmouth, 
Cornwall.) 


We select for special commendation the reviews sent 
in by the Rev. F. Hern (Rowlands Castle), D. Sill 
(Redcar), Miss Kathleen Comber (Hoylake), Mrs. A. M. 
Sykes (Huddersfield), Mrs. T. S. Boldero (Bexhill-on- 
Sea), Miss Godley (Chapelizod), G. E. Wakerley (Not- 
tingham), and F. Harold Buss (East Dulwich, S.E.) 


IV.—The PrizE oF ONE YEAR’S SUBSCRIPTION TO “ THE 
Bookman ”’ has been gained by Miss MOLLIE 
KENNEDY, Dashwood Road, Banbury. 


The Booksellers’ Diary. 


LIST OF FORTHCOMING BOOKS. 
January I to February 1, 1909. 


Messrs. A. & C. Black. 


LANCASTER, SIR E. RAY (Edited by).—A Treatise on Zoology. Part I. 
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SCHECHTER, DR. SOLOMON.—Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. 7s. 6d. 
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Cambridge Modern History. Vol. XI. The Growth of Nationalities. 16s. net. 

GREGG, J. A. F. (Editor).—The Wisdom of Solomon, in the Revised Version, 
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VERNON, MRS. H. M.—Italy from 1494 to 1790. ‘Cambridge Historical Series.) 
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Messrs. Cassell & Co. 


ARNOTT, S., and R. P. BROTHERSTON.—Gardening in the North. 2s. net, 
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JOYCE, T. ATHOL, and N. W. THOMAS.—Women of all Nations, Vol. II. 
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THE READER. 


EDGAR POE AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS. 


By Joun H. INGRAM. 


“THE allegation that ‘ Edgar Poe had no friends” 
| has long since been refuted. Embittered as his 
career was by sorrow and misfortune, it was as frequently 
brightened by the kindness and fidelity of friends. There 
was a fascination about the poet which attracted and 
preserved the sympathy of persons of most diverse 
disposition, and it is useful to know something of these 
people, as their characters and positions throw sidelights 
on Poe's: 
“Tn companions 

That do converse and waste the time together . . 

There needs must be a like proportion 

Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit.”’ 

A man’s first and best friend is generally his mother, 
but Edgar Poe’s died ere he had completed his third 
year, leaving three infants to the world’s mercy. The 
elder boy was taken charge of by his grandfather, Generai 
Poe, whose means had been crippled by heavy charges 
incurred for his country. The two younger children 
were adopted by strangers in blood; Edgar, by Mr. 
John Allan, a prosperous, childless Scotchman, who had 
settled in the United States. His wife did her best to 
supply the place of the dead mother, and, as Edgar 
always asserted, was kind and affectionate towards him. 
So, at times, was the foster-father, but he was of an 
uncertain and despotic temperament, and Mrs. Allan’s 
conciliatory influence was not always successful in pre- 
serving peace at home. 

The Allans having been 
called to Great Britain on 
business when Edgar was 
about seven years old, 
took the boy with them, 
and placed him in a school 
Little 
is known of the orphan’s 
life during his five years at 
this school, but his school- 
master remembered him as 
‘“‘a quick and clever boy,” 


at Stoke Newington. 


who “would have been a 
very good boy had he not 
been spoilt by .. . 
travagant 

pocket-money. 


an ex- 
amount of 

On returning to Virginia 
Poe was placed in a classi- 
cal academy in Richmond, 
in which city his foster- 
father carried on business 
as a tobacco’ merchant. 
At the academy Poe 
mixed with lads of good 


From a daguerreotype, circa October, 1848. 


standing in society and formed friendships with some 
of them which endured for life. Several of these school- 
mates have furnished reminiscences of the lad, all of 
which are most creditable to his character. As a 
student, an athlete, and a companion he left a favour- 
able impression on the minds of all who remembered 
him. Colonel Preston says: 


“His power and accomplishments captivated me, and 
something in me or in him made him take a fancy tome. In 
the simple athletics of those days, when a gymnasium had 
not been heard of, he was facile princeps. He was a swift 
runner, a wonderful leaper, and what was more, a boxer.” 
“In our Latin exercises,’’ continues Colonel Preston, ‘‘ Poe 
was among the first. . . . He was, also, a very fine French 
scholar. . . . Not a little of Poe’s time in school and out of 
it was occupied with writing verses. . . . My boyish ad- 
miration was so great for my schoolfellow’s genius, that I 
requested permission to carry his portfolio home for the 
inspection of my mother ”’— 


that lady, it should be premised, being the daughter of 
Edmund Randolph, the distinguished statesman, whose 
love of literature she had inherited. Mrs. Preston did 
not hesitate to praise the verses, and her gallant son 
deemed she was the first critic to whom Poe’s earliest 
productions were submitted. 

The lad was noted for his swimming feats, some of them 
having been of a daring and even dangerous character. 
Colonel Mayo, another of his old schoolfellows, recalls 
him to mind as a handsome, impetuous boy, defiant, not 

indisposed to fight, but with 
. great mental powers. He 
describes a very hazardous 
adventure shared with him : 


“One day in midwinter, 
when standing on the banks of 
the James River, Poe ban- 
tered hiscompanion into jump- 
ing in, to swim to a certain 
point with him. After floun- 
dering about in the nearly 
frozen stream for some time 
they reached the piles upon 
which Mayo’s bridge then 
rested, and were glad enough 
to stop and try to gain the 
shore by the log abutment to 
the bridge. To their dismay, 
upon reaching the bridge they 
discovered that its flooring 
overlapped the abutment by 
several feet, and that ascent 
by such means was impossible. 
Nothing remained for them 
but to descend and retrace 
their steps, which, weary 
and partly frozen, they did. 
Poe reached the in 
Edgar Allan Poe. an exhausted state, whilst 


XUM 


168 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


After an oil painting. 
The first Mrs. Allan. 


Mayo was fished out by a friendly boatman just as he 
was about to succumb. Both the !ads were ill for several 
weeks.”’ 


Robert Sully, the well-known artist, another school- 
fellow, referring to a distinguishing trait of the poet’s 
character, his kindness and sympathy for the weak or 
helpless, says he was one of ‘the most warm-hearted 
and generous of men. . . he invariably stood by me 
and took my part. I was a dull boy at learning, and 
Edgar never grudged time or pains in assisting me. . . 
As a boy he was frank and generous to a fault.”’ 

Opposite the house where the Allans lived dwelt the 
parents of Elmira Royster. In due course the adopted 
son of the one family became acquainted with and 
enamoured of the daughter of the other. Elmira reci- 
procated the feelings of the ‘“ beautiful boy,” as she 
described him to me. She 
thought him somewhat silent 
and sad in his manner, as 


refinement. He was pas- 
sionately fond of music, 
“an art which in after life 
he loved so well,” and 
was an accomplished artist, 
sketching in a few minutes 
a portrait of Miss Royster 
herself. Love-making went 
on, and the young people 
had vowed the usual eternal 
vows, including a promise 
of marriage, when Poe was 
hurried off to the recently 


founded University of 
Virginia, which he entered 
February 14, 1826. He 
wrote frequently to his 


lady-love, but Elmira’s 
father, deeming her too 
young for such things, 
intercepted the correspond- 
ence, and secluded the 
young lady until she had attained the age of seventeen, 
when he married her to a Mr. Shelton. 

At the University Poe became as great a favourite 
with his college mates as he had been at the Richmond 
academy. Several of them furnished me with interesting 
reminiscences of their gifted companion, who they found 
‘had many noble qualities, but whose disposition was 
retiring. He had few Other 
men at the University with Poe were not impressed 
so lugubriously by his personality. They recollected 
adventures he had taken part in where so serious a 
demeanour would not have been probable. 


From a photograph of a silhouette. 
Mr. John Allan, 


Poe's foster-father. 


intimate associates.”’ 


Possibly, 
he suited his manners to his company, and in “ the 
inhuman dearth of noble natures ’’ adapted himself to 
the capacity of the ignoble. Surviving officials and pro- 
fessors have assured me he had the reputation of being 
a sober, quiet, orderly young man, whose behaviour 
was uniformly that of an intelligent and polished gentle- 
man, and the official records confirm this view, showing 
that he obtained the highest distinctions the University 
then bestowed. 

His associates at Charlottesville were impressed by 
his artistic talent and relate 
how he covered his room 
there with large crayon 


became an ardent admirer 
of Byron, but when beguiled 
into talking, his conversation 
was everything that could 
be desired. The young lady, 
who numbered fifteen sum- 
mers, found Edgar “ very 
generous and warm-hearted, 
and zealous in any cause 
in which he was interested. 
He was enthusiastic and 


copies of illustrations from a 
volume of Byron’s Poems. 
A characteristic incident of 
this period is mentioned by 
a college mate, Mr. Bolling. 
Whilst he was talking to Poe 
he noticed Poe continued 
writing, and when the visitor 
alluded to this want of 
politeness, the poet answered 
that he had been all atten- 


impulsive,” and detested 
everything showing lack of 


From an old engraving. 


Poe’s School at Stoke 
Newington, now demolished. 


tion, and proved it by suit- 
able comments, explaining 


t 
“9 
4 
= 
_ 


JANUARY, Ig09.| 


THE BOOKMAN. 


From a photograph. John Neal. 
‘Poe wrote to John Neal, who was then editing 7he Yankee. ... Through 


the columns of his paper the editor replied, ‘If E. A. P., of Baltimore, whose 
lines about Heaven—though he professes to regard them as altogether 
superior to any in the whole range of American poetry, save two or three 
trifles referred to—are, though nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense, would 
but do himself justice, he might make a beautiful and perhaps a magnificent 


poem, 
(From “‘ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” by John H. Ingram.) 


his apparent discourtesy by the remark that he was 
trying to divide his mind, to carry on a conversation 
at the same time that he was writing about a totally 
different subject. The session at the University ter- 
minated on December 15, 1826, when, bidding farewell 
to his many friends there, Poe started for home. The 
story of his reception may be briefly told. Mr. Allan 
objected to paying his godson’s so-called ‘‘ debts of 
honour,” contracted during a twelvemonth’s residence 
amongst a number of extravagant, wealthy young 
men, and Edgar, in a fit of boyish indignation, left 
home. 

The lad’s dearest companion in Richmond was a 
young fellow of his own age, named Ebenezer Berling. 
This youth had been accustomed to accompany the poet 
on his walks and visits, and was his especial confidant. 
Miss Royster, to whom he was known, has described him 
to me as an interesting, intelligent youth, but as some- 
what inclined to dissipation. After his trouble at home, 
Poe determined to start for Greece, and proffer his 
services against the Turks. Berling, who was a widow’s 
only child, agreed to accompany him, but at the last 
moment succumbed to his mother’s entreaties, and 
Apparently he was in 
The general 


backed out of his agreement. 
delicate health, as he died soon afterwards. 
peace caused Poe to abandon his project. 
It was not till after he left the University Poe learnt 
that his lady-love was married, and why his impassioned 
appeals had met with no response. Instead of dying of 
a broken heart, he embalmed the memory of’ his first 


After a painting by Wilson. oe We Kennedy. 


“‘Mr. Kennedy [one of the judges in the Saturday Visiter competition] 
was so interested in the successful but unknown competitor [E. A. Poe], 
that he invited him to his house. Poe replied, ‘Your invitation to dinner 
has wounded me to the quick. I cannot come for reasons of the most 
humiliating nature—my personal appearance. You may imagine my morti- 
fication in making this disclosure to you, but it is necessary.’ 


‘*Mr. Kennedy at once sought out the unfortunate youth, and found him 
friendless and almost starving.” 


(From “ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” by John H. Ingram.) 


passion in much melancholy verse, and when, in the 
course of his wanderings, he visited his natal city, Boston, 
he published these compositions in his first volume, 
“Tamerlane and other Poems,’’ gracing the title-page 
with this significant motto from Cowper : 


““ Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm, 
And make mistakes for manhood to reform.’’ 


Early in 1829 he was recalled to Richmond by news 
of his foster-mother’s dangerous illness. He arrived 
too late: Mrs. Allan was dead and buried before his 
return. Mr. Allan seems to have lost any affection he 
might have had for the prodigal, but could scarcely turn 
him adrift at such a moment. Eventually he obtained 
a cadetship for him at West Point Military Academy, 
where Poe was admitted on July 21, 1830, and re- 
mained there till March, 1831. The qualities which had 
made him a favourite in previous institutions also 
rendered him one at the Academy, although the severity 
of the discipline and paucity of the recreation there 
must have jarred harshly upon one of his erratic tempera- 
ment. It is recorded “ the impression left by Poe in 
his short career at the Military Academy was highly 
favourable.”’ He might have left with honours, but news 
from home created a revulsion of feeling. Shortly after 
his wife’s death Mr. Allan had married again, and now 
a son had been born to him. Poe was speedily informed 
that he was no longer his godfather’s heir, and deeming 
the army was no place for a poor man, he contrived to 
obtain his dismissal from West Point. 


‘ 
se 
i 
| 


170 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, 1909. 


From an engraving done in Paris. By 
permission of Miss Amelia F. Poe. 


William Clemm, Jun., 
at the age of 21. 
Father of Virginia, the wife of Edgar Allan Poe. 

He determined to offer his services to the Poles, who 
were in revolt against their Russian oppressors, so 
wrote to Colonel Thayer, superintendent of the Military 
Academy, requesting to be granted a certificate of 
“ standing ”’ in his class, for presentation to the Marquis 
de Lafayette, at Paris, a sympathiser with the Poles, 
and who, as a faithful friend of the cadet’s grandfather, 
General Poe, would doubtless interest himself on the 
young man’s behalf. The capitulation of Warsaw put 
an end to Poe’s military aspirations. 

He now turned to literature as a profession. Little is 
known of his struggles until the autumn of 1833, when 
he appears at Baltimore as the winner of a One Hundred 
Dollar Prize offered by a local publication for the best 
tale sent in. One of the adjudicators, John P. Kennedy, 
a kind-hearted, wealthy, popular novelist, interested 
himself in the affairs of the young prizeman, whose 
funds were at a very low ebb. Kennedy gave him 
free access to his table, ‘‘ the use of a horse for exercise, 
whenever he chose; in fact, brought him up from the 
very verge of despair.”’ 

Aided by such a friend, one who stood by him and 
helped him at many a pinch, as Poe gratefully acknow- 
ledged, the poet’s state was bound toimprove. Through 
Kennedy’s introduction and persistent recommenda- 
tions, the young author became editor of the Southern 
Literary Messenger ; an appointment which began a series 
of editorial successes for Poe, whereby he changed a 
number of effete or moribund periodicals into brilliant 
and profitable publications. He gained some glory and 
the publishers much pecuniary profit. It is certainly 
to Poe’s credit that his employer, Mr. White, lost no 
opportunity, after his wayward editor had left, of 
speaking well of him, although he did injure the poet’s 
future career by urging him to “ stick to the department 


of criticism.” This suggestion of publishers for whom he 
worked, to “ stick ”’ to the castigation of literary smali- 
fry, created numerous unscrupulous enemies for Poe, 
and although it did increase the sale of certain periodicals, 
deprived the public of many priceless poems and 
stories. Poe made strong friendships with his publishers 
and editors; and many of them, such as White, Godey, 
Graham, N. P. Willis, Thompson, and others, were 
amongst his firmest defenders when, after his death, his 
honour was assailed by hooligans of the Press. Mr. 
G. R. Graham’s defence of his dead friend was all the 
more valuable because he had been the employer of 
Poe’s chief assailant, Griswold, and knew the character 
of both the men ; whilst N. P. Willis not only gave Poe 
such work as he could on his paper, but was always 
ready to allow him control of its columns for his own 
uses. 

As soon as Poe obtained a regular salary by his 
editorship he married his cousin Virginia, daughter of 
his widowed aunt, Mrs. Clemm, with whom he had 
taken up his abode. No husband was ever more devoted 
to wife than was the poet to his child-bride, who was 
only fourteen, and no mother was ever more watchful 
than was Mrs. Clemm over her nephew. When the poet 
gave up his post at Richmond, Mrs. Clemm accompanied 
the husband and wife to New York, and attempted to 
lessen the household charges by accepting boarders. 
Mr. William Gowans, a wealthy bibliopolist, who lodged 
with the family, has given a very favourable account 
of Poe’s character. He states: 


“Foreight monthsor more . . . Isawmuchofhim... . 


From a daguerreotype of 1849. Mrs. Clemm. 


‘‘My mother—my own mother, who died early, 
Was but the mother of myself; but you 
Are mother to the one I loved so deariy, 
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew 
By that infinity with which my wife 
as dearer to my soul than its soul-life,” 
Poe’s sonnet, “To My Mother.’ 


fn 
SS 
A 
| 
. 


XUM 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 171 


From an old engraving. William Gowans. 


‘‘An interesting account of the poet’s limited menage at this epoch of the 
story [1837] has been given by the late William Gowans, the wealthy and 
eccentric bibliopolist, who boarded with Mrs, Clemm.” 


(From “ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” by John H. Ingram.) 


He was one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and in- 
telligent companions I have met with during my journeyings 
through divers divisions of the globe; beside, he had an 
extra inducement to be a good man as well asagood husband, 
for he had a wife of matchless beauty and loveliness . . . a 
temper and disposition of surpassing sweetness,” 


and much more to the same effect. 

Many similar testimonials to the goodness, docility, 
and even sobriety of Poe’s character might be cited, but 
as men who had nothing to do with a literary man’s 
private life have exposed, exaggerated, and dogmatised 
over the one unfortunate blot upon Poe’s escutcheon, 
and as the poet might well have declared— 


““T am traduced by tongues which neither know 
My faculties, nor person, yet will be 
The chronicles of my doing,” 


it is but fair to allow the accused to answer the charge 
made against him of intemperance. He wrote on 
April 1, 1841, to his friend, Dr. Snodgrass : 


“At no period of my life was I ever what men call in- 
temperate. I never was in the habit of intoxication. I 
never drank drams. But, for a brief period, while I resided 
in Richmond and edited the Messenger, I certainly did give 
way, at long intervals, to the temptation held out on all 
sides by the spirit of Southern conviviality. . . . It is now 
quite four years since I have abandoned every kind of 
alcoholic drink. . . . My sole drink is water.” 


At the death of his beloved wife Poe’s habits degener- 
ated and at intervals he was absolutely insane ; driven 
so by drink, acting upon a highly sensitive mind and 
upon a frame physically weakened by actual want. 
With all the strength of body and mind left to him, the 


unfortunate man strove to resist temptation; as he 
wrote to a beloved friend : 


“‘ The terrible agony which I have so lately endured—an 
agony known only to my God and to myself—seems to 
have passed my soul through fire and purified it from all 
that is weak. Henceforward I am strong :—this those who 
love me shall see—as well as those who have so relentlessly 
endeavoured to ruin me.” 


The number of talented women who befriended Poe, 
especially during the last few years of his life, is re- 
markable. Stedman pointed out that towards women 
Poe had “a kind of chivalry, from his childhood, 
attached to his conception of them”’ ; and Poe was fond 
of quoting Puckle’s dictum, “A well-bred man never 
gives himself the liberty to speak ill of women.” Poe 
always paid deference to women socially, or as a critic, 
in the latter capacity often rendering them more praise 
than they were entitled to. He frequently imparted 
such intensity of language to his expression of gratitude 
or admiration that his meaning has been misunderstood 
by those unacquainted with the fervour of his style, 
but those who know the poet’s true nature agree with 
Mrs. Osgood, that during the last few years of his life 
his affection was never diverted from his wife. ‘I believe 
she was the only woman whom he ever truly loved,” 
said the lady, and she refers to his last poetic work, 
“ Annabel Lee,” written in memory of his wife, as a 
touching proof of his lasting affection for her. “It is 
utterly false,” wrote Mrs. Clemm, his wife’s mother, 
“the report of his being faithless or unkind to her. He 
was devoted to her until the last hour, as all our friends 
can testify.” ‘‘ How happy we three were in our beauti- 
fulhome !”’ (at Fordham), she exclaimed. Mrs. Osgood 
was a woman calculated to arouse admiration by her 
mental and physical charms. “ Not to write poetry, 


Virginia, wife of 
Edgar Allan Poe. 


From a painting. By permission 
of Miss Poe. 


a 
= 
‘ 


172 


THE BOOKMAN. 


{ JANUARY, 1909. 


Frances Sargent Osgood. 


“Mrs, Osgood, who undoubtedly knew more of the poet’s innermost 
feelings during the last five years of his life than any person outside his 
domestic circle, said of his wife, ‘I believe she was the only woman whom 
he ever truly loved.’” 


(From “ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” by John H. Ingram.) 


not to act it, think it, dream it, be it, is entirely out of 
her power,” declared Poe, whilst the lady’s feelings 
for him may be gauged by her lines in the Breadway 
Journal, To 


“In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 
Whose heartstrings are a lute.’-—EpGar Poe. 


“T cannot tell the world how thrills my heart 
To every touch that flees thy lyre along ; 
How the wild Nature and the wondrous Art 
Blend into Beauty in thy passionate song— 
But this I know—in thine enchanted slumbers 
Heaven’s poet, Israfel—with minstrel fire— 
Taught thee the music of his own sweet numbers 
And tuned—to chord with his—thy glorious lyre.” 


Poe’s wife, the innocent Virginia, was as fond of 
Mrs. Osgood as was the poet, and besought her, when 
about to travel for her health, to continue to correspond 
with Edgar, as she deemed her influence had a beneficial 
effect upon him. Mrs. Osgood treated with scorn the 
slanders uttered against Poe, and when it is known that 
a rival for the lady’s friendship was Rufus Griswold, 
it will be understood that they were but too frequently 
spoken in her hearing. 

Of the many ladies who interested themselves in the 
welfare of Poe and his household, none was less selfish 
or more helpful than Mrs. Shew. She knew nothing of 
his literary work or repute, but when told he was in 
distress, at once gave of her best. From the day she 
first saw the suffering family, she became their guardian 
angel. She ministered to the comfort of the dying and 
the living. The last moments of the fair young wife, who 
was passing away in consumption, were soothed by her 


aid. Mrs. Clemm 
wrote to this good 
“ But 
for your timely aid, 
we should have had 
no last words—no 
loving messages— 
no sweet farewells, 
for she ceased to 
speak (from weak- 
ness) but with her 
beautiful eyes.” 
The gratitude with 
which the poet re- 
garded Marie Louise 
Shew is displayed 


Samaritan: 


in lines 
“To M— L— 
S——,” to her to hy | Sa Mrs. Whitman. 


whom he owed— 


“The resurrection of deep buried faith, 
In Truth—in Virtue—in Humanity.” 


