Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“
[blocks in formation]

Mr. Oliver Huckle's "Mental Medicine" differs from the myriad flock of books on the healing of the body through the mind chiefly by the author's willingness to take a hint from any quarter, and to consider it carefully. Originally the book was written to be delivered as conferences with students at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and its intention is to show how ministers and physicians may cooperate in the work of healing, each remaining within his own province. The author has been studying his subject for ten years, and nine years ago issued a pamphlet in which he asserted that all that was vital in the Christian Science movement had for years been practiced at the church of which he is associate pastor, and at many another. Further, he boldly says that through medicine his church and the doctors in his congregation obtain a larger percentage of cures than Christian Science obtains without medicine. Dr. Llewellys F. Barker gives the book an introduction, urging the co-operation of the physician and the clergyman, their two modes of work being counterparts. Readers so fortunate as not to need to study the book for health's sake may find it valuable as a short guide to the comprehension of many subjects on which discussion is rife. An excellent list of "Best Books for Further Reading" includes some fifty titles by the

sanest authors on the general subject, on its medical aspects and on its psychological aspects. That Professor Blackies' "How to Get Strong;" Miss Call's "Power Through Repose"; the psychology of Professor James, Professor Royce and Professor Munsterberg; Dr. Mitchell's "Doctor and Patient," and Dr. Morton Prince's "Dissociation of a Personality" find places in this list gives some idea of its variety. Whether or not a nervous person would greatly profit by studying the question of dissociated personality is a matter for the nervous person's physician to settle. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

If Michael Scott and Merlin should conspire together for the confusion of the young Americans and Englishmen of to-day, they could hardly devise a place more abounding in deception than the contemporary country house as it appears in the contemporary novel. The shabby kinswoman relegated to the schoolroom table and society, emerging only to save a life in an impressive manner, is really the heiress of a million or so; the young man sternly kept in order by dark threats from his cousin and her unexceptionable betrothed, is actually not her wicked cousin but a Knight of good character and unsullied honesty; the aged millionaire has not a penny beyond a beggarly annuity; the poor companion is the family heiress; the apparent bachelor has one or two wives in concealment, and the gentlest of created spinsters has a despatch box filled with her marriage certificates. The reader generally knows all about these devices from the beginning but does he therefore doubt the heroines and governesses and impecunious private secretaries whom he meets in real life? Not he, and suspicion is unknown in the novel. In Miss Imogen Clark's amusing tale, "A Charm

ing Humbug," the lady to whom the orphaned daughter of a great capitalist presents herself as an elderly governess, does venture to remark upon the superior quality of her wardrobe but asks no questions. The men of the family perceive that the young person is coquettish beyond the possibilities of a governess, but she carries out her plan, makes them her friends, wins the heart of one of them and captures her small pupil, horse, foot and dragoons. "All is delusion, naught is truth," but with no such terrifying results as were produced in Branksome Tower. The pupil, Billy, is a delightful boy, with actual good manners and a genuine effective desire to be a brave little gentleman. E. P. Dutton & Co.

When the African colonies, border and central, shall close up