Poe, especially after his wife’s death, could not 
exist without some kind woman’s advice and sympathy. 
Not long after worldly cares had called Mrs. Shew’s 
attention to other spheres of work, the poet’s thoughts 
were attracted by the writings of Mrs. Whitman. Ina 
lecture he gave on ‘“‘ The Female Poets of America,” 
he assigned to her “ pre-eminence in refinement of 
heart, enthusiasm, imagination, and genius, properly 
so called.’”’ Poe was not personally acquainted with her, 
but rumour averred that after delivery of his lecture, 
wandering at midnight near where she lived, he beheld 
her walking in a garden, and he is supposed to have 
furnished some authority for the incident in his lines, 


“IT saw thee once—once only—years ago.” 


An exchange of verses ultimately led to an intro- 
duction and a correspondence, on Poe’s part of a most 
impassioned character. The two poets were engaged 
to be married conditionally, but Poe was accused, 
falsely or not, of having broken the terms of their 
contract, and the lady re- 
claimed her promise. 
Although Poe, not without 
reason, deemed Helen Whit- 
man to have used him un- 
generously, the lady herself 
that he had 
been her affianced lover and 
the object of her devotion. 
To the last days of her life 
she treasured the memorials 
of his admiration, and her 
home was as “a Mecca of 


never forgot 


After a pencil sketch. 


Mrs. Marie Louise 

hew. 

‘*The last days of the poet’s 
wife had been soothed by Mrs. 
Shew, and the final care of the 
dead lady’s remains was under- 
taken by that same friend.” 
(From “ The Life of Edgar Allan 

Poe,” by John H. Ingram.) 


the mind ”’ to all who revered 
the works and words of 
the author of ‘“‘ The Raven.” 
The most beautiful offering 
at the shrine of his genius 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


173 


From a photograph. By permission of 


Miss Amelia F. Poe. Judge Neilson Poe, 


Cousin of Edgar Allan Poe, who befriended Poe in his later years and 
was with him at his death. 


is Helen Whitman’s little book, ‘‘ Edgar Poe and his 
Critics.” 

Probably no one save his “lost Lenore” ever 
aroused Poe’s feelings so deeply as did the lady known 
as “Annie.” His friendship for her, his “ dear, true 
and the aid and sympathy of her family, con- 
stituted the brightest beam of happiness in his lonesome 
latter years. To this congenial and appreciative 
spirit the poet indited his ‘‘ most musical, most melan- 
choly”’ lines, “‘ For Annie,” and in his last letter home 
to Mrs. Clemm was a message of faith and gratitude 
for ‘‘ Annie.” 


’ 


sister,’ 


The lasting impression he made upon 


the lady’s mind was most favourable, and she declared 
to me her belief that ‘‘ he was incapable of a mean or 
dishonourable act towards any human being.” After 
Poe’s death “ Annie was a true friend to his more 
than mother,” Mrs. Clemm, and gave her a home as 
long as she desired it. 


From a daguerreotype. 


Elmira Royster 
(Mrs. Shelton). 


When Poe’s engagement with Helen Whitman was 
broken off, he went South on literary affairs. At 
Richmond he learnt that his first love, Elmira, was a 
widow. He called upon her, and in a little while re- 
newed his addresses. She asked time for consideration, 
but with his usual impetuosity Poe declared, “a love 
that hesitated was not a love for me.’”’ They became 
engaged. A few weeks later, just before the wedding 
bells should have rung out their “ golden notes,” the 
poet met with an untimely fate. The end came sud- 
denly. Poe’s troubled spirit passed away on October 7, 


1849. 


THE LIFESSTORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. 


By Mary BRADFORD WHITING. 


HERE are few modern poets of whom so little is 
known as the brilliant and erratic genius who 

first saw the light on January 19, 1809. This ignor- 
ance arises not so much from lack of information 
as from the amount of false information that 
has been given to the world by Griswold and other of 
his early biographers. They would have had us believe 
that Poe was a dissolute being, the child of a couple of 


strolling players, who inherited his parents’ vagrant and 
unsatisfactory habits of life. 

There is a grain of truth in this story, as there is in 
most misstatements ; but it is not the less misleading 
on that account. The poet’s mother was certainly an 
actress, touring in the States at the time of her marriage 
with David Poe, but she was a clever and beautiful 
Englishwoman, and her husband was well born. His 


2 


174 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


grandfather, John Poe, was descended from one of 
Cromwell’s Irish officers who went to Pennsylvania 
in 1745; and his father, who fought in the War of In- 
dependence, was an Assistant Quartermaster-General 
in the United States Army. ; 

David’s marriage so displeased his father that he 
was forbidden the house, and the struggles and priva- 
tions that he and his young wife endured ended in 
their early death. The little Edgar Allan, not three 
years old at the time of his parent’s death, was adopted 
by his godfather, from whom he had received his second 
name. There can be no doubt that he inherited from 
his paternal stock the Celtic characteristics of which he 
speaks in ‘‘ William Wilson,” a tale which is to some 
extent autobiographical : 


“‘T am the descendant of a race whose imagination and 
easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them 
remarkable, and in my earliest infancy I gave evidence 
of having fully inherited the family character. As I 
advanced in years it was more strongly developed, beconiing 
for many years a source of serious disquietude to my 
friends and of positive injury to myself. I grew self- 
willed, addicted to the wildest caprices and a prey to the 
most ungovernable passions. My voice was a household 
law.” 


It was whilst he was at school in England that Poe 
came under the care of Dr. Bransby, who found him 
not a “bad” boy in the ordinary sense of the term ; 
he needed wise watching and careful discipline, certainly, 
but his caprices and passions sprang from genius and 
not from depravity. How naturally and purely spiritual 
his youthful passions were is evidenced by the verses 
“To Helen,” which were written after his return to 
America. 

As nearly as can be as- 
certained, Poe was fourteen 
when he first saw Mrs. 
Stannard; she the 
mother of one of his school- 
fellows, and her beauty 
and the sweet welcome 
with which she received 
him at her house thrilled 
him with an instant ad- 
miration, or rather, an adora- 
tion: 


“Helen, thy beauty to 
me 
Like those Nicean barks of 
yore, 
That gently o’er a perfumed 
sea 
The weary, way-worn wan- 
derer, bore 
To his’ own native 
shore. 


“On desperate seas long wont 


to roam, 
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic Froma unique photographic cop 
face daguerreolype, circa autumn, 1848. 


Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home 
To the glory that was Greece, 
To the grandeur that was Rome. 


“Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche 
How statue-like I see thee stand, 
The agate lamp within thy hand ; 
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 
Are Holy Land !”’ 


This is not love ; it is a purely imaginative devotion, and 
yet it is not the outcome of imagination alone. Real 
grief can only be aroused by real passion, and when 
Mrs. Stannard soon afterwards died, the boy haunted 
her grave for months, weeping over it in an anguish 
of regret for all that he had lost, drowning his soul, as 
it were, in a wild melancholy the echoes of which are 
plainly heard in his later lyrics. 

The statement that Poe was expelled from college 
has been frequently repeated since it was made by his 
first biographer, Griswold, and it is not surprising that 
a movement should have been set on foot by the members 
of the University of Virginia, with the object of clearing 
his name. The University librarian, as far back as 
1869, made an exhaustive search among the records, 
and stated that although Poe left without taking a 
degree, he had already passed several successful ex- 
aminations, and that as no entry of his expulsion could 
be found, it was certain that he was not expelled. What 
happened at this period of his career remains a mystery. 
What is really known is, that after an absence from home, 
he returned in February, 1829, to find that his adoptive 
mother was dead; and his godfather’s speedy second 
marriage led to his expulsion from home. Brought 
up as the heir to great wealth, petted, spoiled, 
and encouraged in expen- 
sive tastes, allowed, as he 
himself says, to make his 
voice “a household law,” 
he suddenly found 
himself penniless and with 
absolutely no prospect open 
to him. He resolved to 
earn his living by writing, 
and with the need 
womanly sympathy which 
was so marked a feature 
in his character, he went 
in the year 
1833 to make his home 
with his widowed aunt, Mrs. 
Clemm. 

Mrs. Clemm had a lovely 
young daughter, Virginia, 
who was at once the play- 
mate and pupil of her 
cousin, and in the year 1835, 
when he was twenty-eight 
and she was fourteen, they 
were married, 

One of the darkest ac- 
cusations made against the 


of 


to Baltimore 


y of a destroyed Edgar Allan 


| 


FRE 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


BOOKMAN. 


175 


poet is that by his unbridled passions and his propensity 
to drink, he broke his child-wife’s heart, that he squand- 
ered the pittance that should have provided her dying 
hours with comforts, and that he wounded her loving 
nature by his continual neglect. But if this accusation 
were true, it is scarcely possible that Mrs. Clemm would 
have been devoted to him through life, nor that in 
death she would have desired to be laid beside her 
darling Eddy.” 
is probably given by Mr. Graham, the proprietor of the 
magazine for which Poe wrote during several years : 


The correct account of the matter 


“ Poe’s love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship 
of the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before his 
eyes. I have seen him hovering round her when she was 
ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother 
for her first-born, her slightest cough causing him a shudder, 
a heart-chill that was visible. I rode out one summer 
evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful 
eyes bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved 
face haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain.”’ 


The description given by a friend of the last days of 
Virginia’s life might have inspired the well-known scene 
in La Bohéme ”’ : 


“Everything was so neat, so purely clean, so scant and 
so poverty-stricken, that I saw the poor sufferer with such 
a heart-ache! There was no clothing on the bed (which 
was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. 
The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful 
chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. 
She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband’s great- 


From 4 taken for the collection 


of Mr. J. H. Ingram. 


coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat on her bosom. This 
wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness ; 
the coat and the cat were the sufferer’s only means of 
warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her 
mother her feet.” 


In reading these accounts, the questicn naturally 
arises, How is it that Poe had fallen into this state of 
abject poverty ? From the time that he had gained 
the prize of a hundred dollars offered for the best story 
by’ ‘the proprietors of the Saturday Visiter, he should 
have had little difficulty in finding employment. His 
contributions to Graham’s magazine brought the cir- 
culation up from” five to fifty-two thousand, and Mr. 
Graham spoke of him as “ the soul of honour in all his 
transactions.”” His severance with the magazine was 
entirely his own act; it was apparently impossible for 
him to submit to the trammels of regular occupation, 
and Mrs. Clemm undertook the office of his literary 
agent. 


“She was the sole servant, keeping everything clean,” 
writes Captain Mayne Reid, ‘‘ the sole messenger, doing 
the errands, making pilgrimages between the poet and 
his publishers, frequently bringing back such chilling 
responses as, ‘ The article not accepted,’ or, ‘ The cheque 
not to be given till such and such a day.’ No reproaches 
ever passed Mrs. Clemm’s lips, either during her son-in- 
law’s life nor after his death. ‘I attended to his literary 
business,’ was her statement to a friend, ‘for he, poor 
fellow! knew nothing about money transactions. How 
should he, brought up in luxury and extravagance ? He 
passed the first part of the morning in his study, and after 


Residence of Mr. Allan, Poe’s godfather, who adopted 
the boy on the death of his parents. 


a 
2 
XUM 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


he had finished 
his task for the 
day, he worked 
in our beautiful 
flower - garden 
and read and 
recited poetry 
to us. Every 
one who knew 
himintimately, 
loved him.’ ”’ 


But Poe’s 
unbusiness - 
like habits 
were not the 
only cause of 
his distress. 
His caustic 
temper made 
him an ever- 
widening 
circle of foes, 
and his finest 
productions 


From a miniature. 


Mrs. David Poe, 


Edgar Allan Poe's mother. 
were so miser- 


ably rewarded that “The Raven” is said to have 
brought its author no more than the sum of two 
pounds. 

Though those who knew him best found most excuses 
for him, there can be no doubt that his way of life did 
need excuse, and in the following letter to a friend (for 
the use of which, as of other matter concerning Poe’s 
life and work, I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. 
John H. Ingram) he gives the explanation of his irregu- 
larities : 


“You say, can you hint to me what was the terrible 
evil that caused the irregularities so profoundly lamented ? 
Yes, I can do more than hint. This evil was the greatest 
that can befalla man. Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved 
as no man ever loved wife before, ruptured a blood-vessel 
in singing. Her life was despaired of ; I took leave of her 
for ever,and underwentall the agonies of her death. She 
recovered partially, and I again hoped ; at the end of a 
year the vessel broke again. I went through precisely 
the same scene. Then again and again, and even once 
again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies 
of her death, and at each accession of the disorder I loved 
her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate 
pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous 
in a very unusual degree. I became insane—with long 
intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute 
unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often and 
how much. As a matter of course my enemies referred 
the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the 
insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a 
permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife. 
This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the 
horrible, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair 
which I could not longer have endured without total loss 
of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I 
received a new but, O God, how melancholy an ex- 
istence !”’ 


A man’s own account of himself is not always to be 
trusted, but the testimony of Poe’s friends shows his 
extraordinary susceptibility. Mrs. Shew was the one 


most capable of understanding his case, for she was a 
qualified doctor, and she made the following notes 
while helping to nurse him after his wife’s death : 


“T decided that in his best health he had lesion of one 
side of the brain, and as he could not bear stimulants or 
tonics without producing insanity, I did not feel much 
hope that he could be raised up from brain fever brought 
on by extreme suffering of mind and body—actual want 
and hunger and cold having been borne by this heroic 
husband in order to supply food, medicine, and comforts 
to his dying wife.”’ 


Her description of the composition of ‘‘ The Bells”’ 
shows the unnatural condition of his brain. Coming 
one day to her house, he told her that he had a poem to 
write, but that he had “no feeling, no sentiment, no 
inspiration.” She gave him some tea in the conserva- 
tory, and on his complaining of the noise of the bells 
which were ringing in the neighbouring church tower, 
she wrote on the paper before him : 


“THE BELLS. 
By ©. A. Pos. 
The bells, the little silver bells.’’ 


He seized the pen from her and finished the poem 
without hesitation, but immediately on its completion 
he fell into a state of exhaustion. 


““My brother took him to his own room, where he slept 
twelve hours and could scarcely recall the evening’s work. 
This showed his mind was injured, nearly gone from want 
of food and from disappointment. He had not been 
drinking, and had only been a few hours from home. 
Evidently his vitality was low and he was nearly insane ; 
while he slept we studied his pulse and found the same 
symptoms which I had so often noticed before. We called 
in Dr. Francis, who said, ‘ He has heart disease, and will 
die early in life.’ ”’ 


This calm and sensible woman advised her patient 
to take a calm and sensible remedy : 


did not 
expect him to : 
live long; I 
knew that or- 
ganic disease 
had been 
gaining on his 
physical frame 
through the 
many trialsand 
privations 
of his eventful 
life. I told 
him that 
nothing could 
or would save 
him from sud- 
den death but 
a prudent life 
of with 
a woman fond 
enough and 
strong enough 
to manage his 
afiairs for 
him.” 


rom a daguerreotype, 
circa autumn, 1848. 


Edgar Allan Poe 


ow % 
5 
q 
. 
¥ 


JANUARY, I909.| 


THE BOOKMAN. 177 


Devil in the Belfry.” 


“The little chap ... clapped the big chapeau-de-bras upon his head; 
knocked it down over his eyes and mouth; and then, lifting up the big fiddle, 
beat him with it.” 


(From Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Paris by 
. Quantin.) 


soe 


“The Pit and the Pendulum.” 


Twice again it swung, and a sharp sense of pain shot through every 
ve. 


(From Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Pzris by 
A. Quantin.) 


Metzengerstein.” 
‘Clearing at a single plunge the gate-way and the moat, the steed bounded 
far up the tottering staircase of the palace, and, with its rider, disappeared 
amid the whirlwind of chaotic fire.” 
(From Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Paris by 
A. Quantin.) 


“The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” 


“As the sailor looked in the gigantic animal had seized Madame 
L’Espanaye by the hair. . . . With one determined sweep of its muscular 
arm it nearly severed her head from her body.” 


(From Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Paris by 
A. Quantin.) 


SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF E. A. POE’S STORIES. 
(From the collection of Mr. John H. Ingram.) 


XUM 


‘ 
= 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


By most heart-broken husbands this advice would 
have been looked upon as an insult, but Poe viewed 
the matter in a different light ; to him, inconstancy was 
a proof of constancy, a paradox which he sets forth in 
the story called ‘‘ Eleonora.” 


““She whom I loved in youth,”’ he says, ‘‘ and of whom 
I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was 
the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long 
departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We 
had always dwelt together beneath a tropical sun, in the 
valley of the Many-Coloured Grass.”’ 


But a blighting touch fell upon Eleonora, and as she 
faded away, she wept to think that her lover would 
forget her after she was gone. 


“And then and there I hurriedly threw myself at her 
feet and offered up a vow to herself and to Heaven that 
I would never bind myself in marriage to any daughter 
of Earth, that I would inno manner prove recreant to her 
dear memory or to the memory of the devout affection 
with which she had blessed me. And I called the mighty 
Ruler of the Universe to witness the pious solemnity of 
my vow. And the curse which I invoked of him and of 
her should I prove traitorous to that promise, involved a 
penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit 
me to make record of it here.”’ 


To most men, under these circumstances, a second 
marriage would have been an impossibility, or, at any 
rate, could only have been entered upon by the abjura- 
tion of the vow; but Poe was able to discover a third 
course—the forming of a new union would not 
destroy but fulfil the old, and he therefore entered 
upon it as a duty: 


‘““What indeed was my passion for the young girl of 
the Valley in comparison with the fervour and the delirium 
and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I 
poured out my whole soul at the feet of the ethereal Ermen- 
garde ? I wedded, nor dreaded the curse I had invoked, 
and its bitterness was not visited upon me. And once— 
but once again, in the silence of the night, there came 
through my lattice the soft sighs that had. forsaken me, 
and they modelled themselves into a familiar and sweet 
voice, saying, ‘Sleep in peace! For the spirit of love 
reigneth and ruleth, and in taking to thy passionate heart 


University of Virginia 
as it was when Poe was a student. 


her who is Ermengarde, thou art 
absolved for reasons which shall be 
made known to thee in Heaven of thy 
vows to Eleonora.’ ”’ 


But the love into which he plunged 
for Helen Whitman was not only the 
fulfilment of his love for Virginia, it 
was also to him the fulfilment of his 
love for Helen Stannard, and in the 
lines which he addressed to her, he 
declares that he felt it a ‘“ duty” 
to love her. 

After Virginia’s death a friend 
persuaded Mrs. Whitman to send 
Poe some of her verses, a gift which 
he at once acknowledged in a letter 
in which he told that ever since 
*. he had first heard of her, “ your 
unknown heart had seemed to pass 
into my bosom.” 

“Judge, then, with what shuddering, overwhelming 
joy, I received the Valentine which gave me to see that you 
knew me to exist. I wished to contrive some means of 
acknowledging, without wounding you by seeming directly 
to acknowledge, my sense of the honour you had conferred 
upon me. To accomplish as I wished it precisely what I 
wished, seemed impossible, however, and I was on the point 
of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume 
of my own poems, and then the lines I had written in my 
passionate boyhood to the first purely ideal love of my 
soul, to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you, flashed upon 
my recollection. They expressed not only all that I would 
have said of your person, but all that of which I most 
wished to assure you in the lines commencing ‘ On desperate 
seas long wont to roam.’ Think of the rare agreement of 
names, and you will no longer wonder that to one accus- 
tomed as I am to the Calculus of Possibilities, they wore 


an air of positive miracle. I yielded at once to an over- 
whelming sense of fatality.”’ 


At the time that he sent this he had not been in- 
troduced to her, but they no sooner met than he found 


himself carried away by a flood of emotion. He wrote: 


“As you entered the room, pale, hesitating, and evi- 
dently oppressed at heart, as your eyes rested for one 
brief moment upon mine, I felt for the first time in my 
life the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of 
I saw that you were Helen, my 


the reach of reason. 


From a contemporary engraving. 
Poe's College at Fordham. 


178 
RPA 
From an old print. 


ne 


XUM 


JANUARY, 1I909.! 


THE BOOKMAN. 179 


From daguerreotype taken in 1849. 


Edgar Allan Poe. 


Helen, the Helen of a thousand dreams—she whom the 
great Giver of all good had preordained to be mine, mine 
only, if not now, alas! then hereafter and for ever in 
the Heavens!’ ” 


It was not much wonder that Mrs. Whitman shrank 
from the addresses of this strange and vehement lover ; 
for a while she held back, deterred alike by her 
own misgivings and by the warnings of her 
friends, and in a frenzy of feeling he went to 
the house and besought her to have pity on 
him. His excitement was so great that her 
mother sent for a doctor, who carried him off 
for the administration of a course of treatment. 
This incident was afterwards misrepresented by 
Griswold in his Life of Poe, and Mrs. Whitman 
published an indignant denial. Whatever there 
may have been to forgive, she readily forgave ; 
and on condition that he promised never again 
to touch the intoxicants that acted like poison 
on his sensitive frame, she agreed to marry him. 
Every arrangement was made for the wedding, 
and Mrs. Clemm, who seems to have fully 
approved, was waiting to welcome her son-in- 
law’s bride; but when Poe went to Mrs. 
Whitman’s house, she met him with the an- 
nouncement that she had been told he had 
broken the promise he had so _ solemnly 
made, and that the marriage could never take 
place. 

The blow was a terrible one. Poe’s friends 
did their best to help and comfort him, but the 
end was now near at hand. On October 2, 
1849, he went to Baltimore. Before leaving 


fo ne 


of home you tag vb 
might, 


Sau. 29. 47. 


he had complained of feeling unwell, and it is 
supposed that he took a sedative and fell into a state 
of stupor. It was election time, corruption and bribery 
were rife and votes were openly bought and sold; 
Poe was seized upon by ruffians, drugged, carried 
from one polling-booth to another until he had been 
made to vote in as many as eleven different wards, 
and then flung out into the streets. He was found by 
some passers-by, picked up and taken to the hospital, 
where he died in two or three days. 

The tale is best told in Mrs. Clemm’s words. When 
news of his death reached her, she wrote thus of Edgar 
Poe to a friend who had known many of her troubles: 


““ Neilson Poe of Baltimore has written to me and says 
he died of congestion of the brain, and not of what the 
vile, vile newspapers accuse him. He had many kind 
friends with him, and was attended to the grave by the 
literati of Baltimore. Severe excitement (and no doubt 
some imprudence) Brought this on; he never had one 
interval of reason. Some of the papers, indeed nearly all, 
do him justice. But this, my dear Annie, will not restore 
him. Never, oh! never, will Isee those dear, lovely eyes. 
I feel so desolate, friendless, and alone !”’ 


The keenest grief of Mrs. Clemm’s closing years was 
the use that Mr. Griswold made of the letters and papers 
that she had unreservedly put into his hands. Many 
of the accusations which his book contained were 
merely the repetition of ill-natured slander; but the 
lines in which he sums up the poet’s character show that 
he entirely misunderstood the man of whom he wrote : 


““Poe’s harsh experience had deprived him of all faith 
in men and women: he had made up his mind upon the 
numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole 


ast ancl new 


writ 

the we 
fay Hak 
aud wit as Auk Come 


ye. 
— She me 
he, 7 lve 


See 


Ju, J be — every 
wk me. Sends 


Facsimile of a Letter by Edgar Allan Poe. 


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THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, 1909. 


*“*The Raven.’’ 
From “‘ Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. 
(G, Bell & Sons.) 


system, with him, was an imposture. He had to a morbid 
extent that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, 
but no wish for the esteem or love of his species ; only the 
hard wish to succeed—not shine, not serve, succeed— 
that he might have the right to despise a world which 
galled his self-esteem.” 


Such censure is altogether beside the mark ; it would 
have been well for Poe if he had had a stronger wish to 
succeed—a little wholesome ambition would have been 
a very effective spur to action; but as he himself said, 
poetry was not a purpose with him, but a passion. 
Professor Harrison, in his book “‘ New Glimpses of Poe,” 
published in the United States in 1901, speaks of the 
poet as ‘‘a human opal,” and says, ‘‘ The Hamlet-like 
nature of the man, with its unsteady purpose, its poetic 
flickerings, its strange logic and boundless inconsequence, 
makes him a unique psychological study truly Shake- 
spearean in the multiplicity of its facets and angles.” 
It is this ‘‘ Hamlet-nature’”’ that gives the life and the 
writings of Poe a never-failing interest ; cast adrift in 
a world too hard for him, he struggled, sorrowed, sinned, 
and repented, while his whole being was tinged with a 
sadness that was not less real because he deliberately 
turned it to poetic uses. 


“The tone of the highest manifestation of Beauty is 
sadness,’”’ he says in his ‘‘ Philosophy of Composition.” 
‘* Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development 


PLUTONIAN - SHORE 


+ 


“The Raven.” 


From “ Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” Illustrated by W. Heath Robi " 


invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy 
is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tones. Of all 
melancholy topics, | asked myself, what, according to the 
universal understanding of mankind, is the most melan- 
choly ? Death, was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I 
said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical ?’ 
The answer here is also obvious. ‘When it most closely 
allies itself to beauty.’ The death, then, of a beautiful 
woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the 
world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best 
suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.” 


Poe is here telling the story of the composition of 
“The Raven,” but the same strain of poetic melancholy 
runs through many other of his poems, ‘ Ulalume,” 
“The Haunted Palace,” ‘“‘ The City in the Sea,” ‘‘ The 
Vale of Unrest,” etc., and perhaps finds its most perfect 
expression in the lines ‘‘ To One in Paradise.” 

This inherent sadness is a recurring note through the 
whole of Poe’s writings ; in the stories, as in the poems, 
you walk almost always under the shadow of death, but 
in the stories he reveals less of the melancholy and the 
beauty of death than of the grim mystery, the agonies, 
the grotesque horrors, the tragedy and the terror of it. 
His weirdest, uncanniest imaginings are built up with 
such a Defoe-like, matter-of-fact, detailed realism that 
the impossible grows into probability, the marvellous 
puts on a face of every-day truth and seems perversely 
natural and real when it is least so. ‘‘ The Gold Bug ”’ 


4 
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THE BOOKMAN. 


181 


has been the germ of hundreds of tales of treasure-hunts 
and puzzling cyphers; there are foreshadowings of 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in ‘“ William Wilson”; M. 
Dupin of ‘‘ The Murders in the Rue Morgue ”’ and “ The 
Mystery of Marie Roget” is a wonderful ancestor of 
Sherlock Holmes; the ‘‘ MS. found in a Bottle” has 
had a long line of descendants that have been found in 


other bottles. It is no exaggeration to say that Poe 
has influenced, more or less, most of the world’s great 
short-story writers, those of France and England and 
Germany in particular. America has produced no poet 
of higher imaginative power or more original genius: 
he is greater than al! but one of her writers of stories, 
and not second even to Hawthorne. 


EARLY STRUGGLES OF POPULAR NOVELISTS. 


By An ANONYMOUS NOVELIST, SIR A. CONAN DOYLE, SIR GILBERT PARKER, F. FRANKFORT Moore, 


GEORGE R. Sims, PERcy Waite, Sitas Hockinc, EDGAR JEPSON, CUTCLIFFE HyYNE, 


H. C. BatLey, JOHN GALSWORTHY, THOMAS COBB, BERNARD CAPES, 


JosEPH HockING, JOHN OXENHAM, AND CHARLES MARRIOTT. 


NE man’s hard lot is another’s man’s bed of roses, 
and the same steak may be both tender and tough, 
according to whether the eater is really hungry or 
whether he is merely making a meal as usual because it 
is meal-time. Poverty, suffering, luxury, privation, are 
all, of course, relative terms, and, in a sense, the agony 
may be equally intense whether one crudely starves to 
death or dies of a rose in aromatic pain. 

But when we talk of the early struggles of the literary 
aspirant there is a pretty common understanding that 
the struggle is an all-round reality. We think at once, 
say, of Goldsmith pawning his new suit to pay arrears 
of rent to a weeping landlady ; we remember how he 
lived in his garret, ‘ writing for bread, and expecting 
to be dunned for a milk-score,’’ and how, after eleven 
years of drudgery as a hack-writer, he thought himself 
well paid when, at the age of forty, he received sixty 
pounds for ‘“‘ The Vicar of Wakefield.’”” We do not 
consider Trollope much of a struggler, though he re- 
ceived less than two hundred pounds in all for his three 
first novels; but we think of Hood; of Stevenson’s 
modest beginnings; of poor Gissing’s difficult career ; 
or are confronted with the statement, that Mr. Gardiner 
repeats in his ‘‘ Prophets, Priests, and Kings,’’ to the 
effect that the largest sum George Meredith has ever 
received for a novel is £400. 

With these preconceived notions of what is before 
the young writer when he sets out to live the literary 
life, it is more bewildering than comforting to come upon 
such a passage as this in Mr. Hall Caine’s new book, 
“My Story”’: 


** But thinking it may cheer the beginner who is trudging 
through the dark ways of the literary life, knee-deep in 
disappointments, to see how stiff a struggle it was to me, 
I will gladly show how modest were my earnings during 
many of my earlier years. 

“‘T had been working on the Mercury for some time at 
about two hundred pounds a year, eked out by perhaps 
a hundred more from the Atheneum and the Academy, 
when I began to write my first novel. Soon I found 
myself crippled by want of leisure, and was compelled to 
realise that I must either abandon my hope of becoming 


a novelist or curtail my energies—and therefore my 
earnings—as a journalist. It was a serious crisis, for, 
taking my heart in both hands, I had married in the 
meantime, and had other responsibilities. But after serious 
deliberation with my. wife, hardly knowing where we 
were or what leap in the dark we were making, with 
infinite misgiving and most natural if ludicrous nervous- 
ness, I wrote to my editor in Liverpool asking him to 
reduce my salary ! 

a . My salary was reduced by half, and I wrote 
and published my first novel. Then my modest success 
as an author emboldened me to think that I could live 
without journalism at all; and having ceased to write on 
the Atheneum and the Academy from a conviction that 
the man who wrote books had no right to review books, 
I resigned the remaining ha!i of my position on the Mercury 

. and I trust I do not reveal a fact which will shock 
the proprietors of the paper, among whom is my friend 
and colleague Egerton Castle, when I say that during the 
last year of my connection with the Mercury I received 
my half salary without writing, so far as I remember, a 
single line. 

‘“ Meanwhile, however, I was casting my bread on the 
waters with rather reckless prodigality, for it was not 
immediately that my fiction made up to me for the loss 
of journalism. I had been paid a hundred pounds for 
my first story as a serial, but when I came to publish 
the book all I could get was seventy-five pounds for 
the copyright out-and-out. For my second book I fared 
only a little better; and for my third, my first Manx 
story, ‘The Deemster,’ which contained the work of a 
laborious year, plus the Manx lore acquired during eighteen 
years of my youth, I received one hundred and fifty pounds 
in all.” 


This may or may not be hardship, but, at least, in the 
strength of it, one may congratulate Mr. Hall Caine 
on the obvious fact that he has never sojourned in Grub 
Street. If we were at liberty to tell plain tales and 
give names, we could tell of living authors, men of 
brilliant literary capacities, who have made out of 
three or four novels of unquestionable merit less than 
Mr. Hall Caine received for his first book, and who, 
abandoning the writing of fiction because, good as their 
work admittedly was, it did not catch the popular fancy, 
are to this day earning small and precarious incomes 
from journalism. Knowing these things and how more 


\ | 


182 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


than likely it was that a rude awakening must await 
the literary beginner who accepted Mr. Hall Caine’s 
experiences as typical of the hard struggle that lay 
ahead of him, we put the question to a number of 
successful and popular novelists, who have been kind 
enough to send us their opinions or some note of their 
personal history. Unfortunately, we are not able to 
publish all these ; in several cases the writer, whilst 
emphatically denying that Mr. Hall Caine’s story 
“stiff struggle,” desires that 
his communication should be regarded as confidential. 
But the following are sufficiently representative ; the 
first being written by a very well-known and now 
popular novelist who consents to our printing his com- 
munication but, because he has written so frankly of 
his private affairs, asks us to withhold his name. 


represents anything of a 


A REAL “STIFF STRUGGLE.” 


In present circumstances it would be very inconvenient 
for me to say anything for publication about my own 
experiences in journalism. I may tell you privately 
that they were much less rosy than Mr. Hall Caine’s. 
I had fifteen years’ experience of provincial journalism, 
and I know that it is quite common for junior reporters 
to be paid from 25s. to 35s. a week. Maultitudes of 
really clever men are receiving not more than {2 a week, 
and thinking themselves lucky if they get {2 5s. or 
£2 Ios. For five or six years I did all sorts of work on 
a provincial daily for 35s. a week. When I got £2, 
and had to do reviews of books and occasional leading 
articles, I thought myself in clover. I always felt that 
my ledger was in the future. For a number of years I 
was the correspondent of the Times and of another 


Engraving from picture by S. S. Osgood in tne 
posse: sion of the New York Historical Society. 


Edgar Allan Poe. 


London daily in a great provincial town ; at the same time 
I was on the regular staff of a provincial daily, and I was 
becoming known as a writer of stories in the magazines, 
yet I never earned from all these sources more than 
£150 a year. For my first book I got £10. The 
book that made my name as a novelist brought 
me in about £200, and I never got a penny of this 
sum till ten months after publication. A great deal 
of extravagant nonsense is talked about the earn- 
ings of newspaper men, and it is time somebody told 
the truth. It is a glorious profession, and I look back 
upon my journalistic days with real affection, for they 
formed the most interesting period of my life—far more 
interesting than being slated by critics !—but it is the 
hardest of all trades and for the labour exacted the least 
well paid. This does not mean that newspaper pro- 
prietors are mercenary slave-drivers. The competition 
is tremendous and becomes more pressing every year. 
Many young fellows go into journalism as though they 
imagined it was an earthly paradise. It is an everlasting 
grind, and must be. You are met on all hands by 
strong, persistent competition, and must keep your- 
self up to the mark. For twelve years I suppose my 
average day’s work would be from twelve to sixteen 
hours, and it is the most nerve-exhausting work in the 
world. You need a constitution of iron, the patience 
of a saint, and the courage of a martyr. There is no 
room for young Faint-heart in journalism. If he 
coddles himself or is flattered at home he is done for. I 
suppose I should have been better off financially had 
I been a tinker or a tailor, yet I have no regrets, and 
would gladly go through it all again if I had a chance. 
But hard work there must be. When I look back I 
see the journalistic path strewn with the bones of idlers. 
It was not that they were all incompetent in the literary 
sense, but they either could not or would not buckle on 
their armour for a long, arduous, resolute—and I must 
add, splendid—fight. They wanted to do only easy 
things ; most of them were theatre or music-hall mad ; 
they could not understand that the true journalist is 
ready at any moment for all sorts of jobs—and he must 
be ready, too, not on Monday or Friday, but every day, 
including Sunday. In early youth I was a shockingly 
intolerant sectarian in religious matters, but rubbing 
shoulders with all kinds of Christians knocked that 
silliness out of me. For journalism is a magnificent 
educator. It is the unique training-ground for the 
novelist. It does not follow, as is too often imagined 
by indolent fellows who nurture very delusive dreams of 
a ‘soft time ’’ (which authorship never is), that every 
journalist is a potential novelist. This is the curse of 
many. They read about the vast earnings of Mr. Hall 
Caine and others, and thinking that story-writing is 
very easy they allow visions of fame and fortune to 
enervate them into feeble and uninteresting journalists 
whom no editor wants. If they will do their work 
earnestly and well as newspaper men, they will make 
more assured any higher literary destiny that may be 
coming to them. 


I didn’t intend to chatter on at this rate. But if 


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THE BOOKMAN. 


there should be anything in this you approve of, you 
are welcome to use it, but I really must ask you nof 
to identify me as the writer of it. 

A NOVELIST. 


SIR A. CONAN DOYLE 
endured no hardships. 


In my own case I had a small medical practice, so that 

I can never claim to have endured the absolute hardships 

which often fall to the lot of the apprentices to literature. 
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. 


SIR GILBERT PARKER 
on £300 a year, 


I do not think an income of £300 a year represents 
a “stiff struggle’ with adversity and for fame and 
competency. Everything depends upon the standards 
and conditions of life in which one is moving at the 
time. There are a great many people who would not 
think {300 a year represented much anxiety or an 
unusual combat with circumstances. 

GILBERT PARKER. 


FRANKFORT MOORE 


draws comparisons. 


I cannot doubt that many hearts will be wrung by 
the reading of Mr. Hall Caine’s early struggle as de- 
scribed with such pathos by him in his “ Story’”’; but 
I am not quite so sure that among his most ardent 
sympathisers he will find many men who hada practical 
knowledge of journalism and its emoluments twenty-five 
or thirty years ago. But for the matter of that, I doubt 
if any young man of indifferent education and only a 
mercantile training would be able to command, even now- 
a-days when journalism has become a profession, such a 
salary as Mr. Hall Caine received. I know for certain 
that I was for several years on the editorial staff of a 
newspaper before I earned an income of £200. But then 
it must not be forgotten that Mr. Hall Caine always 
possessed the ability of Mr. Hall Caine. Upon the 
piteous statement that £175 represents the entire sum 
derived by him from his first novel, any comment in- 
volves a consideration of a question of comparison. 
Compared with the sums earned by Mr. Hall Caine by 
the publication of a novel now-a-days, £175 is, of course, 
paltry ; but compared with what the majority of authors 
have made out of a first novel it is not, I venture to 
think, absolutely contemptible. 

F. FRANKFORT Moore. 


GEORGE R. SIMS 
wishes he had felt the “ pocket-pinch,” 


I am afraid that my experiences are not a fair example 
of the literary struggle. 

I had asalary of £600 a year in the City, which I gave 
up for a time in order to Jead what I imagined to be a 
literary life. 

I had secured the privilege of writing a column of 


Photograph from painting by Oscar Halling. 


By permission of Miss Amelia F. Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. 


gossip called ‘‘ Waifs and Strays”’ in the Weekly Dis- 
patch for which, at first, I received a guinea a week, and on 
Fun I earned on an average £2 a week. 

As I did not find this sum sufficient for the joys of 
life, I went back again to the City and the salary. This 
meant working in an office from nine till five, and doing 
my newspaper and magazine work at night, but I did 
it and remained in the City until my financial success 
as a playwright had given me an income which enabled 
me to dispense with a salary. 

I struggled for ten years to get a footing in journalism, 
but though I was then, and always have been, hard up, 
the bitterness of the pocket-pinch was not part of my 
experience. I wish it had been—I should have been 
a better journalist. 

GEORGE R. Sis. 


PERCY WHITE 


counts Hall Caine’s struggle “ unheroic.” 


It seems to me that Mr. Hall Caine marched to suc- 
cess in fiction by the easiest and least discouraging path 
and that his ‘ dark ways,”’ illumined by the cheerful 
gleam of acertain £200 a year, are much less sombre than 
those beginners. Well-equipped 
for the assault, Mr. Caine stormed the citadel of popular 
success with comparative ease. His public was waiting 
for him, and all he had to do was to meet it on their 
common ground. 

My own unimportant “struggle” was equally un- 
heroic. After writing in my youth a couple of novels 
which the publishers wisely rejected, and a short story 
or two which the magazines amiably printed, I drifted 
into journalism and, in my spare time, wrote my first 
published novel, ‘‘ Mr. Bailey-Martin,” which, after 


usually braved by 


183 
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184 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


being rejected by most London publishers, was finally 
issued by Mr. Heinemann. This was my first start. 
A commonplace writer on commonplace subjects, a 
commonplace success, on a small scale, has been the 
result of commonplace effort quite undisturbed by any 
of those tragic elements which seem to me reserved 
chiefly for writers of exceptional originality whose 
talent the public are always slow to recognise. 
PEeRcY WHITE. 


SILAS K. HOCKING 
thinks Hall Caine had no struggle at all. 


I really do not see where Mr. Caine’s stiff struggle 
comes in, nor how his experience can be any encour- 
agement to those who are wading knee-deep in dis- 
appointment. According to his own showing he was 
making £300 a year with his pen when he began to 
write novels. He sacrificed half his salary on the 
Liverpool Mercury, 1.e. £100, so that he might write 
his first story, for which he got £175, surely not a bad 
exchange. Most people will be inclined to say, I think, 
that he had no struggle at all. 

A great many fairly successful writers of to-day 
could tell a very different tale. My 
own experience, I fear, is scarcely to 
the point. I have appealed from the first 
to a particular class, and have only on 
one or two occasions ventured on a six- 
shilling novel. My first story brought 
me £15, and I was very thankful to get 
that for it. The point with me has 
always been this: I had no difficulty in 
getting my first book published. The 
real struggle—as I know from the crowds 
of beginners who write to me and send 
me their MSS. for perusal, as though I 
had no work of my own to do—the real 
struggle is when no editor or publisher 
can be got to take the story, when the 
poor MS. is returned time after time, 
and there is no Liverpool Mercury or 
Atheneum to fall back upon in the mean- 
while. I have never got a quarter of 
what Mr. Hall Caine has received either 
at the beginning or since, but I should 
never think of speaking of my early 
efforts as a stiff struggle. They proved 
an easy entrance to a pleasant road. 

Sitas K. Hockinc. 


EDGAR JEPSON 


tells of his own earnings. 


If Mr. Hall Caine reckons £300 a year 
a “ stiff struggle ”’ for the young novelist, 
and {175 a poor price for a first novel, 
he began to write in uncommonly favour- 
able times. The fact is that he began at 
a time when there was, compared with 
to-day, very little competition. There 


were fewer writers of any kind ; there were still fewer 
novelists. During the twelve years I have been 
writing novels, I have known the beginnings of a 
good many living novelists; and I know half a 
dozen young novelists at the beginning of their career 
to-day. It is my experience that not one beginner 
in twenty makes {60 out of his first novel. I believe 
that {20 is above the average sum made out of a 
first novel. I would not undertake to find, in a six 
months’ hunt, three young novelists who began by 
making £300 a year. 

You ask what my own experience at the outset was. 
Out of my first book, “ Sybil Falcon,”’ I made exactly 
nothing at all; out of my second book, “‘ The Passion 
for Romance,’”’ which I am frequently assured is the 
best book I ever wrote, I made £2 1s. 8d. Out of my 
first five books I made £175 6s. o?d. They contain 
some of the best work I ever did ; and I have kept the 
figures as a warning to young men and women desirous 
of essaying the gamble of fiction. 

Things have indeed changed since Mr. Hall Caine 
began to write. The life of a novel, under present 
conditions, is three months; the competition is extra- 


Eulalie.” 


From ‘‘ Some Poems of Edgar Allan:Poe.” (Pear Tree Press.) 


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JANUARY, I909.| 


THE BOOKMAN. 


185 


‘Arthur Gordon Pym.” 
“In five minu tes our deck was swept from stem to stern.” 
From “ The Works of E. A. Poe,” Edited by John H. Ingram. 
(A. & C, Black.) 


4 vols. 


ordinarily keen; the standard of novels is very much 
higher. It is very hard indeed even for a good novel 
to get out of the ruck of good novels of each of which 
about a thousand copies are sold. The sale of a novel 
is so much a matter of pure luck that publishers cannot, 
as business men, give the beginner the prices they did. 
My advice to the young man who proposes to write 
novels to make money is that he had much _ better 
devote his burning genius to the American markets. 
That is a pleasanter and easier form of gambling. But 
of course you get other things out of novel-writing 
besides money; and if you must write novels—well, 
you must. 
EDGAR JEPSON. 


CUTCLIFFE HYNE 


made £150 a year after six years’ working. 


Mr. Hall Caine’s statement about his early literary 
earnings may be true; but do they represent his 
earnings from the start ? Or were they other than 
literary earnings ? 

You ask me what mine were. That is easily 
answered. For the first three years after I came down 
from Cambridge I worked like a horse at writing, and 


did not earn a halfpenny. I wrote six long novels, 


which did not advance past the manuscript stage. I 
then descended to writing boys’ books, and sold two to 
Blackie’s for something like {£30 apiece, and one to 
Sampson Low’s for about the same sum. Not knowing 
better, I sold the copyright, and I see that Sampson 
Low have this year reissued the book I sold to them. 

I was working six years before I made £150 a year, 
and during all that time I was travelling about the 
world, getting material at first hand. Afterwards, I 
made a good thing out of it. 

C. J. CurcLiFFE Hyne. 


H. C. BAILEY 


cannot see the “ stiffness.” 


I am sorry that I cannot see the “ stiffness ’’ of the 
“struggle”? described by Mr. Hall Caine. 

As for my own experience, my first novel was written 
while I was still an undergraduate in the brief intervals 
of rest provided by a benevolént University. I had 
therefore no opportunity of sacrificing more remunera- 
tive work to its composition. The second publishers 
who saw the MS.—Messrs. Longmans—bought the 
serial rights of the book—‘‘ My Lady of Orange ’’—for 
Longman’s Magazine and later published it in book 
form. But I should regard this and any other case of 
the sale of the serial rights of a first book as rather 
lucky than typical 

H. C. BalLey. 


JOHN GALSWORTHY 


on “Mr. Hall Caine’s cheering statement.” 


Three hundred a year is, on the face of it, a princely 
beginning for a young man in any profession. 

I am afraid that my own literary beginnings were 
not typical enough for the recital of them to be of any 
service to the aspirant in letters. 

JoHN GALSWORTHY. 


THOMAS COBB 


sheds no tears. 


All things are relative. In another part of ‘“ My 
Story,” Mr. Hall Caine (I quote from memory) writes 
that no living writer has received larger sums for books 
than himself; so that comparatively it might appear 
a “‘ struggle” to live on £300 a year. Although doubt- 
less more than one living writer might be named who has 
achieved prompt financial success, it must yet be rare 
indeed to receive £75 for a first novel—to say nothing 
of the additional {100 for the serial rights. But then 
Mr. Caine had, I think, already been working at journalism 
for some time. It is certain that there are a great many 
well-known contemporary novelists whose books (thanks 
to the manifolding system of the circulating libraries) 
have thousands of readers, but who have never earned 
so much as £300 a year and never will. After all, 
there are other rewards. 

THOMAS COBB. 


4 
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186 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Igo09. 


BERNARD CAPES 
believes beginners would like to have Hall Caine’s 
complaint. 


Thank you for your suggestion ; but I feel that any 
personal comparisons would be indelicate. I can quite 
understand the submerged literary tenth taking great 
comfort from that picture of Mr. Caine, the Colossus, 
labouring knee-deep through the slough in which they 
are plunged to the necks, and being stimulated thereby 
to emulate his courage, if they cannot command his 
stature—the more so as what were a pittance to him, 
to them were wealth. But perhaps Mr. Caine uses the 


term “ stiff struggle’ in the sense of a “ stiff glass,” 
meaning something potent and enriching; in which 
case a famous drawing by Leech is irresistibly suggested 
to one. An inebriated citizen lies against a lamp-post ; 
a benevolent old lady exclaims, “* He’s ill, poor gentle- 
man’”’; a scornful cabby rejoins, “Hill! I on’y wish 
I’d got arf ’is complaint.” I fancy that the average 
literary beginner would be very well content with a 
half, or even a quarter, of Mr. Caine’s original com- 
plaint ; but it is possible that I may be deducing from 
a single instance. 


BERNARD CAPES. 


JOHN OXENHAM 


warns the beginner, 


Most beginners would, I should say, rejoice, or at all 
events be extremely well content, to struggle as stiffly 
as Mr. Hall Caine did on the half of £300 a year with 
£175 added for their first book. 

The struggle has undoubtedly got stiffer since Mr. 
Hall Caine’s early days. If any one who is contemplating 
attempting a living out of writing wishes to read what 
I believe to be a true account of the weariness of the 
strife that may be involved thereby, let him turn to 
George Gissing’s “‘ Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,” 
which he can procure anywhere for sixpence. He sums 
up his own feelings in these grim words: “ With a 
lifetime of dread experience behind me I say that he 
who encourages any young man or woman to look for 
his living to ‘literature,’ commits no less than a 
crime. If my voice had any authority, I would cry 
this truth aloud wherever men could hear.” 

Mr. Gissing was possibly somewhat pessimistic at 
times, but there is, without doubt, truth in his pro- 
nouncement. 

In my own small case—since you ask about it—I can 
only repeat what I have said elsewhere. I took to writing 
of a night as an alterative (please do not let your proof- 


JOSEPH HOCKING 
shows no sympathy. 


It is impossible to give anything like a sufficient 
answer to your question, seeing I have not-read 
Mr. Hall Caine’s new book. Personally I should 
say that your résumé of his experiences can 
scarcely be said to describe a stiff struggle. When 
a man receives £200 a year from one newspaper 
and “ekes it out with perhaps {100 more ”’ from 
two others, there is no suggestion of starving in 
a garret. Manya young writer would regard such 
an income as wealth. 

With regard to my own experiences at the 
outset of my career, I have but little to say. 
I commenced writing when I was about twelve 
years old, and kept on receiving rebuffs until 
I was about twenty-four. But I have never at 
any time in my life been dependent upon literature 
for my income—that is to say, I have always 
had a profession which at least provided me 
with bread and cheese. During the earlier years 
of my literary life I wrote because I loved writing, 
and not because I expected anything like a 
remuneration for it. 

I should not care to divulge the sum that 
I received for what I regard as my first 
novel. It was so ridiculously small and yet 
the book has sold by many thousands of copies. 
However, as the publisher has since told me, 
its publication gave me my chance. 

JosEPH HOCKING. 


= 


2), 


¢ “ 
Mi. 


‘And the people—ah, the people, 
They that dwell up in the steeple 
All alone.” 


From “ Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. 
(G. Bell & Sons.) 


| ADA Ta 
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JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE 


BOOKMAN. 


reader make it alternative !) to the dull grind of business 
life, and I wrote for the sheer pleasure of escape into a 
new world of my own invention, where I could, to some 
extent at all events, have things a little bit my own 
way. I was not writing for bread and cheese but for 
the pleasure of writing. When a time came to choose 
between writing and the market-place, I had fortunately 
got a small footing, and cheerfully burning the market- 
place, I plumped with all my heart for letters—thereby 
taking risks which I sometimes look back upon now 
with a shiver. The outcome, however, justified me, and 
has left me grateful. My first year’s efforts, I see, 
brought me in about £25, the next year about £100. 
JOHN OXENHAM. 


CHARLES MARRIOTT 


finds Hall Caine’s experience misleading. 


If Mr. Hall Caine calls living on £300 a year a “ stiff 
struggle,” it is quite obvious that he doesn’t know the 
meaning of hardship. Anyhow, as a practical guide 
to the “literary beginner” his experience is almost 
wickedly misleading. So far from ‘“ encouraging”’ the 
beginner who has already begun, it is more likely to 
afflict him as a callous mockery. The man who after 


Hans Pfaall.” 


“ Hans Pfaall himself, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his 
creditors, were all seen in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just 
returned with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea.” 


(From Baudelatre’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Paris by 
A. Quantin.) 


“The Gold Bug.” 
‘““He received the paper very peevishly, and was about to crumple it, 


apparently to throw it in the fire, when a casual glance at the design 
seemed suddenly to rivet his attention.” 


(From Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Works, published in Paris by 
A. Quantin.) 


five or six years’ hard work is making £300 a year by 
writing may consider himself a very lucky fellow. 

With regard to mv own experience: I’ve never done 
any regular journalism, so that I can only speak as a 
novelist and writer of occasional articles. 

When I wrote my first novel, my wife and I with two 
children were living not uncomfortably on £150 a year. 
This took me from nine till six every day to earn by a 
fairly exhausting occupation, so that I had only the 
evening for writing. I sold my first novel outright for 
£25. As it promised to be something of a success my 
publisher very good-naturedly offered to break the 
agreement and give me a retaining fee of {60 a vear 
for two years on condition that I gave him the first 
refusal of the novels I wrote in that period. So that 
for my first novel I may be said to have received £145— 
conditionally. I believed, and still believe, that I was 
exceptionally lucky. 

A small legacy enabled me to accept my publisher’s 
offer and give up my employment. For the next two 
years my actual earnings by writing amounted to 
£366 13s. 1d. This sum represents two novels, twelve 
short stories, the same number of miscellaneous articles, 
and a little reviewing. 

CHARLES MARRIOTT. 


187 

j 
‘on 
Wag 
aE? 
athe, 
XUM 


188 THE BOOKMAN. 


(JANUARY, Ig09. 


Hew Books. 


MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL’S NEW BOOK, 
“MY AFRICAN JOURNEY.” * 


By THE EArt oF RONALDSHAY. 


Under the appropriate title of ‘“‘My African Journey,” 
Mr. Churchill gives us a readable account of the expedition 
which he made through British East Africa during the 
latter part of 1907, while still officially connected with the 
Colonial Office as Under Secretary. The record of his 
wanderings which he here gives us takes the form of a 
popular narrative of travel. Facts and figures, as he 
reminds us in his preface, are already on record in profusion, 
and—mindful, perhaps, of laborious hours spent in enforced 
perusal of statistical abstracts and blue-books—he decides 
to avoid them, a decision for which the reader will doubtless 
be duly grateful. On two or three occasions only do any 
figures creep into the narrative, and on one at least of these 
they would have been better left out, for while we are told 
at one moment (p. 85) that the Victoria Nyanza is 4,000 ft. 
above sea level, we are led to infer at the next (p. 129) that 
its altitude is 3,500 ft. It matters little, however, to the 
average man whether the height of any particular sheet of 
water be 3,000 ft. or 5,000 ft. ; what he desires is to obtain 
with as little mental exertion as possible a vivid picture of 
lands which he will probably never see, but which constitute 
a not unimportant part of the British Empire. 

In Mr. Churchill’s book the picture is vividly and attrac- 
tively drawn. Here and there he employs a somewhat 
extravagant language to describe matters of insignificant 
detail, as, for instance, when, having presented a dressing- 
gown purchased on the outward journey to a local chief in 
the Lado Enclave, he tells us that ‘thus the fabrics of 
Cathay were by the enterprise of Europe introduced into 
the heart of Africa’’; and now and again the party poli- 
tician peeps out, as when he describes those who preserve 
game in England “‘ with so much artificial care, and to the 
inconvenience of other dwellers in a small island,’”’ as “ per- 
verse and unenterprising folk’’; but on the whole there 
is little to criticise and much to praise in the story which 
he unfolds. 

From Mombasa he carries us along the Uganda Railway— 
‘one slender thread of scientific civilisation, of order, 
authority and arrangement, drawn across the primeval 
chaos of the world ’’—causing us to alight at intervals to 
accompany him in pursuit of rhinoceros, lion, or pig, to look 
on at the wildly gyrating figures of a kikuyu war dance, or 
to take part in a discussion of the questions of the day as 
they present themselves to the white community of the 
East African Protectorate. ‘‘ Every white man in Nairobi,” 
we are told, “is a politician.”” A distracting medley of 
problems ‘confront the visitor in perplexing disarray,” 
of which, facile princeps, is that of the white man versus 
the black, and the brown man versus both. To this thorny 
question Mr. Churchill attempts to supply an answer. East 
Africa, he thinks, can never be a white man’s country in 
the true sense of the word, for proof is wanting that ‘ the 
pure-bred European can rear his children under the equa- 
torial sun and at an elevation of more than 6,000 ft.”’ The 
same doubt is expressed later on with regard to Uganda. 
Here ‘‘ every white man seems to feel a sense of indefinable 
oppression. A cut will not heal; a scratch festers. In 
the third year of residence even a small wound becomes a 
running sore. . . . Whether it be the altitude, or the down- 
ward ray of the equatorial sun, or the insects, or some more 
subtle cause, there seems to be a solemn veto placed upon the 
white man’s permanent residence in these beautiful abodes.” 


* “My African Journey.”” By Winston Churchill, M.P. 
With 64 Illustrations and Maps. 5s. net. (Hodder & Stoughton.) 


In any case the desire of the white man to make East 
Africa a white man’s country does not bring him into 
collision with the black aboriginal. The black aboriginal 
plays an important part in the white man’s scheme, for, 
whatever Mr. Churchill may have said with regard to a 
similar question in another part of Africa from his politica} 
platform in 1906, he here admits that ‘‘ the white man 
absolutely refuses to do black man’s work.” 

But the brown man from India is another matter. In 
all manner of occupations—trading, farming, banking, 
contracting, engineering, building, accounting—the Asiatic 
steps in and ousts the European. Here, then, in Equatorial 
Africa we find waiting for solution a problem—immeasur- 
ably complicated by reason of the fact that the brown man 
from India is himself a British subject—which is at the 
same time perplexing the statesmen of Great Britain in such 
different parts of the Empire as Canada, New Zealand, 
Australia, and South Africa. The chances of finding a 
reasonable solution are, however, greater here than in other 
countries. The immediate course of sound policy, Mr. 
Churchill thinks, would seem to lie in reserving the highland 
areas for exploitation at the hands of the white man, while 
at the same time encouraging the Asiatic to trade and 
settle in “‘ the enormous regions of tropical fertility to which 
he is naturally adapted.” 

From Nairobi the railway winds through magnificent 
scenery to the great lake. At Naivasha we are given a 
glimpse of a Government stock farm and learn how by 
judicious crossing the progeny of the native sheep “a hairy 
animal ”’ is being transformed into ‘‘ the woolled beast of 
familiar aspect,’’ and that of the humped African cattle 
into a ‘‘ respectable British shorthorn.” 

Beyond the railway lies Uganda. Of its entrancing 
scenery, its immense productivity, and its attractive people 
Mr. Churchill writes with undisguised admiration. ‘‘ The 
kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale.’’ In the rich domain 
between the Victoria and Albert Lakes ‘‘an amiable, clothed, 
polite, and intelligent race dwell together in an organised 
monarchy.” Everything grows here better than it grows 
anywhere else—cotton, rubber, hemp, cocoa, coffee, tea, 
oranges, pineapples. ‘“‘ As for our English garden products, 
brought in contact with the surface of Uganda they simply 
give a wild bound of efflorescence or fruition, and break 
their hearts for joy.” At first sight, indeed, Uganda appears 
to be paradise upon earth, and it is not until closer acquaint- 
ance is made with this fair country that the dark shadows 
which overhang it become apparent. Nature resents the 
intrusion of man, and sends forth her armies in the shape 
of insects to fight him. The dreaded Spirillum tick infests 
the land and takes satanic delight in spreading the poison 
of a peculiarly painful fever. But far worse than the 
Spirillum tick is the species of tsetse-fly known as Glossina 
Palpalis, whose baneful occupation of carrying the germs 
of ‘‘ sleeping sickness ’’ from man to man is carried on with 
hideous success. ‘‘In July, 1901, a doctor of the Church 
Missionary Society hospital at Kampala noticed eight cases 
of a mysterious disease.’’ By the middle of 1902 over 
30,000 deaths had been reported, and by the end of 1905 
the number had reached 200,000 out of a population in the 
plague-stricken regions ‘‘ which could not have exceeded 
300,000.” The story of the war now being waged against 
this scourge will provide one of the most interesting alike 
in the annals of British administration and of medical 
science. 

We have no space to follow Mr. Churchill as he trekked 
north, passing from the regions of equatorial luxuriance 
to the two great deserts—‘‘ the desert of sudd and the 
desert of sand ’’—to emerge finally in the tourist-ridden 
land of Egypt, traversed by the ‘“‘ comfortable sleeping-cars 


| 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


189 


of the Desert Railway and the pleasant passenger steamers 
of the Wady Halfa and Assouan reach.’’ But we note that 
in spite of his being fully alive to the dark side of the Uganda 
picture, his first enthusiastic impressions of that country 
remain uneffaced by subsequent travel. Speeding down 
the White Nile to the Sudan and Egypt which lie before 
him, he reverts to his opinion that “ the best lies behind. 
Uganda is the pearl’’ ; and when finally he comes to sum 
up the conclusions formed as a result of the journey, they 
are comprised in the words—‘‘ Concentrate upon Uganda.” 
In a concluding chapter the steps which should be taken 
to develop the immense latent wealth of the country are 
discussed, and the conclusion arrived at is summed up in 
the three words—“ Build a railway.”” The Uganda Railway 
at present stops short on the threshold of that country : 
with steam transport linking up the Victoria Nyanza with 
the Albert Nyanza immense stimulus would be given to 
enterprise and an incalculable boon conferred upon the 
country. 

The book is illustrated with a number of photographs and 
has three small maps. 

RONALDSHAY. 


THE VOYAGE TO ST. HELENA.* 


Like a tale of R. L. Stevenson’s, this reprint bears 
a very copious title: “‘ Certain Narratives of the Voyages 
of the Dethroned Emperor on the Bellerophon and the 
Northumberland to Exile in St. Helena: The Romantic 
Stories told by George Home, Captain Ross, Lord Lyttelton, 
and William Warden. . . . with four Plates.’”” Who would 
not anticipate a feast of good things from such an adver- 
tisement ? Devotees of Napoleon so fervent as the editor 
might consider his volume as a new and more splendid 
version of ‘‘ Kidnapped,” with its hero on the grand scale, 
its rude sailors and ruffian captains, vast waters, and the 
lonely isle which closes in the perspective. About the log- 
books themselves, artless, commonplace, sometimes almost 
illiterate, there hangs a kind of charm; it would even be 
possible to turn them into a Greek tragedy reminiscent of 
the divinely stricken Philoctetes, carried in his own despite 
to the Lemnian isle. But Philoctetes was brought back 
living and in triumph to the camp of the Achzans. 
Napoleon died on his rock, murdered, I think our editor 
would say, as Sir William Butler has not hesitated to declare 
was the object they sought, by the English ministers. It 
is the sad and moving prologue to this drama of exile that 
we now read, in pages long forgotten. ‘‘ Not one of these,”’ 
Mr. Shorter tells us, referring to the narratives of Brockle- 
bank, Warden, Home, and Lyttelton, ‘“‘ has been reprinted 
in this last half-century.” 

George Home, of,the great old Scottish family, was a 
midshipman on board the Bellerophon when Napoleon 
surrendered himself off Rochefort to Captain Maitland. 
In the oddly named ‘‘ Memoirs of an Aristocrat,”’ noticeable 
on other accounts, Home dedicates his seventh chapter to 
the circumstances of the Emperor’s arrival on the ship 
and his stay in English waters, when thousands flocked to 
Torbay that they might catch a glimpse of the Corsican 
monster, about whom they had the strangest ideas. A 
Gulliver among Lilliputians would have been so stared at, 
so misconstrued. Captain Maitland behaved like a gentle- 
man, almost the only one, except Sir Henry Hotham, with 
whom Napoleon came into official contact. Home, the 
lively Scots boy, adored the Emperor, writes of him twenty- 
two years after as a very demi-god, and pours bitter scorn 
upon the Government and the “ Holy Allies.” He is all 
aflame with indignation at the ‘‘ mean fear ’”’ which drove 
Castlereagh and his advisers to deport their unparalleled 


* “ Napoleon and his Fellow-Travellers.”’ 


Edited by Clement 
Shorter. 12s. net. (Cassell & Co.) 


prize to a desolate isle in mid-Atlantic ; and he reiterates 
with their victim that ‘‘ England was for ever degraded in 
the hospitality of the Bellerophon.” But Maitland had no 
part in tormenting his captive, whose ‘“‘ indescribable 
charm ”’ won all hearts, and whose smile subdued strangers, 
like this George, with its “‘ ineffable beauty.’”’ The legend 
of Napoleon, so powerful during the next thirty years, 
inspiring the young generation who at last overthrew the 
Holy Alliance, is here seen to be exercising on his enemies 
themselves a fascination not unmixed with terror. Home 
would have certainly helped his Philoctetes to escape ; 
and he calls the manner of his farewell to Captain Maitland 
before embarking on the Northumberland ‘“a_heart- 
rending sight.’’ Here is another significant touch: “ to 
be friendly to that great name” of Napoleon, ‘‘and to 
belong to the Bellerophon, was considered one and the 
same thing’’ ever after those memorable days. 

Captain Ross continues the story in a letter dated 
July 26, 1816, to W. J. Hall of Kingston, Jamaica, which 
Mr. Wilfrid Meynell published in 1885. His description 
of ‘ Bonaparté,”’ as he calls him, contains the following 
sentence: “‘ He is very sallow and quite light grey eyes, 
rather thin, greasy-looking brown hair, and altogether 
a very nasty, priest-like looking fellow.”” His own people 
addressed him as ‘“‘ Your Majesty,” but, says the Captain, 
‘‘ John Bull was not quite so civil, as he never got more 
from us than any other general officer would.”” The ex- 
cellent dull Captain! How many general officers of this 
proportion had the world known since general officers 
were ? It is a pity that John Bull should in such egregious 
fashion have immortalised his bad manners. Sir George 
Keith, by orders from London, examined the prisoner’s 
effects ; and all his money, except two hundred napoleons, 
was taken and sent up to the Treasury. Other small 
tyrannies were practised on the man whom Mr. Gladstone 
described as ‘‘ the greatest soldier and greatest adminis- 
trator in history,” but whom the Tapers and Tadpoles 
handled like a convict bound for Botany Bay. In the eyes 
of Captain Ross he appeared to be a rather common person, 
tolerably ill-bred ; his voice sounded “ very harsh and un- 
pleasing,’’ and, in short, there was nothing about him 
divine or demonic. 

Lord Lyttelton, a strong Radical, whose grand-daughter 
became Mrs. Gladstone, was permitted to engage in con- 
versation with Napoleon, prior to his departure from 
Plymouth, on the very day when he passed to the 
Northumberland. In this critical moment the Emperor 
showed ‘ neither passion nor dejection ”’ ; it was impossible 
‘“not to admire his quickness, adroitness, and originality ” 
during an interview which lasted two hours, and of which the 
topics ranged over some most irritating and debatable points. 
He called St. Helena ‘‘ une isle de fer,’’ whence escape was 
not to be thought of; and Lord Lyttelton, with what 
seems needless cruelty, retorted that the English nation 
could never trust Bonaparte’s word, and so were making 
sure of his person. 

Dr. Warren’s “ Letters from St. Helena,’’ which went 
into eight editions in 1816, describe the incidents of the 
voyage, and give an account, often very minute, of 
Napoleon’s sayings and doings while this naval surgeon 
stayed on the island, some nine months in all. The doctor 
was no more a man of genius than the rest who served 
at Longwood as courtiers, gaolers, or attendants on the 
tethered eagle. His diary-like correspondence met with 
savage criticism from the Quarterly; it is declared to be 
worthless by Lord Rosebery in the fine monograph where 
that admirable writer makes amends by confession for the 
shabby treatment which was inflicted on England’s fallen 
foe. But when we turn to the “ Letters’”’ themselves we 
are pleasantly disappointed. They will certainly repay 
our attention. Warren understood no French, and the 
Emperor could not speak English, though he learned to 
read it with moderate success. However, General Bertrand 
served as interpreter; and there is plenty of evidence in 


| 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


Hat we vee ov vem 


Jr ao dream within oa dream . 


J ttamd amid Re roar 

Of a Same , 
And hold unten 
While J weep — whale J weep | 
fod caw J mot rer 

Ham wth asp 


Ch, Bod. | cam J not Vane 


fon tha 
alt Rat vvum 


Edear. 


Facsimile of Verses by Edgar Allan Poe. 


the conversations themselves and in other witnesses to 
prove them genuine as well as characteristic utterances, 
not less valuable in their way than Gourgaud’s ‘‘ Memoirs ”’ 
On the other hand, Las Cases, after reading the book, com- 
plained that Warren had taken no notice of the corrections 
which were furnished to him; while the hero himself, for 
whom the narrative was thought in England to be an 
apology and much too favourable, pointed out that many 
things attributed to him in the “ Letters ”’ did not represent 
his views or his manner of speech. But when we have 
made these deductions, in Mr. Shorter’s opinion the work 
is in substance accurate. It deserved the honours of a 
reprint if the episode of St. Helena was to be fully told 
again. 

Whether we should give credence to Napoleon’s account 
of any single transaction in which he was engaged is 
another question. He practised in perfect degree the art 
of saying the thing which was not. accumulating against the 
day of men’s judgments upon him a prejudice that could 
not but weigh him down. ‘“ All those maxims that have 
most scandalised mankind,’ says Lord Morley, speaking 
of Machiavelli, ‘‘ were the daily bread of the Italian soldier 
who planted his iron heel on the neck of Europe’; nay, 
Machiavelli had set decent limits and conditions, which 
the Corsican never observed. He was a past master of “all 
the devices of fraud and violence.’’ Without attempting 
to hold the balance now between the Holy Alliance which 
sent him to his death at Longwood, and the Liberals in 
whose eyes he appeared as the ‘“‘armed soldier of the Revo- 
lution,” we may at least feel sure that his word in the 
witness-box cannot be taken on its merits. Talk with 
whom he might, high or low, he pursued the method of 
his proclamations to the peoples whom he was invading ; 
the truth signified nothing in comparison with his aim, 


which was to persuade and to subjugate. Heine laughed 
at the thought of associating Napoleon with freedom, and he 
was in the right of it. English and American liberty was 
a foreign idea to him which he could never grasp. And 
the duty in a ruler of speaking the truth when it was not 
convenient he would have denied with infinite scorn, 
The great condottiere in prison pleaded like Cesar Borgia 
with his tongue after his sword was broken. But he 
always acted on the reason of State, which he identified 
with himself; and history cannot give him absolution, 
though a criminal on this mighty scale is not to be judged 
like Cartouche or Jonathan Wild. 


WILLIAM Barry. 


BETWIXT AND BETWEEN.* 


Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s reputation is indissolubly con- 
nected with children, but not with children’s books. His 
delicate art of wistful retrospect makes children real to 
grown-up people, and gives dulled hearts a breath from 
forgotten childhoods, but it is not an art that can be 
enjoyed by any one still so fortunate as to beachild. Its 
appeal is not only to imagination, but to knowledge. Mr. 
Grahame writes for people who have passed the barriers, 
and look affectionately back at their little dead selves 
playing in the meadows behind them. They know that 
they are different, now. But the very secret of childhood is 
a feeling of eternal age. Grown-ups are in no way other 
than oneself, except that, for some perfectly arbitrary 
reason, they happen to be in power. As soon as a child 
thinks he is a child he is so no longer. If you ask a little 
boy what he is, and he tells you he is a little boy, you may 
know he is telling you a lie. If he tells you he is a king, 
or a commander-in-chief, or a motor-car, or a grocer, or 
some other variety of grown-up thing, you may implicitly 
believe him. And such a little boy would find Mr. Grahame’s 
books incomprehensible, for in them there is always the 
consciousness of a gulf between childhood and manhood, a 
gulf it is a sorrow to have passed, a horrible chasm between 
dream and reality. Their motive is the pathos of retrospec- 
tive life in which no child can possibly believe. 

“The Wind in the Willows ’’ is an attempt to write for 
children instead of about them. But Mr. Grahame’s past 
has been too strong for him. Instead of writing about 
children for grown-up people, he has written about animals 
for children. The difference is only in the names. He 
writes of the animals with the same wistfulness with which 
he wrote of children, and, in his attitude towards his 
audience, he is quite unable to resist that appeal from dream- 
land to a knowledge of the world that makes the charm of all 
his books, and separates them from children’s literature. 
The poems in the book are the only things really written 
for the nursery, and the poems are very bad. 

If we judge the book by its aim, it is a failure, like a speech 
to Hottentots made in Chinese. And yet, for the Chinese, 
if by any accident there should happen to be one or two 
of them among the audience, the speech might be quite a 
success. Mr. Grahame’s book is quite a success from the 
point of view of the people for whom it was not written. 
When the grown-up reviewer, after his annoyance with 
Mr. Grahame for having chosen the wrong language, makes 
up his mind to think of the book as if it were meant for 
himself, and grants its author a fairy-story licence he would 
have done better without, he finds himself reading page after 
page to the end and spending his time quite happily. A 
toad, for example, must be allowed to live in large houses, 
to be imprisoned in gaol, to drive motor-cars, to wear the 
clothes of an ordinary-sized washerwoman, and yet to 
consort upon terms of equality with a mole, whose attributes 
are merely those of nature. A greater man; than Mr. 
Grahame would not have asked so much. But we would 


* “The Wind in the Willows.’’ By Kenneth Grahame. 6s 
(Methuen.) 


| 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


191 


willingly have granted Mr. Grahame even more for the 
sake of ‘‘ Dulce Domum,” that delicious little picture of 
the rat and the mole in the mole’s house, mulling ale on 
Christmas Eve for the field-mice waits who have come, in 
red worsted comforters, to sing their Christmas carols. 
ARTHUR RANSOME. 


THE WORKS OF MR. YEATS.* 


‘If one writes well and has the patience, somebody will 
come from among the runners and read what one has written 
quickly and go away quickly, and write out as much as he 
can remember in the language of the highway.”” To have 
come from among the runners, in his own characteristic 
phrase, seems the only modest claim an alien can make 
who sets out to speak of the work of Mr. Yeats. He has 
now suffered the experience, happy, melancholy, serviceable, 
or trivial, as the mood may suggest, of having that work 
collected into one beautiful and complete edition. This 
is being published by the Shakespeare Head Press in eight 
volumes, of which six are already issued. On many men, 
and more especially on many poets, at an age when possibly 
the weightier part of their life’s work remains to be done, 
this might have a disquieting effect. But Mr. Yeats is 
singular in our day for his intense absorption and for his 
intense confidence in his destiny. Very little indeed of 
these first volumes is given up to the impulsive, unschooled, 
and early work that for so many writers holds their most 
endearing charm. Mr. Yeats has almost from the 
beginning very gravely considered and eagerly accepted 
this destiny. He has bestowed freely on his art what 
many men withhold from wife and children. In reverie 
and in thought he has deliberately set himself apart, 
pursued steadily one path, deliberately rejected every lure, 
following only any clue that beckoned to knowledge and 
the deepening of his insight—folk-lore, mysticism, magic. 
He has pulled his dreams to pieces ; watched his pen 
writing : student and poet at even pace one with another. 
He is as interested in his own methods, as critical and 
studious of their outcome, and as meticulous over the detail 
of his work, as ever his posterity will be. He never wearies 
of enriching, simplifying, harmonising his verse. His notes 
and appendices are rare in studied simplicity of style, and 
rarer yet for their frank untroubled egotism. The greater 
the artist the more profound, of course, his egotism must 
be ; for a magnanimous confidence in his gifts and in his 
cause is a powerful ally in that supreme contest—the one 
against the many. But it may be none the less powerful for 
its being secret. And often, too, a certain large indifference 
to that which, though it may be the best a man can do, is in 
the long run how little and how soon submerged, smiles 
down the thought of self. With poetry, moreover, any 
intrusion of the poet’s personality, any graceful naiveté 
even, may have a distracting effect on the reader. We are 
all children over our poetry, and dreams -vanish at the 
lightest touch. It must, however, be remembered that 
Mr. Yeats is writing with a wider purpose than most men. 
He believes he has a mission to fulfil, and therefore what 
might seem a needless ostentation on the part of the 
priest may be really due to the ritual peculiar to his 
office. He is, apart from his own more personal work, an 
inspiring leader in a great cause—the founding in Ireland of 
a national drama. In his own striving after perfection of 
style, his aim is to hark back through the written tradition, 
the poetry that is of the artist and of the narrow cultivated 
class, to the unwritten tradition, the poetry of the people ; 
to return to the vivid and simple sincerity of the one 
through the culture and art of the other ; to win back to 
innocence by way of experience. It is a hard task enough ; 
but he has set himself also a task far harder even than this. 


* “ The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler 
Yeats.”” 8 vols. £4 4s. net. (Shakespeare Head Press.) 


For he wishes to take all the scholars of Ireland along with 
him. His whole heart is in the legendary and traditional 
history of his own people. Like an old and tarnished but 
still enchanted lantern, it has lain half-hidden for centuries. 
Mr. Yeats has dedicated all his energies to evoking its 
genie. He once deplored patriotism in the artist. But 
since then he has written ‘‘ Cathleen nio Hulihan.”’ Ireland 
is in his heart. He has for years, whether in the body or 
out of the body, brooded in the peasant’s chimney corner, 
listened at every keyhole for the lightest stir, the faintest 
whisper that may help to realise his dream—the dream and 
hope of kindling in every simple breast this new life and 
loyalty, of proving to the least of her people that Ireland 
and he are heirs of incomparable riches. He would make 
what men call life, however sober, or obscure, or squalid, 
the binding of a secret romance in which far memories 
and loveliness and mystery are the realities, and daily 
experience only their accidental and transitory accom- 
paniment. It is not a new claim or a new justification 
of poetry. It is implied in all poetry. But how rare, few, 
and faint are the unwearying followers of any cause! And 
in this, one surely of the forlornest, Mr. Yeats fares on mind 
and heart at one, devotedly, unfalteringly, with never- 
waning courage. 

Mr. Yeats repudiates the old and rather indefinite theory 
of the Celtic influence in literature. To him Celticism 
means only the ancient beliefs and mythology of a people 
unusually rich in such welling up into the consciousness 
of a man patiently and earnestly devoting his days to 
their reception. These alone will give meaning and beauty 
and immortality to the Irish drama, to the verses of Irish 
poets. Ireland for him, her every solemn pool, and green 
hill, and isle, and cabin ; her every wind that blows (‘‘ except 
the east ’’) is haunted with shades and influences, and echoes 
with cries, beyond all earth’s continents else. It is certain 
that man’s inward life is nothing much concerned with 
the things of earth. Consciousness is only so far as a little 


From a photograph. 


Edgar Allan Poe's Tomb in 
Westminster Churchyard, 
Baltimore. 


— 
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~ 


192 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, 1909. 


candle throws its beams. And the eye that profits by its 
light is probably a primitive and falsifying medium. If 
in some rude and shadowy outhouse of the Phantom Intelli- 
gences there squats in a cold corner a kind of natural, 
swathed in rags, racked with pain, purblind, malformed, 
and all but deaf, that bundle of semi-consciousness is 
probably the soul of civilised man. But compared with 
the sleeping and waking dreams and visions of all mankind, 
Irish legendry is but as a faint, still lovely picture in an 
endless and beautiful story book. Apart from this the 
mere ‘‘somebody from among the runners ”’ need not of 
necessity concern himself with the actual source and in- 
spiration of the Celtic school of poetry. He will find his 
comfort and refreshment in the fruits of its boughs, though 
he does not busy himself about the roots of the tree that 
bears them. Happily, too, the lover of poetry need not 
yet learn Erse before he can enjoy Irish poetry. Dr. 
Hyde’s exquisite little plays, too, can be read in English ; 
and all Lady Gregory’s stories. Whether this little con- 
fraternity of gifted Irishmen will succeed in their crusade, 
almost superhuman in its difficulties and quite inscrutable 
as to its outcome, time, as the saying goes, will reveal. 
It is as impossible not to envy their enthusiasm, their 
docility, their various talents, as it is vain to deplore their 
hostile aloofness and estrangement from England. This 
may be a little for their own sake ; it is much more for 
ours. Imperial poetry has somehow proved a contradic- 
tion in terms ; but have there ever been songs so sweet 
and wild, or lamentations so beautiful as those of the 
rebel and the captive by the waters of Babylon? And 
yet can Mr. Yeats point to any beauty of strangeness, 
or of homeliness, or of mystery; any character of humour, 
or of royalty, or of divinity; any delicacy of rhythm or 
charm of idiom; any restraint and purity in art, or 
loveliness of imagination—can he point to anything in 
his plays or poetry that the English mind and taste are 
incapable of appreciating ? So far, indeed, as the plays 
are concerned, it matters little whether Mr. Yeats’s strange 
and shadowy kings, his beautiful women, his magicians 
and bards, with their sesames and shibboleths and fascinat- 
ting names, are actually present to him, inspiring his verse, 
as he tells us they are, or are simply the creation of a 
fecund and imaginative genius. Whether or no, they must 
at least be actual and present to his reader. Their realisa- 
tion for him is his only hope of their existing at all. Nothing 
can ever be again simply because it once was. In every poet 
all earth’s beauty must be born anew. It is not time that 
haunts with sorcery old and far-off things, but imagination. 
And a living poet is better than a dead dynasty or a dormant 
mythology, for the simple reason that on him alone, as 
Guaire on Seanchan, so far at least as this dull world is 
cencerned, their very royalty and divinity depend. 
WALTER DE LA MARE, 


A WOMAN’S LAST WORD.* 


The discussion on Votes for ,Women has, in these latter 
days, passed from the realms of academic argument to 
become a burning question of the market-place and the 
forum, a question of first political importance, with vital 
social changes looming when the expected affirmative shall 
be pronounced. The exultant battle-cry of fair ladies in 
revolt drowns the muttered misgivings of the unconverted, 
and the hesitating and reluctant go down into silence—their 
opposition quietly surrendered—before the banners of 
Women’s Enfranchisement. By many tokens we are near- 
ing the end of the controversy. The courage, enthusiasm, 
and brains of the women in this movement have won the 
widest recognition. And the plain average man seeing 
women, in the passionate advocacy of their cause, face 
scorn and ridicule, suffer mob violence and the discomforts 
of prison, bear all things and endure all things if only the 


* “ The Human Woman.” By Lady Grove. 5s. net. (Smith, 
Elder.) 


cause may prosper, at last consents to listen to what all 
the hurly-burly is about, and listening is persuaded. (Here- 
in may be seen an explanation of the resistance of ardent 
politicians to a demand now found generally unobjection- 
able by men in the street. The latter are not so busy with 
their own opinions that they cannot find time to listen to 
the opinions of others, but the party politician is far too 
strongly given over to his own opinions to take any serious 
trouble to make out those of others.) And now Lady 
Grove’s book should hasten the conclusion of the dispute, 
and be accepted by wise men as the last word on the dis- 
cussion. For there is humour and good sense and good 
feeling, too, in ‘‘ The Human Woman,” and it is well that 
the long-drawn-out argument end without bitterness or any 
sort of ill-will. 

With no little skill and literary dexterity Lady Grove 
handles the well-worn, honestly thread-bare contentions of 
opponents, and finds even at this late hour something fresh 
and witty to be said in their dismissal. Of course, those 
who hold that the “ essentially feminine—in other words 
a parasite or chalice,” is a desirable type, though they may 
enjoy the witticisms and appreciate the style of Lady 
Grove’s essays, will find no balm or comfort for their souls 
therein. But (to quote Mr. George Meredith again) “‘ you 
meet now and then men who have the woman in them 
without being womanised ; they are the pick of men, and 
the choicest women are those who yieid not a feather of 
their womanliness for some amount of manlike strength ’’— 
and these men and women will endorse the arguments of 
our authoress. The ideals of a woman’s party, the con- 
sideration of objections to the suffrage, the question of 
war and the woman’s vote, the work of women in local 
government, newspapers for women, and the present legal 
disabilities of women in England are amongst the topics 
discussed by Lady Grove, and they are all dealt with tem- 
perately, without even any suggestion of that hostility to 
the merely male which the professed anti-woman attitude 
of so many men has evoked. The last stand of the anti- 
suffragists is now being made, and it is still behind what 
Mr. John Morley called “‘ the faded screen of gallantry ” 
that cover is sought. The fear lest chivalry and courtesy 
should perish is the plea put forward by those who rank 
gallantry above political equality, and would still, an they 
could, keep women from public life. To all such we can 
only answer with Charles Lamb : 

“‘T shall believe the principle of gallantry to be influential 
when I can shut my eyes to the fact that in England women are 
still occasionally—hanged. 

‘“*T shall believe in it when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across 
the kennel ; or assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering 
fruit which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. 

“‘ Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such prin- 
ciple influencing our conduct when more than one-half of the 


drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be 
performed by women.” 


Lamb’s immortal essay ought to have stopped the 
mouthings about gailantry long ago. Courtesy and all 
those common civilities we are apt, somewhat pompously, 
to inflate under the title of chivalry will never fail utterly 
while men and women fall in love and beget and bear 
children. And nature can be trusted to pursue her way 
whatever the political and social changes evolved. 

Lady Grove’s book is a welcome contribution to the dis- 
cussion of a great question that must soon be answered. 
As we said before, it may be accepted by all but the rash and 
foolish as the last word—the last word of a gifted woman. 

JosEPH CLAYTON. 


CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT.* 
The ranks of London journalism can boast few more 
gifted or versatile men than Mr. W. L. Courtney, the 
literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Fortnightly 


* “Dramas and Diversions.”” By W. L. Courtney. 5s. net. 
(Chapman_& Hall.) 


XUM 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


193 


Review. Nine books stand to the credit of Mr. Courtney, 
and their scope and brilliancy alike are remarkable. ‘‘ The 
Literary Man’s Bible,” “‘ The Feminine Note in Fiction,” 
“ The Idea of Tragedy,” and ‘‘ The Development of Maurice 
Macterlinck ”’ represent the literary and dramatic sides 
of Mr. Courtney’s work, and to these now must be added 
his volume of plays called ‘‘ Dramas and Diversions.’’ In 
another department of scholarship and execution we have 
his profound and enlightening treatment of ‘‘ The Meta- 
physics of John Stuart Mill.””. When we remember that 
Mr. Courtney has charge of the book reviewing and dramatic 
criticism of a great daily journal, which devotes to the pub- 
lishers and the theatres a larger space than is given by 
any other of our morning papers, contributing to its 
columns from his own pen some of the most discerning 
literary and dramatic criticism that appears in the British 
Press, and at the same time edits a leading monthly review, 
the wonder grows how he can find time and energy for 
original work of the calibre contained in ‘“‘ Dramas and 
Diversions’: work that presumably calls for a certain 
measure of leisureliness as well as of inspiration. 

Mr. Courtney’s latest book will appeal chiefly to those 
of our readers who are keenly concerned for the con- 
temporary English drama, but it has an interest also for 
those who regard that drama with rare exceptions as be- 
neath contempt. Some of these seven plays of Mr. Court- 
ney have been produced on the London stage; none of 
them, we fear, has in it the materials for a great popular 
success at the commercial theatres. The reflection is on 
those theatres and the public taste, rather than upon Mr. 
Courtney’s work. It would be too sweeping a denuncia- 
tion of the London stage to say that no really good thing 
can live long upon it: for the plays of Mr. J. M. Barrie 
and Mr. Bernard Shaw, among others, are worthy of 
consideration as works of literary-dramatic art as well as 
passing entertainment. Yet it were easy to argue that the 
plays that succeed most signally on our stage attract the 
mass of the public as largely by their bad points as by their 
good. All the dramatic work of Mr. Courtney (unless we 
except ‘“‘ The Labyrinth’”’ and ‘‘ Markheim,” neither of 
which is included in the book under notice) lacks that 
streak of effective melodrama which Mr. Barrie and Mr. 
Shaw, in common with Messrs. Jones, Pinero, and Sutro, 
manage generally to weave in with their supericr intel- 
lectual wares. Moreover, Mr. Courtney’s mind is analy- 
tical rather than constructive ; and it is doubtful whether, 
save by accident, he can ever hope to catch the fancy of 
the crowd, which likes the broad colour scheme, the bold 
impression, on the stage; which is impatient of the slow 
and detailed building-up of character by a vast number 
of tiny touches. In his comedy-drama “‘ On the Side of 
the Angels,’’ Mr. Courtney came near,to an achievement 
with possibilities of “‘money in it’’: and it is rather 
surprising that one of the more cultured managers has not 
tried the play in his regular bill. ‘‘ Bridals of Blood’’ was 
actually secured for this purpose by the late Sir Henry 
Irving and was bequeathed to his sons; it is founded on 
Fulda’s ‘“‘ Die Gluthochzeit,” and is a fine stirring piece of 
drama to read, but would require a more than usually able 
handling to make a payable season at any of our West 
End theatres. Mr. Courtney undoubtedly can write 
poetical stage speech: take, for example, the utterance 
of his sixteenth-century Cardinal : 


“ For look you, how the world 
Is changing from the fashion of its prime, 
The old world dying tardily, the new 
Rising in might from out the womb of Time. . . 
The tree of knowledge is plucked bare of leaves ; 
Men eat forbidden fruit, and, eating, die... 
And Hell itself, bursting its barriers, 
Roars at the portals of the Lateran.” 


“* Kit Marlowe’s Death,”’ with its beautiful little tribute 
to Shakespeare, is a charming tragi-comediette; and 
“Gaston Bonnier” is full of fire and strong colour. 


‘Father Time and his Children” is a sort of pantomime 
or pageant of the year; and “ Pericles and Aspasia” 
is a farce or skit, the characters having Greek names 
and dress, but being in fact modern Londoners, some of 
them thinly disguised and very famous persons. This 
last is an excellent piece of pseudo-classical fooling ; and 
the volume as a whole is full of quaint conceits, happy 
inventions, and good writing. If Mr. Courtney were a 
Frenchman or a German, his dramatic works would be 
esteemed far more highly than they are. 


MR. WELLS’S CONFESSION.* 


We mean nothing derogatory to Mr. Wells—very much 
he reverse, indeed—when we say that since he began to 
write he has been continuously self-educating himself in 
the eyes of the public. No better process could have been 
devised for educating also the public. Once a schoolmaster, 
always a schoolmaster; but less and less has Mr. Wells’s 
teaching attitude been “‘’Tis scientifically so, I tell you!” 
More and more has it changed to ‘‘ Come, let us learn 
together!’’ And he learns in such an attractive fashion 
that we do learn with him. He has progressed from the 
inhumanities to the humanities. In some of his earlier 
work we felt that his critical overweighed his idealistic 


faculties; that his ideal, if attained, would scarcely be 
worth having. In this present work we find nothing of 
the sort. Each of his professedly serious books (‘‘ Antici- 


pations,” ‘‘ Mankind in the Making,” “‘ A Modern Utopia,” 
and ‘‘ New Worlds for Old ”’) represents a stage in his— 
and our—education. The last-named book we have heard 
aptly described as old wine in new bottles. In each he 
has had the courage to recant portions of its predecessors. 
And now in “ First and Last Things,” his ‘‘ Confession of 
Faith and Rule of Life,’’ we see the educational process 
conducted to such a point that his conclusions are essentially 
in almost complete agreement with those of the uneducated. 

But with what a difference! Though the conclusions 
of the book are age-old, they are newly arrived at. ‘In 
my way of thinking,” says Mr. Wells, “ relentless logic is 
only another name for a stupidity—for a sort of intellectual 
pigheadedness.”” We knew that before, though not in so 
many words and not metaphysically, even while we aped 
logic. 


““ When I sit upon the bench, a respectable magistrate, and 
commit some battered reprobate for trial for this lurid offence 
or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or such-like 
indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us is, after 
all, getting nearest the keen edge of life. Am I and my respect- 
able colleagues much more than successful evasions of that ? 
Perhaps these people in the dock know more of the essential 
strains and stresses of nature, are more intimate with pain... .” 


Folk held negligible by the cultured knew that too, though 
again not in so many words and not by sitting on the 
bench. Mr. Wells’s collectivism is simply ‘ All together, 
boys!” Where the uneducated man—the man not greatly 
deformed by our lop-sided education—is inarticulate, Mr. 
Wells is lucidly articulate ; where the former acts without 
knowing why, Mr. Wells shows that he should act so, and 
why; where he is intuitive only, Mr. Wells is rational 
as well. Both give back to life the same answer, but 
Mr. Wells gives reasons for his, and thus the answer is 
doubly reinforced. He admits that ultimately his own 
beliefs are arbitrary, that “all the great and important 
beliefs by which life is guided and determined are less of 
the nature of fact than of artistic expression.”” In the 
end he is mystical. So are we all, if we get to the end. 
It is Mr. Wells’s voyage there, and his discoveries on the 
way, that are so valuable. 


* “ First and Last Things.” 


By H. G. Wells. 
(Constable.) 


4s. Od. net. 


104 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


We have neglected dealing with the fundamental belief 
of the book and the rules of conduct based on it, the belief, 
namely, in ‘‘ the development of a collective consciousness 
and will and purpose out of a chaos of individual conscious- 
nesses and wills and purposes.’”” What the whole of a 
closely reasoned and interesting book is occupied in out- 
lining, cannot be fairly dealt with here. And we have 
dwelt rather on Mr. Wells’s process of self-education. For 
it is a thing of profound significance. 

STEPHEN REYNOLDS. 


MEMORIES.* 


Of the making, and incidentally the publishing, of books 
of reminiscences there is now-a-days no end. Authors, 
politicians, actors, diplomatists, soldiers, and sailors, alike 
jot down their recollections for the entertainment of 
their contemporaries and the instruction of posterity ; 
serving them up with the sauce of such anecdotes of great 
men and women as they may have heard, or perchance 
read, or even, sometimes, it is whispered, imagined. Of 
the ever-increasing mass of these volumes some are amusing, 
a few interesting, here and there one valuable: for the 
greater part they have served their purpose when they 
have whiled away an idle hour or two of subscribers to the 
circulating libraries; while even of the rest most are 
merely material for the biographers yet unborn, who will 
doubtless show their discernment by boiling down a chapter 
into a paragraph, or extracting from the book a couple 
of pages. 

Perhaps Mr. Comyns Carr had some such feeling as this 
when, instead of printing on the title-page the word 
“Reminiscences”? that throughout the book is printed 
at the top of each left-hand page, he gave his volume the 
more distinctive title of ‘‘Some Eminent Victorians.” 
“Some Eminent Victorians,’’ however, is not a book of 
studies such as might proceed from the pen of the essayist ; 
it is mainly a storehouse of anecdote: yet, though it 
belongs to a class of work of which we have confessed 
ourselves somewhat weary, we are constrained to admit 
it is a favourable specimen of that class. Mr. Comyns 
Carr has had opportunities which nearly every one will 
envy him: he has met all the men we would so gladly 
have known, and he has been intimate with many whose 
names are household words: painters, barristers, politicians, 
preachers, actors, caricaturists, musicians, men of letters 
—which is surprising only until we remember that Mr. 
Comyns Carr has been barrister, art critic, dramatic critic, 
theatrical manager, librettist, editor of the English Iilus- 
trated Magazine, and dramatist. He has met Tennyson, 
Browning, Swinburne, Wilde, Stevenson, Henley, Richard 
Jefferies, and Laurence Oliphant; Lord Herschell, Lord 
Russell, and Lord Holker; Rossetti, Millais, Leighton, 
Frederick Walker, and Whistler ; Charles Keene, Pellegrini, 
and Du Maurier; Irving and Toole; Dr. Martineau and 
Spurgeon ; Bright, Gladstone, and Disraeli. Burne Jones 
used tosend him sketches, Dr. Birkbeck Hill was his school- 
master, and among his schoolfellows was William Lewin, 
better known as William Terriss; he dramatised Hugh 
Conway’s most popular novel; and collaborated with 
Mr. Pinero to provide a libretto for Sir Arthur Sullivan. 
Few men have crowded more work and found more pleasant 
acquaintances in less than three-score years. 

There are stories in these three hundred pages for most 
tastes, and there are two or three that will be appreciated 
by all readers. One of the latter concerns the famous 
caricaturist, Carlo Pellegrini. Pellegrini was a member 


* “Some Eminent Victorians: Personal Recollections in the 
World of Art and Letters.’’ By J. Comyns Carr. 12s. 6d. net. 
(Duckworth.) 


of the Beefsteak Club, where there was another artist 
who was given to entertaining his fellow-members with 
impromptu sketches : 


“This innocent display of artistic power gravely offended 
Pellegrini, who, possibly moved by a measure of jealousy that 
any one else should encroach upon his special province, insisted 
with some vehemence that a club was not the place for such 
exercises. 

““*T like the boy,’ he said to me one evening, ‘and when he 
talk, I listen, but ’tis pity he draw.’ 

“It was only a few evenings later that I entered the room, 
and found the young friend who had been the subject of Pelle- 
grini’s rebuke absorbing the entire conversation of a crowded 
table. Pellegrini was present, and I could see that he was 
growing restive under the artist’s unceasing flow of conversation. 
In a momentary pause he turned to me and in an audible whisper 
delivered this laconic judgment : 

*“* Joe, I ’ave made a big mistake. ’Tis better he draw.’ ” 


Whistler, even after he had been famous, was often in 
pecuniary straits. During one of these periods Mr. Comyns 
Carr met a foreign painter who had frequently been a 
guest at the breakfasts at Whistler’s house at Cheyne 
Walk. He asked him if he had seen anything of Whistler 
lately. ‘‘ Ah no, not now so much,” came the reply. ‘ He 
ask me a leetle while ago to breakfarst, and I go. My 
cab-fare two shilling, ’arf-crown. I arrive, very nice. 
Gold fish in bowl, very pretty. But breakfarst—one egg, 
one toast, no more! Ahno! My cab-fare back, two shilling, 
’alf-crown. For me no more!”’ 

Space must be found for one more story. When Sir 
William Harcourt was staying at Hughenden with Disraeli, 
his host turned to him after dinner one night and said, 
“Harcourt, I have had two young gentlemen from Oxford 
staying with me lately, and it seems from what I have 
learned from them that our judgments in all literary 
matters are sadly old-fashioned. These young gentlemen 
assured me that, according to the accepted canons of the 
present day, the Jate Lord Byron is to be admired, not so 
much for his qualities as a poet, as for the beauty of his 
moral character.’’ This speech was characteristic of the 
cynical statesman: it is, we read in Mr. Comyns Carr’s 
preface, characteristic also of the latter’s attitude to the 
criticism of the young man of to-day. Here, however, 
the writer of these reminiscences does not do himself full 
justice. It is true that he is, as he declares, devoted to the 
mid-Victorian writers and artists; but nowhere in his 
book is there the slightest trace of lack of sympathy with 
later schools, and he who loves Dickens wholeheartedly 
admires Stevenson and Richard Jefferies, and, an enthusiastic 
lover of Rossetti and Millais, has abundant praise for the 
later-day idyls of Mr. Hugh Thomson. 

Lewis MELVILLE. 


HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS.* 


Coincident with the development of collective psychology 
there has arisen among democratic politicians an uneasy 
feeling that all is not right with the elective representative 
system as a means of securing the ends of democracy. It 
is very reasonable, therefore, that Mr. Wallas, who has 
made a thorough study of the newer developments in 
psychology, should apply his theoretic knowledge to prac- 
tical problems in politics, and illustrate his thesis from his 
own very wide experience of public life. He notes that 
in modern study of politics there is a disinclination to 
treat the subject in relation to the nature of man. He 
believes, however, that the present tendency to analyse 
institutions and avoid the analysis of man is a temporary 
and harmful phase, and that there are already signs that 
it is coming to an end. Following the analogy of what 


* “Human Nature in Politics.’’ By Graham Wallas. 
(Constable & Co.) 


5s. 


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THE BOOKMAN. 


195 


has happened in the development of the theory of educa- 
tion, he believes that students of politics are about to 
turn again to that study of mankind which is the ancient 
ally of the moral sciences, and is of the opinion that such 
a study will not only deepen and widen our knowledge 
of political institutions, but open an unworked mine of 
political invention. 

The present work aims rather at laying the foundations 
of this branch of political science than at working the 
mines of invention, though Part II. is full of suggestions 
in this direction. Mr. Wallas lays great stress on the 
dangers attending the common habit people have of be- 
lieving that all our actions are the result of deliberate 
reasoning. Our activities, he maintains, are chiefly more 
or less spontaneous reactions, and the reasons we give for 
our actions are very frequently supplied at a later stage, 
after reflection. He tells us, for instance, that “‘ we can 
speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive 
impulse,” but it is not clear that he gains anything by this 
distinction. If we accept Binet’s view that all our inter- 
pretations of the ultimate elements of sense impression 
are rapid, unconscious, logical inferences, we reduce the 
difference between impulse and inference to something 
quite unimportant. In his application of the contrast 
between impulse and deliberate reasoning, Mr. Wallas is 
particularly happy ; and does not really depend upon the 
somewhat overstrained contrast implied in the sentence 
quoted. It would be very difficu’t to find anywhere 
as good a treatment of the inevitableness, and therefore 
the extreme practical importance of hypostatisation, as 
is to be found in the chapter on Political Entities. The 
treatment of the psychology of advertisement is quite 
admirable. 

In striking contrast to the grey abstractions of the 
Bentham school, we find this book rich in vivid pictures of 
real things and people. From beginning to end the reader 
is made to feel that he is living less in a book-world than 
in the midst of what Mr. H. G. Wells would call ‘‘ authentic 
men.” The author does not allow himself, however, to 
rest content with the mere esthetic enjoyment of the 
pictures he presents with such vividness. Dealing with 
a new science, he has a praiseworthy desire to attain to 
some sort of objective standard that may enable him to 
lay a true foundation on which he and his followers may 
build. In the chapter on ‘‘ Material of Political Reasoning ” 
he works out the necessity for such a standard, and finds 
it in the quantitative results of the biometric methods of 
Karl Pearson and his school. After an extraordinarily 
interesting analysis of the processes by which the nature 
and size of a debating hall for an empire are to be deter- 
mined in terms of quality expressed quantitatively, he 
concludes: ‘‘ Any discussion which took place on such 
lines, even though the curves were mere forms of speech, 
would be real and practical.’”’ At once one feels that 
there is a danger of such arguments leading to a bloodless 
coldness worthy of the dismal science. But in seeking the 
objective standard that quantitative analysis seems to 
promise, Mr. Wallas does not lose concrete reality to seize 
an abstraction. He finds fault with the President of Yale, 
who, he tells us, ‘‘ seems to imply that in order to reason 
men must become passionless.’’ In spite of the support 
the President might get by appealing to Kant, Mr. Wallas 
refers him to Plato, in whose state exists ‘‘a ‘harmony’ 
which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the 
separate passions no longer war among themselves, but 
are concentrated upon an end discovered by the intellect.” 

In Part II., which deals with the “ Possibilities of 
Progress,” we have a singularly able and suggestive series of 
chapters of which that on Official Thought is the most 
striking. Here Mr. Wallas maintains that not the House 
of Lords, but the permanent officials of the country, form the 
teal protection against sudden and ill-advised legislation. 

In the space available here it is impossible to do anything 
like justice to this remarkable book. It is full of life and 


colour; the plain man will find it intensely interesting 
and instructive, and even the most experienced politician 
will learn much from its pages. 


ROUSSEAU AS A LOVER.* 


Time brings about strange revenges in the estimates 
in which the great men of history are regarded. The 
idol of one age becomes the football of another, and posterity, 
which enjoys more than a valet’s privileges of acquainting 
itself with the correspondence, the love affairs, and the 
secrets of past celebrities, finds the list of such persons as 
it can deem heroic steadily dwindling. Take the case 
of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Here is a man who can be 
called in a far more intimate sense than Voltaire could be, 
the father of the French Revolution. It was he who gave 
the men of the Terror their watch-words and their argu- 
ments ; they did but put into practice his precepts and his 
philosophy. Rousseau, then, is responsible for changing the 
face of modern Europe, for altering the whole tone of its 
political thought. He can be similarly described as the 
father of the Romantic movement. Unreadable as the 
“Nouvelle Héloise’”” may be to-day, it certainly brought 
a new note into the language of sentiment, it started a 
new phase in the history of fiction. And Rousseau was 
not one of those innovators who have had to be content with 
visions of posthumous renown ; his success was signal and 
immediate. Diderot and Grimm may have smiled at 
his manners, but they admitted him at once to the republic 
of letters. Ladies féted him, aristocrats made him free of 
their tables and provided him with houses rent-free, his 
books sold enormously, despite a certain amount of prosecu- 
tion and persecution of their author, and at certain times 
at least whole nations hung on Jean Jacques’s words. 
But to-day Rousseau is having a very bad time. His 
biographers, and their number has been quite considerable 
lately, hardly leave him a shred of reputation. Not merely 
is his philosophy shown to be based on a series of gratuitous 
assumptions, of downright fallacies; but his claim to be 
considered as a lover at all—nay, even as an analyst of his 
own emotions, a chronicler of his own amours—is roughly 
disputed. His “Confessions” themselves—that appal- 
lingly shameless and morbid record—have already taught 
us that he had the soul of a lackey, that he was a victim of 
neurasthenia who indulged in all sorts of unhealthy day- 
dreams, that on several critical occasions he played the 
rogue and the coward, that he was content to place himself 
in the most humiliating dependence on women to save 
himself the fatigue of working for a livelihood. But 
always there had remained to save and sweeten his fame 
the idyll of Les Charmettes. At any rate, we had said, that 
pretty episode remains, and on the strength of that Rousseau 
may be counted as one of the world’s great lovers. Pilgrims 
have travelled to Les Charmettes from generation to 
generation to pay homage as at a shrine, and even so 
sedate a man of letters as Lord Morley has been moved to 
enthusiastic tenderness in his picture of this house of 
“sorrow-stricken memories.”’ And now, it seems, even this 
must go. Dates and facts convict Jean Jacques of the 
culminating falsehood. So Mr. Francis Gribble assures us, 
and under the circumstances it almost looks as -if the title 
he had chosen for his new biography, ‘‘ Rousseau and 
the Women he Loved,” had been adopted in a mood of 
bitter sarcasm. 

Who were the women whom Rousseau loved, or thought 
he loved? It is worth while just to run through their 
names. First there was Madame de Warens, the lady 
who pitied the helpless vagabond lad, and gave him shelter 
at various times for long periods. 
was the basest ingratitude. 


Her reward, of course 
She it was who, to protect his 


* “ Rousseau and the Women he Loved.” 


By Francis Gribble. 
15s. net. (Eveleigh Nash.) 


XUM 


196 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, I9g09. 


innocence, initiated Jean Jacques into the mysteries of love 
and let him share her favours along with her steward, 
Claude Anet, and we have Rousseau’s own account of the 
contentment with which he thus acted Alfred de Musset 
to Anet’s Pagello, and of what a happy and united family 
this ménage made. So far Jean Jacques’s story seems 
accurate, though his love relations with Madame de Warens 
appear to have been of short duration. But the whole 
chronicle of his idyll with ‘‘ Mamma” at Les Charmettes 
must now be considered as fiction. It was a fresh rival 
who was the Adam of that Eden, and Rousseau lingered 
there, a guest who had long outstayed his welcome. Other 
loves ? Well, there were two girls whom the boy Rousseau 
saw only for a day, and their smiles he thought far more 
delightful than more substantial tokens of affection. 
There was the ugly mattress-maker who refused to act 
as a go-between. There was the servant-girl who could 
not tempt Jean Jacques, There was the grocer’s wife 
whose resounding kisses he dodged down by-streets to 
escape. There was another tradesman’s wife whose kind- 
ness he misconstrued. There were courtesans, among 
them La Padoana, who bade him “ leave the ladies alone 
and study mathematics instead.” All these were met 
early in his life, but he wanted “‘ real ladies.”” They came 
later on, but Rousseau’s experiences were hardly of the sort 
of which to boast. There was Madame Dapin, to whose 
husband he wrote a grovelling note, acknowledging her 
‘‘ visible disgust for me.”? There was Madame d’Epinay, who 
had to turn this denouncer of aristocrats almost out of doors 
before he would quit the ‘‘ hermitage ”’ she had lent him 
for a while. Finally, there was the Comtesse d’Houdetot, 
whom, though the avowed and loving mistress of Saint- 
Lambert, he tried desperately to seduce from her allegiance. 
A time came when even her good nature grew tired of 
Jean Jacques’s alternations of over-familiarity and servile 
obsequiousness. The ex-valet’s one genuine conquest 
was a peasant woman, the mother of his discarded children, 
Thérése le Vasseur, who as half-mistress, half-nurse, stayed 
with him till death, and even she betrayed him for the 
attractions of a groom. 

This is not a brilliant record, and not all Mr. Gribble’s 
pretty gift of irony and vivacity of style can prevent the 
tale of such a set of amours from proving hopelessly sordid. 
Rousseau seems to have felt this himself. No wonder, 
then, the author of that famous love-story, the “‘ Nouvelle 
Héloise,” the dictator of the laws of sentiment, whose 
dream, as Mr. Gribble rightly remarks, had been not of 
fame (which he got), but of romance (which was denied 
him by his temperament), eagerly sought some episode 
of his life on which he could linger with pride. So, thinks 
Mr. Gribble, was fabricated the legend of Les Charmettes 
To quote his happy description : 


“ Both George Sand and Madame de Staél could look back 
upon a golden age, of however brief duration, in which love had 
indeed yielded all that could be asked from it. Jean Jacques 
could not. ... It was not merely that he had tired of the 
women or that they had tired of him. It was rather that he had 
never succeeded in lifting intrigue to the level of romance... . 
Reviewing his life and his various adventures, sentimental 
and other—contrasting his experiences, it may be, with those 
of other men—he understood, when too late, what he had 
missed, and felt the need of some memory on which his mind 
could dwell with loving and luxurious regret. He would be 
satisfied to be miserable in the present if only he could remember 
that he had been ideally happy in the past; and there was 
only one way of achieving this—by calling imagination 
to the aid of memory. . .. The idyll of Les Charmettes is 
the result.” 


Here, then, let us leave him, though Mr. Gribble’s book, 
which is a true biography notwithstanding its title, covers 
ably enough other sides of Rousseau’s career than that 
suggested by the title. Primarily, however, it is as an 
amorist that Mr. Gribble has treated him, and in that 
capacity, as will be gathered, he makes Jean Jacques cut 
a very sorry figure. 


F. G. BETTANY. 


THE SPY.* 


Gorky’s book is the story of the making and unmaking 
of a Russian spy that ends about the time of the “ revolu- 
tion”’ and the abortive Constitution. Yevsey Klimkoy 
was a country boy who was called ‘“‘ Old Man” from the 
time he became an orphan at the age ofseven. ‘The name 
suited him very well. He was too small for his age, his 
movements were sluggish, and his voice thin. . . . He held 
himself aloof, and livedalone.” Singing in the church choir 
he let his voice blend with the rest, and “‘ hid himself de- 
liciously somewhere, as if overcome by asweet sleep. In this 
drowsy state it seemed to him he was drifting away 
from life, approaching another gentle, peaceful existence.” 
These subtle comparisons are very characteristic of Gorky ; 
the inner life which they help to describe is drawn with 
remarkable fineness and fulness. The boy was one of 
those unattractive, sensitive cowards who are abused by 
nearly every one and without great resentment, for it is part 
of their nature to admire unduly the energy of their bullies, 
Having at length to go to work in a town, he is put with 
a bookseller to look after the shop. The bookseller keeps 
a few advanced books, lures people into buying them and 
then secures their imprisonment as suspicious persons. 
At first the boy is timidly resentful and actually warns 
one customer. Heconnives with the old man’s mistress at 
his murder by suffocation. But he and the mistress are taken 
on by the successor, and gradually, without wishing it, but 
showing himself a tell-tale and a docile muddle-headed 
youth, he gets into the ‘‘ Department of Safety” as a 
common spy. The life of the spies is drawn by means of 
conversation, descriptions of faces, habits, moods, and 
drawn vividly, horribly, but without malice. They are 
mostly of Yevsey’s type, mean, mopish, sodden, without 
invention or purpose, dominated by a sick, rancorous, 
yellow-headed man who “ stamped his feet, extended his 
trembling arms and tore the air with his yellow fingers, 
while his face turned leaden, his red eyes grew strangely 
dim, and the spittle spurted from his mouth.” Yevsey 
“‘clearly realised that the spies did not understand the 
aim of their work, did not believe that it was needful for life, 
and did not think or reason when, instinctively, according 
to their habit, they went about half-sick, half-drunk, 
driven by different fears.’’ Far different were the working 
people on whom they spied. They were uplifted by new 
hopes, by a new intensity of comradeship. Yevsey admired 
their bearing, their voices, their courage, their cheerfulness, 
and he came near to making real friends of them before 
some accident drove him to remember his duty and he 
betrayed them and meanly drank away his reward. “If 
only somebody liked me,”’ he used to reflect. He envied 
every one. The spies were all envious of “ revelries, of 
big stakes, and costly women.’’ Yevsey turned over in his 
slow, inexpressive, but sensitive and original mind and 
nerves the explanation he had heard of the Constitution : 
“ A different order of life—different.’”” He longed for it even 
though they used to say that foreigners, the Japanese for 
example, were financing the revolution. He warned an 
intended victim and was called ‘‘ vermin ’’ for his pains. 
Then it was pleasant to complain. “It filled his heart with 
drunken sweetness. It set him in a martyr-like attitude 
towards people, and made him more significant.’? He was 
unreal, superfluous. He dared not escape from his way 
of life. The ‘“‘ poison of many insults ’’ increased at once his 
self-importance and his consciousness of the world’s con- 
tempt. When at last the people were rejoicing over the 
Constitution he grew elated and saw a dim future of better 
things for himself, keeping a shop it might be. But no. 
The counter-revolution came. He tried to make up his 
mind to murder the chief spy. He tugged at the trigger 
of his revolver in a vain attempt to shoot another, and then 
dashed away, failed to hang himself, laid his head on the 
railway line, but got up from the approaching train— 


* “The Spy.” By Maxim Gorky. 6s. 


(Duckworth.) 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 197 


fortunately, too late. Asa tract for the times ‘‘ The Spy ’ 
is admirable, vivid, and generoustoo. But it is still better 
as a piece of psychology. Towards the end of the book 
Yevsey is represented as te’ ing the story of his life to a 
famous author on the side of the revolution, and really the 
story is often so subtle, e.g. in its depiction of states of mind, 
that it might well be an autobiography. 
EpwarpD THOMAS. 


SUSANNA AND CATHERINE 
WINKWORTH.* 


The name of Susanna Winkworth is known to book- 
men as that of a capable translator of Bunsen and of 
Tauler, and that of her sister is still more widely famous 
as the author of the ‘“*‘ Lyra Germanica,”’ a work which 
enriched our nation with many of the best of the spiritual 
songs of the German people. There is still room for 
improvement in English hymnology, but to Catherine 
Winkworth we owe the introduction of a fresh and beautiful 
stream of influence. After the death of Catherine the 
elder sister began to write a biography, but did not complete 
it, and what she wrote, although printed, was not published. 
It now appears with additional letters and a continuation 
by their niece, Margaret Josephine Shaen, and is especially 
valuable for its portrayal of some of the leaders in the 
liceralisation of religious thought that went on in the middle 
of the nineteenth century. It is a serious and satisfactory 
contribution to our knowledge of that period. 

The Winkworths were of good Evangelical stock, but 
when the family came to Manchester and its neighbourhood 
they seem to have fallen quite naturally into a me nbership 
of highly cultivated and philanthropic group of Unitarians 
of that city. By the Rev. William Gaskell they were guided 
into German literature, and it is to the translations in 
verse which he demanded from his pupils that we finally 
owe the ‘‘ Lyra Germanica.’’ Catherine Winkworth 
admired his version of ‘‘ Ein Feste Burg ’’ so greatly that 
in the second edition she substituted it for her own. 
He was a man of the widest culture and nobility of 
spirit who exercised a benign influence on many lives. 
The charming glimpses we have of Mrs. Gaskell, whilst 
they do not alter what is known—what little is known— 
of the details of her life, add some vivid touches to the 
portrait of a woman distinguished equally for genius and 
goodness. The sisters’ circle widened until it included 
very different elements. Hence in these pages we hear 
Arndt roundly denouncing England, and Mazzini preaching 
Italian unity, we see Mary Carpenter quietly going forward 
with her good work, whilst Carlyle is denouncing all philan- 
thropists for “‘ spending their lives trying to whitewash 
what God Almighty had made black and meant to be black.” 
One of these diatribes was at a dinner-table where Froude 
was also present. Miss Elliot, one of the philanthropists, 
very smartly retorted : ‘‘ Pretty well to talk about making 
black white when we are sitting between the whitewashers 
of Henry VIII. and Frederick II., compared to whom our 
ragged children are white already !’’ Other names that 
occur are those of Francis William Newman, he whom 
George Eliot styled the “St. Francis of rationalism,” 
of Jenny Lind, of whom there are delightful sketches, of 
Frances Power Cobbe before the anti-vivisection crusade 
had filled her life with the sadness of an all-absorbing and 
yet unavailing protest, of Princess Alice, and of Florence 
Nightingale. Of Nasmyth, the astronomer and inventor 
of the steam hammer, we are told that he was “ not always 
sure of his h’s,”’ although the omission of the aspirate is 
usually regarded as the one thing a Scot cannot do. Dr. 
Martineau also figures largely as one of the great influences 
in the lives of the two sisters. And what will interest 


* « Memorials of Two Sisters : Susanna and Catherine Wink- 
worth.’ Edited by their niece, Margaret J. Shaen. 10s, 6d. net. 
(Longmans. ) 


many to whom theological speculation is as ‘‘ caviare to 
the general’’ is a conversation between Catherine Wink- 
worth and Charlotte Bronté on the subject of her approach- 
ing marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls. 

There are one or two mistakes that should be corrected 
in a second edition. The ‘ College ’’ mentioned on p. 61 
was not the Unitarian Home Missionary Board, which was 
not in existence in 1850, but Manchester New College, of 
which the Rev. William Gaskell was a Professor. The 
allusion at p. 36 is to the Lancashire Public Schools 
Association, which advocated Cobden’s plan of education 
popularly controlled and free from sectarianism. 

The main interests in the life of the two sisters were 
theological and ethical, and they both belonged to the 
Broad Church, of which Stanley, Kingsley, and still more 
F. D. Maurice were the representatives, and there are 
many letters dealing with religious doubts and difficulties. 
One was for atime at least a member of a Unitarian Church, 
and both had a sweet charitableness that longed for 
comprehension. A weaver whose acquaintance Catherine 
made in the course of her district visiting said: ‘‘ Well, 
I have always wondered what ladies was made for; I 
thought them such useless beings; but at least now I’ve 
found that they’re the best of good company. Why, you 
could not find a single thing in the paper that she did not 
know all about it. I'd liefer hear her talk even than go 
to the public-house!’’ Which saying is an allegory as 
well as a statement of fact. 

The apparent, it may be only apparent, casualness of 
life is illustrated in the career of these two sisters. If they 
had kept to the Anglican circle to which by inheritance 
they belonged, they would not have known William Gaskell 
and his wife. If they had not known them, they would not 
have come into contact with Bunsen ; if they had not met 
Bunsen, the ‘“‘ Lyra Germanica’’ would not have been 
written. 


““So runs the round of life from hour to hour.’ 


Let us be thankful therefor. 
WILLIAM E. A. Axon, 


PEN-PORTRAITS.* 


Here, in these pages, Mr. Gardiner has “ gathered men 
and women,” not 


“Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,” 


as Browning’s were, but chosen from among the living 
only, and chosen “‘ not always because of their official or 
public prominence, but sometimes because they represent 
a phase of life, an aspect of contemporary history, or a 
personal influence of some significance.’ His first char- 
acter study is of the King, his fortieth, and last, is of Mr. 
Chesterton ; and the other thirty-eight include such in- 
teresting and diverse personalities as Florence Nightingale 
and Mrs. Pankhurst, the Premier, the Primate, Keir Hardie, 
the Kaiser, General Booth, Bernard Shaw, George Mere- 
dith, John Burns, Thomas Hardy, Dr. Clifford, Kipling, 
and the Rev. R. J. Campbell. It is a series of striking 
and brilliant lightning-sketches, frank, vivid, revealing, 
dashed off with apparent ease and lightness of touch, yet 
with such a fulness of knowledge that every stroke tells. 
There are no caricatures, but there is some very vigorous 
drawing, and Mr. Gardiner does not give haloes to all his 
heroes. Here is a glimpse of his presentment of Kipling : 

‘Mr. Kipling sees life by flashes of lightning, and sets it down 
in phrases that strike like lightning. It is a world filled with 
sudden and sinister shapes—not men, but the baleful caricatures 
of men; not women, but Manad sisters, with wild and blood- 
shot eyes and fearful dishevelled locks; with boys that drink 
and smoke and swear like dragoons; animals that talk, and 

* “ Prophets, Priests and Kings.’”’ By A. G_ Gardiner. 
7s. 6d. net. (Alston Rivers.) 


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198 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


machinery that reasons like a Yellow journalist. . . . Mr. 
Kipling is a precocious boy with a camera. He has the gift 
of vision, but not the gift of thought. He sees the detail with 
astonishing truth, but he cannot co-ordinate the parts. He 
gives the impression of encyclopedic knowledge, for everything 
he sees is photographed on the retina, and everything he hears 
is written down in his brain. . . . He is like the ‘ Encyclopedia 
Britannica,’ fused with imagination at white heat. And as the 
‘Encyclopedia’ is to literature, so is he to life. He knows every- 
thing except human nature. 
he does not know life, because he does not know the heart of 
man. 


Bernard Shaw Mr. Gardiner describes as ‘‘ the Swift 
of his time. . . . He is pure intellect without illusion and 
without emotions. His art is the art of ideas and not of 
sentiment. . . . He is the tonic of his time, very bitter 
to the taste, but stimulating. He clears the mind of cant. 
He clears the atmosphere of fog. He is admirable in 
small doses; but as a sustained diet—he is inferior to 
Shakespeare.” 

And in dealing with Chesterton he draws comparisons 
between him and Shaw : 


“Mr. Chesterton’s natural foil in these days is Mr. Bernard 
Shaw. Mr. Shaw is the type of revolt. The flesh we eat, the 
wine we drink, the clothes we wear, the laws we obey, the re- 
ligion we affect—all are an abomination to him. . . . Mr. Ches- 
terton has none of this impatience with the extcrnal garment 
of society. He enjoys disorder and loves the haphazard. With 
Rossetti he might say, ‘ What is it to me whether the earth 
goes round the sun, or the sun round the earth ?’ It is not the 
human intellect that interests him, but the human heart and 
the great comedy of life. He opposes ancient sympathies to 
modern antipathies. It follows that Mr. Shaw’s weapon is 
wit, sharp-edged as the east wind, and that Mr. Chesterton's 
weapon is humour that buffets you like a gale from the west.” 


The sketch of Meredith is a finely sympathetic piece of 
work, and of Hardy Mr. Gardiner says : 


“ He is the antithesis of Meredith, whose voice is of the morn- 
ing and whose vision is of the day. . . . He is the Millet of 
literature, sounding the same note of the sorrow of the earth, 
working in the same elemental media. . . . But, if he is the 
Millet of literature, he is Millet without the ‘ Angelus.’ His 
peasants are bowed to the brown earth in the mystic light, but 
no far-off bell tolls a message through the quiet air.” 


The style throughout is terse, picturesque, epigram- 
matic; Mr. Gardiner writes without bitterness, but he 
does not suppress the truth about his subjects when it 
happens to be unflattering—his words have teeth in them 


on occasion, and some of his epigrams bite uncommonly 
hard. 


Wovel Hotes. 


THE BOND. By Neith Boyce. 6s. (Duckworth.) 


Here we have the problem novel again, though we must 
admit that ‘‘ The Bond ”’ is written in a vein of reticence 
and with a certain delicate restraint of touch that call 
for praise. Basil, an artist, has married Teresa, another 
artist. They both have temperaments, and both annoy 
each other very much at times, yet each realises that 
without the other life would not be worth living. The 
affectionate passages between these two young things 
are related with a graphic, if surprising, realism. Seizing 
hold of his wife at the conclusion of one of Teresa’s little 
exhibitions of temper, Basil bites her. 


sO rough, 


“He was always 
Basil is painting the portrait of the beautiful 
Mrs. Isabel Perry. Mrs. Perry wants to flirt with Basil, 
who, being very much in love with his wife, is left cold. 
Teresa grows jealous, and her jealousy goes on_ piling 
itself up, till it boils over, and she runs away from Basil 
to Switzerland, ostensibly to take a holiday. A flirtation 
with Crayven, a silent Englishman, nearly becomes serious, 
but not quite. Recognising the vulgarity of faithlessness 
as she sees it exhibited in the family of her host and hostess, 


He knows all about life; but | 


Teresa decides that she wants Basil again, and goes to 
him. The story ends somewhat unsatisfactorily with a 
reconciliation, but the author has described so many of 
them that we have not much faith in the lasting nature 
of this one. One’s sympathy throughout is rather with 
Basil than with his wife. 


THE BOMB. By Frank Harris. 6s. (John Long.) 


Mr. Frank Harris, one time editor of the Fortnightly 
Review. is a man of exceptional talent with a rare gift for 
the short story. With ‘‘ The Bomb” we have his first 
long novel, and it is a strong and living piece of work, 
It is an historical novel; but Mr. Frank Harris does not 
take us back to the middle ages. There is no “ By my 
halidome !”’ or Grammercy "’ nonsense in ‘‘ The Bomb,” 
An incident in the social war of modern times, the labour 
troubles in Chicago in 1886, which culminated in bomb 
throwing and the subsequent trial and execution of the 
Chicago Anarchists, is the subject of the book ; and already 
the events recorded are an old story, unknown or unre- 
membered for the most part by the men and women of 
to-day. Mr. Harris brings it all back before us: the 
misery of the working people, in especial the foreigners, in 
Chicago, the strikes and Socialist agitation, the brutal 
methods of repression adopted by the authorities, the 
determination of two men to retaliate with violence, the 
explosion, and finally the trial and judicial murder of men 
quite innocent of bomb throwing. It is a chapter in the 
history of working-class life in America at the close of the 
nineteenth century, this account of the Chicago Anarchists, 
and it is finely wrought. Though written in the first person 
from the standpoint of the man who threw the bomb, 
there is a striking fidelity in the narrative to the actual 
occurrences. No less brilliant than the descriptions of the 
social agitation is the love-making of Elsie and Rudolph 
in ‘‘The Bomb.” But the whole book is far above the 
heights of average contemporary fiction. 


Photo by Elliott & Fry. Mr. Frank Harris. 


Editor of Vanity Fair. 


on 


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JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


199 


—_ 


LEWIS RAND. By Mary Johnston. 6s. (Constable.) 


“‘T have come to be sorry for almost all my life,”’ says 
Lewis Rand, near the close. ‘‘ I was a leader in a party 
in whose principles I believed and still believe, and I 
betrayed my party. To-night I think I could give my life 
for one imperilled field, for one green acre of this land— 
and yet I was willing to bring upon it strife and dissension. 
Ingrate and traitor—hard words and true, hard words and 
true! I might have had a friend—and always I knew he 
was the man I would have wished to be—but instead, I 
thought of him as my foe and I killed him. I have brought 
trouble on many, and good to very few. I have wronged 
you in very much, But I never wronged you in my love— 
never, never, Jacqueline! That is my mountain peak— 
that is my cleansing sea—that is that in my life which 
necds no repenting, that is true, that is right!’’ The 
story is of Virginia, in the years when Jetterson was 
President of America. From a_ poor boy, son of 
a tobacco roller, whose father keeps him working in the 
fields and will not allow him to buy books or acquire 
any education, Lewis Rand, helped and befriended by 
Jefferson, an old friend of his father, rises in the world, 
enters the political arena, becomes one of Jefferson's 
strongest supporters, but, insatiably turns 
traitor. secretly sides with Aaron Burr in his scheme for 
setting up a republic in Texas, and yet in his own mind 
purposes to betray Burr also and establish an empire with 
himself as emperor. He is a man of supreme abilities, 
and of a certain innate nobleness. 
straight he passes from success to success irresistibly ; 
but once he starts to intrigue in traitorous ways, all things 
go wrong with him; his hopes crumble in his hands, and 
his path leads him only into a desert. When he realises 
how far wrong he has gone, he turns courageously to make 
atonement, and the woman who loves him honours him 
too much todream of dissuading him from paying the price 
of his sins. It is a great theme greatly handled ; a book 
that is at once an absorbingly interesting romance and a 
fine piece of literature. 


ambitious, 


So long as he runs 


JOAN OF GARIOCH. By Albert Kinross. 6s. 

This very well written story is mainly concerned with 
the adventures of an English special correspondent in 
Russia at the time of the revolutionary outbreak in 1906. 
That the said correspondent is a retired British officer who 
has been deprived of the lady to whom he was engaged by the 
machinations 
of a mysterious 
and wealthy 
foreigner gives 
zest and a ro- 
mantic turn to 
the book. But 
the romance is 
quite the least 
important 
part, and of 
Joan herself 
we really know 
nothing, save 
that she was 
faithful to her 
early love and 
leit the affec- 
tions of the 
villainous 
“Jarnac’’ (who 
richly deserved 
the fate that 
overtook him) 
unrequited. It 
is in the ac- 
count he gives 
of the events 


(Macmillan.) 


Mr. Albert Kinross. 


Photo by Ward Muis. 


Photo by Russell & Sons. 


Mr. Morley Roberts. 


in Russia that our author is at his best. Going out to Riga, 
free of any attachment to the cause of the revolutionaries, 
and without any particular aspirations after freedom, Jim 
(we are left in the dark as to the hero’s surname) describes 
the situation in the Baltic provinces asit appears to the 
decent fair-mindel Englishman. There is no straining 
after effect, no attempt to pile up horrors, no desire to 
harrow the feelings by too much realism. The picture 
left in our mind includes the wonderful vigilance of the 
revolutionary leaders, the fierce revolt of a peasantry 
emerging from centuries of bondage, and the suppression 
by massacre of the revolution. 


DAVID BRAN. 


Mr. Roberts inscribes this story ‘“‘ To my friend E. N., 
who has always done his best to make me do mine.” In 
his latest novel Mr. Roberts has certainly come up to the 
highest expectations of his friends. ‘‘ David Bran” is a 
singularly frank and vivid study. Its interest is bound up 
with four Cornish people, three women and one man. David 
Bran’s relation to Lou, the dark girl of the tale, are not 
exactly those suggested by Browning’s “ Fifine at the 
Fair,” but the plot is the same. Cana man of rich, complex 
nature love two women at the same time, one of them his 
wife, the other a woman who appeals to the iomantic rather 
than the domestic side of his personality ? Crudely stated, 
this seems a bit of empty casuistry. But Mr. Roberts has 
succeeded in vitali ing it. Bran’s mother reminds one of 
the sad mother in “‘ The Return of the Native,”’ though her 
fate is happier. The entire setting and conceptions of the 
story are exceptionally fresh-——fresh even to the point of 
audacity. It is a book to read, and to enjoy for its style 
as wellas its story, though some of its teachings are certainly 
open to question. 


By Morley Roberts. 6s. (Eveleigh Nash.) 


BY FAITH ALONE. By René Bazin. 6s. 

The fine story which has been translated in these pages 
is another evidence of the new spirit in French fiction, which 
is displacing the naturalistic realism by an equally realistic 
but more sympathetic and religious treatment of modern 


(Eveleigh Nash.) 


> 

(UM 


200 THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig09. 


life. There are two heroes in this woodland idyll ; one is 
Gilbert Cloquet, a labourer upon the estate, the other is 
Michel, the heir and agent. The latter finally succumbs 
to disease after an unhappy life. The former, sorely tried 
by a spendthrift daughter and by unsympathetic comrades 
in his trade-union, wins his way through poverty and 
sensualism and a vulgar atheism to self-respect. The 
author has set these figures in idyllic surroundings. We 
have had few more exquisite descriptions of forest scenery 
lately than may be found in these pages. But the more 
sordid facts of French peasant-life are not ignored, and 
M. Bazin has depicted, evidently at first hand, the suspicious 
attitude of the labourers to the aristocracy, the blatant 
unbelief, and the petty circle of interests which render a 
good life so hard for men of Cloquet’s temper. There is 
less humour in the book than even in Mr. Hardy’s ‘‘ Wood- 
landers,’’ which is the nearest parallel to it in our fiction. 
But the French author, for all his pathos, leaves a better 
taste in the mouth of his readers, and in artistic effect he 
is not inferior to his English contemporary. We welcome 
the book as a masterpiece of its class, alike in style and in 
conception. 


WHITHER THOU GOEST. By J. J. Bell. 6s. (Hodder & 
Stoughton.) 


“Ruth, lll say the hateful thing, too. At the first, I 
did think of your money before yourself, and you could 
not despise me more than I despise myself. But it wasn’t 
long before my punishment began—till I loved you more 
than anything in the world.” In this confession of Dick 
Balmain’s you have the germ of ‘‘ Whither thou Goest.”’ 
Dick, left to support his mother and three sisters, finds 
that his father’s business is on the verge of bankruptcy ; 
whilst he is striving his utmost to save it, he meets with 
Ruth, and hearing that she has inherited a fortune, sets 
himself to win her for the sake of her money ; he sees no other 
way of clearing himself of his father’s debts, and making 
things right for his mother. After he is engaged, he loses 
sight of his mercenary project, and comes to love Ruth, 
wholly and passionately for herself; but a malicious 
whisperer betrays him, and when Ruth taxes him with his 
meanness he cannot deny it, and her faith in him is so 
shaken that she cannot believe it is no longer her wealth, 
but herself alone that he cares for. She breaks off the 
engagement, and he goes from her; then she repents, and 
helps him in secret, and when he meets her again, at last, 
his projects have failed, he is poorer than ever, and has 
discovered that she has been his unknown benefactor, and 
that, for a new barrier between them, he is deeply in her 
debt. It is a chequered and charming love story, unfolded 
with an easy, cunning narrative skill, and shadowed and 
brightened with the pathos and quaint humour that are 
characteristic of all Mr. Beil’s work. 


THE TRAMPING METHODIST. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. 
6s. (G. Bell.) 

The title of this book and the quotation from Stevenson 
on the titie-page are both a little misleading. They suggest 
semething far more formless than actually follows. At 
first one thinks one is in for a rambling story of the 
“ Lavengro ”’ order, and indeed there is all through quite a 
Borrovian tang of the open road. One is tempted to think 
that Miss Kaye-Smith has used pigments too uniformly 
lurid in portraying the clergy of the Established Church, 
but she gives a most interesting and convincing picture of 
the ways of Methodism in the years immediately following 
Wesley’s death, the Methodism, that is to say, not of the 
Salems and Little Bethels, but of the wayside. The carlier 
pages of the book are chiefly occupied with these matters. 
A plot, however, soon makes its appearance, a plot in the 
literal, old-fashioned sense, woven of the threads of a few 
lives constantly recrossed, with love and déath playing 
their parts in the tangling and the clearing. There is 
plenty of coincidence, but not too much for a story so 


frankly dramatic. Without coincidence a tale of which 
movement is the principal feature is likely to become 
chaotic, and a certain symmetry of happenings is an essential. 
Nor is this a conventional or merely stagey story. More 
blood is spilt, more crime committed, there are more 
undercurrents and dark secrets than, perhaps, generally 
disturb the history of smiling Sussex and Kentish villages, 
but it is all quite alive and human. The character-drawing 
is excellent. The villains are black and the heroes white, 
but the blood runs red in their veins for all that. They 
live and die (the latter perhaps a thought too frequently) 
and one is interested in their destinies. They love, and 
few have done it more sweetly since Richard Feverel loved 
Lucy. 


COLONEL STOW. By H. C. Bailey. 6s. (Hutchinson.) 


Mr. Bailey has already won for himself a reputation as a 
writer of the romantic sort, and his latest book will in no 
way detract from it. He knows how the thing should be 
done. He has made himself a manner out of Mr. Hewlett’s 
style, and it is a good manner: terse, sometimes a little 
jerky, but full of life and movement. This time he has 
chosen the Civil War for his period. It is no new theme, 
but the touch is fresh. There is plenty of fighting, and it 
is of a vigorous, spirited sort. The battle-pieces—New- 
bury and Naseby—are finely done, and there are some 
delightful, impossible ‘‘ one-man ”’ episodes, of which the 
great Dumas himself might have been proud. With 
fighting, love-making is, of course, the main thing, and if 
one is vigorous the other is no less so. Time and again is 
Mistress Lucinda Weston crushed against a bosom (not 
always the same bosom) until she is hurt. She is a woman 
of flame. Then there is Joan, the puritan maiden, and 
Colonel Stow, the ‘‘ soldier of dreams,” and Colonel Royston, 
the cynical soldier of fortune with heroic moments. Real 
personages also, Cromwell and Charles, the generals of 
both parties, cross and recross the stage, but we are not 
subjected to too much historical information. Mr. Bailey 
has none of the romantic illusions. He knows that a 
puritan can be grotesque and a cavalier gaudy as well as 
he knows that both can be brave. His sense of humour, 
which never fails him, keeps him from the posturings of 
the earnest romancer. 


The Bookman’s Table. 


PICCADILLY TO PALL MALL. By Ralph Nevill and 


Charles Edward Jerningham. 12s. 6d. net. (Duckworth.) 


The title of this volume, “ Piccadilly to Pall Mall,” 
suggests a volume of the type of Mr. G. S. Street’s ‘‘ Ghosts 
of Piccadilly,’ and, indeed, in parts it [bears some re- 
semblance to that book, in so far, as it deals with many 
ot the same figures. Mr. Street deliberately limited his 
scope: Mr. Nevill and Mr. Jerningham wander from 
subject to subject, from society eccentric to financial 
magnate, at their own sweet will. The main theme of the 
book is the change in manners and habits of the upper classes 
since the earlier decades of the last century, and in many 
ways it forms a complement to the delightful memoirs of 
Lady Dorothy Nevill, which, by the way, were edited by 
one of the authors. Mr. Nevill and Mr. Jerningham treat 
their subject lightly. and illustrate it with innumerable 
anecdotes, many of which are new to the present writer. 
One is so good that it must be repeated. Sir Robert Peel, 
son of the Prime Minister, was threatened by some police- 
men with arrest for some exuberant prank. His retort, 
““My father didn’t create you to arrest me,”’ so staggered 
the representatives of the force (then in its infancy) that 
they let him go. We read of the growth of the restaurant 
habit, of the clubs of bygone times and of to-day, of art 
collections, and public statues and buildings, of the growth 


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JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 


201 


of speculation, and of such different persons as Sam Lewis, 
Colonel North, the Jubilee Juggins, Max Lebaudy, Abing- 
don Baird, Lord Ailesbury, Sir Edgar Boehm, the late Duke 
of Devonshire, the Rothschilds, and Queen Victoria. In 
a book that is designed for light reading it is rather a 
surprise to come across a section, for which we are told 
Mr. Nevill is alone responsible, treating in quite a serious 


vein of the morality of the metropolis. The views Mr. 
Nevill holds on this matter are those of common-sense, 
and have often been advocated, though, as he is the first 
to admit, they are bitterly opposed by the advocates of 
morality by Act of Parliament. In conclusion, it may be 
said that ‘‘ Piccadilly to Pall Mall”’ is interesting from 
beginning to end, and it will be especially welcome to the 
students who endeavour to trace the evolution of society 
from the day when the aristocrat reigned supreme to to-day, 
when the plutocrat rules the roost and calls the tune. 
The two photographs, of St. James’s Palace and of the 
Empire Music Hall by Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, are 
so excellent as to deserve special mention. 


LILIES OF ETERNAL PEACE. By Lilian Whiting. 1s. 6d. 
net. (Gay & Hancock.) 
This is a satisfying and beautiful little book. While 


expressing deep and tender sympathy with all who suffer 
grief and loss, it uplifts the soul into nobler companionship 
with those who have passed ‘‘ beyond the veil,” and, 
without a word of controversy or of bitterness, embodies 
what is the real answer to that group of thinkers who are 
fain to prolong the physical life by means of the spiritual 
and look forward to its endless continuance on earth as a 
triumphant consummation. For “the process of change 
which we call death is not an evil. Nothing disastrous has 
occurred to the friend who has gone from the physical into 
the ethereal realm.”’ . . . ‘‘ There can be no question but 
that the spiritual man has powers that are far beyond our 
present knowledge. . . . The ‘ other world’ is not, as Kant 
has declared, ‘another place, but another view.’”’.. . 
“When the religion of spirituality shall truly interpret 
to us this change, humanity will come to recognise death 
as a sacred festival, rather than as an occasion of mourning 
and gloom.’”” The meaning of the tiny volume has been 
so perfectly phrased by the author that it seems idle to 
sum it up in any other way than by a series of quotations. 
“As a matter of fact,” says Miss Whiting, it “‘is the one 
business of man on earth to co-operate with the divine 
power. . . . Every avenue through which the forces that 
make for nobler living may extend themselves is an avenue 
through which man may co-operate with God. Realising 
this, how can any hours be poor or desolate? ... The 
lilies of eternal peace are not, then, to be gathered in the 
gardens of pleasure or of meaningless dallying ; they grow 
on the highway of noble effort and lofty achievement.” 


SOME POEMS OF EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 


by James Guthrie. 30s. (Pear Tree Press.) 


With Drawings 


Although Mr. Guthrie, in a pamphlet on the ‘“‘ Aims and 
Intentions of his Press,” utters a warning against the 
exaggerated importance books derive from extraneous 
circumstances, he does not, happily, disdain to resort to 
similar methods in drawing attention to his own produc- 
tions. His paper, his type, and his ink are beyond re- 
proach, and these specimens of his black-and-white hand- 
printing should satisfy the most exacting bibliophile. 
From the somewhat preraphaelite frontispiece to the final 
conventional tailpiece each specimen of the wood-engraver’s 
art, although of unequal value, is representative of honest 
work and of legitimate endeavour to elevate the craft. 
Mr. Guthrie fully comprehends that if wood-engraving fail 
as a craft, it must also disappear as an art, but he does not 
seem to have quite settled in his mind what standard the 
art should attain to. Several of these illustrations, although 
Poesgue in spirit, are not depictive of the poems they 


nominally illustrate. They in no way represent what Poe 
wrote. ‘‘ The Lake,” for example, shows nothing sugges- 
tive of ‘black rocks” and “ tall pines,” or the other 
verbal accessories of the poem, and the picture of ‘‘ The 
Haunted Palace ”’ presents nothing to show its association 
with the verses bearing that title. Much is imported 
into these presentments which Poe never suggested, but 
there can be no question as to their originality and quaint- 
ness—that necessary adjunct of beauty. The atmospheric 
effect of several of them is fine ; they are generally replete 
with good brain-work and are the result of skilful technique. 
The picture of “Eulalie” is less effective, being more 
conventional in type than the majority of the illustrations. 
The biographical introduction to the ‘‘ Poems ”’ is mainly 
compiled from Mr. Ingram’s “ Life of Poe,” but no reference 
is made to the fact by its writer. 


THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD. By Anatole 


France. Translated by Lafcadio Hearn. 6s. (John Lane.) 


It would be a nice point for the devout Anatolian to 
decide which of the thirty or more of M. France's books is 
the most characteristic of his genius, but there can be no 
question that ‘‘ Sylvestre Bonnard ’’ appeals most surely 
to the general reader. It lacks the brilliant wit and 
audacious dialogue of “‘ Le Lys Rouge” and the keen 
satire of ‘‘ Monsieur Bergeret.’’ But it is the gentlest and 
most kindly of M. France’s books, and presents the most 
charming and entirely lovable character in all the long 
gallery of his creations. In the strictly chronological sense 
“Sylvestre Bonnard ”’ is an early work, the earliest of all 
except “‘ Jocaste et le Chat Maigre.’”’ But although it first 
appeared twenty-seven years ago, it is in no sense a youthful 
effort. M. France served a long apprenticeship before he 
allowed himself to settle down to serious creative work, 
and he was already in his thirty-seventh year when 
“Sylvestre Bonnard’’ was published. Since its first 
publication the book has been largely revised and corrected, 
and no doubt any one reading the latest French edition 
is tempted to underestimate the extent of the development 
of M. France’s genius. The style is finished and the out- 
look on life matured and equable. ‘The first edition is now 
so rare that only the plutocratic book collector can hope 
for the privilege of ascertaining how far the book as we now 
know it has been re-written since it first delighted a limited 
but discerning public. But Lafcadio Hearn’s translation, 
which Mr. Lane has wisely reissued, was made long enough 
ago to suggest that the alterations were mainly alterations 
of detail. Itis a pity that Hearn’s introduction should have 
been printed without comment or even a date to show 
when it was written. Of the story itself there is nothing 
new to be said. The dear old scholar with his inimitable 
housekeeper, sitting entrenched in his ‘“ city of books,”’ 
and talking with such delightful and childlike wisdom 
to Hamilcar, the worthy predecessor of the immortal 
Riquet, is the most irresistibly charming of all M. France’s 
creations. If there were only a literary Pope to sanction 
the canonising of characters in fiction, Sylvestre Bonnard 
would become the patron saint of book lovers, and his 
story would be among the most precious of the lives of 
literary saints. The later books of M. France are more 
audacious, they have more force and “ bite, ’’ but there are 
none to which one returns so often or with so much pleas- 
ure, none are so good to live with, as ‘“‘ Sylvestre Bonnard.” 


LONDON VISIONS. By 
(Elkin Mathews.) 


Laurence Binyon. 2s. 6d. net. 


Mr. Laurence Binyon has brought together in this book 
the contents of those two little volumes that he published 
under the same title, the one ten, the other thirteen years 
ago, and to these he has added a fitting selection from two 
other of his earlier volumes, and several unpublished poems 
more recently written. Every poet who has walked its 
streets has been susceptible to the charm of London, has 


202 


THE BOOKMAN. 


[JANUARY, Ig00. 


found more or less of inspiration in it, and has striven to 
give voice to the burden and mystery of the lives that are 
lived in it, to the awful splendour of its dawns and sunsets, 
the noise and hurry of its days, the beauty and horror of 


its nights. Mr. Binyon has woven something of all this 
into these haunting and exquisite lyrics. He-has not the 
imaginative fire and grim forcefulness of Henley, nor 
(except perhaps in the fine ballad of “‘ John Winter ’’) 
the pathos and homely narrative power of Buchanan, but 
he has a delicacy of thought and fancy, a quickness of 
insight, a grace and picturesque vividness of expression 
in which neither of them surpasses him. ‘‘ Red Night ” 
compresses into four small pages a wonderfully realistic 
vision of the soul of London, “her desolations and her 
majesties,’’ but as Mr. Binyon suggests in his preface, the 
contents are so arranged that they round into a single 
corporate poem. In that opening lyric you see all London 
unrolling, lurid, swarming, inchoate, as in some cloudy, 
bewildering nightmare; in the poems thai follow, single 
figures have detached themselves from the immense crowd, 
single pictures and impressions have detached themselves 
clearly from the misty, dazzling panorama, and at the end 
you find that each one of these figures, pictures, impressions 
has had its due effect in building up for you a full and un- 
forgettable microcosm of London. Itis too late in the day 
to say that Mr. Binyon is a true poet; we knew it when 
we first read his ‘‘ London Visions ’’ years ago; we were 
more sure of it still when he published ‘‘ The Death of 
Adam ”’ ; but it is not too late to assure any who are un- 
acquainted with this little book that they are ignorant 
of some of the loveliest and most significant work in modern 
poetry. 


Hotes on Hew Books. 


MR. EVELEIGH NASH, 


Miss ?Annie Matheson has compiled a widely appealing little 
“book of devotion,” Sayings from the Saints (2s. 6d. net and 
3s. 6d. net), and these “‘ sayings’ have been restricted to the 
words of the saints within the canon. Beautiful counsel is 
here, and the pages hold many fragrant phrases; sometimes 
a long quotation of more than a page will hold a thought and 
dilate upon it with a fine insight and faith ; sometimes a dozen 
words alone will present a dazzling truth. If we may criticise 
so holy a group, we venture to question the interest of St. Al- 
phonsus de Liguori. This saint, no doubt with absolute sin- 
cerity, uttered many a phrase which is now a platitude; 
frequently he simply paraphrased the Bible, and in such cases 
the Bible is better. The volume, however, is a sympathetic 
whole. Each page is headed with the virtue or the failing in- 
dicated below it, and the collection will prove itself to be a real 
friend to those who look for saintly words to strengthen and 
guard them through each day. 


MR. T. FISHER UNWIN, 


“In dealing with persons who are afflicted with worries, it 
is not of the least use to tell them ‘ not to worry. When we 
opened Dr. John H. Clarke’s handy volume on Vital Economy 
(1s. net and 2s. net) and our eyes fell on these words, we knew 
that there was clear, practical sense in the book, and turning 
back to the beginning we read every word, from Chapter I. to 
the Index. Dr. Clarke’s main object is to help the ordinary 
human being, the one who is neither a Hercules nor an invalid, 
to conserve his strength and make the best of his body under 
the daily conditions which are his lot in life. While giving full 
value to fresh air and cold water, he speaks very sensibly about 
the “‘ fresh-air maniac’’ and the ‘“cold-tub maniac’’; dis- 
cretion and sound individual judgment, and not a blind disregard 
of symptoms, are needed with regard to these good elements. 
Chapters are given on Fresh Air, Exercise, Tea, Coffee, 
Worry, the Bath, and so forth. We may not like all the 
advice, but we shall be the wiser for remembering most of it. 


MESSRS. CHATTO & WINDUS. 


The Franco-British Exhibition as a permanency is offered 
to us in the Illustrated Review which Mr. F. G. Dumas edits 
and Messrs. Chatto & Windus publish. We see, by picture 


and word, the making of the great White City—the scheme, the 
architecture, the very cement and fibrous plaster of it—an! we 
see the beautiful things which filled it, and the amusing and 
instructive things which shared the honour. The volume, 
which among other excellent illustrations reproduces a yvreat 
number of the masterpieces of painting and sculpture, is a fine 
and useful memento of the Great Exhibition of 1908. 

Mr. Alfred H. Hyatt is a skilful and indefatigable anthologist, 
and his new volume which Messrs. Chatto & Windus have just 
published, The Charm of Venice. is one of the most charming 
of his very successful ‘ collections.” In Venice Mr. Hyatt had 
a fertile subject, and he has selected with care, taste, and judg- 
ment. No better little volume could be slipped into the pocket 
or the knapsack of the visitor to Venice than this well-varied 
gathering together of poem and prose passage, revealing, as the 
title of the volume claims, the many-sided, unquestionable 
charm of Venice. 


MESSRS. GREENING & CO. 

In Branded (6s.), Mr. Gerald Biss has written a gripping and 
sensational story, which is strongly reminiscent of a famous 
poisoning case. The plot is concerned with the twin daughters 
of the condemned woman, and the actions of one of these 
girls is made to show that heredity does not necessarily shape 
the character. The mother in the story is an innocent woman, 
but the girl’s conduct is as tainted as if guilt were in her blood. 
The evolution of this beautiful twin is very graphically told, 
and the book, lurid in parts, holds the attention easily. 


YEAR BOOKS. 


We have been glancing through the first four of the Year 
Books that have arrived on our table. The indispensable 
Hazell’s Annual (Hazell, 3s. 6d. net) is, as usual, a_ very 
encyclopedia of general information, and its special articles on 
social and economic questions of the day are as interesting as 
they are reliable. It is one of the books that the man of business 
cannot afford not to buy.— The new issue of the familiar and handy 
little ‘* Daily Mail’? Year Book (Associated Newspapers, 6d. net) 
is a miracle of cheapness. It is crammed with articles, statistics, 
and condensed information on practically every important topic 
of the ;hour.—Mowbray’s Annual (Mowbray, Ltd., Is. net), 
is a compact and comprehensive storehouse of information on 
the work, problems, organisation, and personnel of the Anglican 
community at home and abroad. The Literary Year-took 
(Routledge), now in its thirteenth year with its directory 
of authors, publishers, agents, periodicals, booksellers, its full 
exposition of the copyright laws, and all its varied and serviceable 
information on literary matters, has become an essential part of 
every author’s and editor's library. 


REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS. 

The month has been rich in reprints and new editions, and 
among the most attractive are the five volumes which Messrs. 
George Allen & Son publish, uniform in style and cheap in price, 
of Maurice Maeterlinck’s works—Wisdom and Destiny, The 
Life of the Bee, The Treasure of the Humble, Aglavaine and 
Selysette, and Sister Beatrice and Ariadne, etc. (2s. 6d. net and 
3s. 6d. net each). This is a pocket edition in a type and style 
which are at once excellent, dignified, and tasteful. 

Another altogether charming reprint is our old favourite, 
Rab and His Friends. If there could have been one person 
chosen above all others to illustrate this classic, it should have 
been, in our opinion, Miss H. C. Preston Macgown, R.S.W., and 
Mr. Foulis of Edinburgh this artist has secured for this reprint. 
Seven most delicately drawn, delicately coloured, and entirely 
sympathetic pictures impress the beauty of the little idyll. 

Messrs. Nelson & Sons go on triumphantly with their Shilling 
Library. They have now added to it such alluring volumes as 
Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s Golden Age, Mrs. Everard Cotes’s Simple 
Adventures of a Memsahib, and Sir Henry Hawkins’s Reminiscences. 
These little books are truly marvels of cheapness, good taste, 
and good selection. 

Messrs. Macmillan & Co. have conceived the happy idea of 
publishing a pocket edition of Mr. Marion Crawford’s ‘‘ Singer's 
Trilogy ’’—-Soprano, The Prima Donna, and The Diva’s Ruby. 
The three pretty volumes are charmingly bound in red leather, 
and are enclosed in a neat red case (10s, 6d. net). 

To return to the dainty publications which we always expect, 
and get, from Mr. T. Foulis of Edinburgh, it is worth noting his 
exquisite little long-shaped, paper-covered reprints of, among 
others, that charming love-story of Aucassin and Nicolette, and 
Browning’s Last Ride Together, and other poems (6d. net each). 
These are just the ideal gift for those who wish to give a little 
more than a card at birthday, Easter, or other seasons, and yet 
are not so expensive as to be an embarrassment either to giver 
or receiver. The little books are most prettily illustrated in 
colour and their outward form is in every way pleasing. 

A book of a very different kind, but a very welcome one, is 
Messrs. Longmans’ new edition of John Stuart Mill’s Auto- 
biography (3s. 6d. net). This noble book is by no means enough 
known to the general reader, and the present edition, with por- 
trait after the painting by Watts, is an extremely handy, useful, 
and inexpensive form in which to possess it. 


XUM 


— 


JANUARY, 1909.] 


THE BOOKMAN. 203 


Hew Books of the Month. 


From NoOvEMBER 10 TO DECEMBER 10. 


THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 


All Shall be Well. Selections from the Writings of Lady Julian 


Gk AD. 1979. 16. (Mowbray) 
BENSON, MARGARET.—The Venture of Rational Faith. 


BLACK, HUGH.—University Sermons. 6s. 
(Hodder & Stoughton) 
Churchman’s Library, The English: The Christian Use of the 
Psalter, by the Rev. A. R. Whitham; The Practical 
Religion, by Vernon Staley; Letters to a Godson, 
Second Series, by Cyril Bickersteth ; Our Working Girls 
and How to Help Them. 4 vols. 1s. net each . (Mowbray) 
DENNEY, JAMES, D.D.—Jesus and the Gospel. tos. 6d. 
(Hodder & Stoughton) 
FRENCH, REV. E. ALDOM.—God’s Message Through Modern 


GARDNER, ROBERT.—In the Heart of Democracy. 3s. 6d. 
HORDER, W. GARRETT.—The Other World. 3s. net 
(Macmillan) 
MAY, JOSEPH, LL.D.—Miracles and Myths of the New Testa- 
MURRAY, J. CLARK, LL.D., F.R.S.C.—A Handbook of Chris- 
tian Ethics. 66. net ......cccccecses (T. & T. Clark) 
PASSMORE, T. H., M.A.—Your Confirmation. 9d. net 
(Mowbray) 
RAMSAY, W. M., HON. D.C.L.—Luke the Physician. Illus- 


SPENCE, FRANK.—Christian Reunion. 6s. 


(Hodder & Stoughton) 
STALKER, REV. PROF. JAMES, D.D.—The Atonement. 


THOMPSON, R. CAMPBELL.—Semitic Magic. tos. 6d. net 
(Luzac) 

YOUNG, DINSDALE T.—The Travels of the Heart. 3s. 6d. 
(Culley) 


New EDITIONS. 


MILTON.—On the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. 1s. 6d. net 
(British & Foreign Unitarian Association) 


FICTION. 


ANTON.—Next-Door Neighbours. 6s........... (H. J. Drane) 
“ BARTHOLOMEW.”—As They Are. 3s. 6d. net (H. J. Drane) 
BLACKBURN, DOUGLAS.—I Came and Saw. 6s. 
(Alston Rivers) 
CHANNEL, A.—Children of the Resurrection. Is. 6d. net 
(A. F. Bird) 
CHESTER, GEORGE RANDOLPH.—Get-Rich-Quick Walling- 
rer rr rere (E. Grant Richards) 
COLE, R. W.—The Artificial Girl. 6s. ............ (Greening) 
DESPARD, MRS., and MABEL COLLINS.—Outlawed. A 
Novel on the Woman’s Suffrage Question. Is. net 
H. J. Drane) 
GALE, ZONA.—Friendship Village. 6s. ........ (Macmillan) 
HAMILTON, COSMO.—The Blindness of Virtue. 6s. 
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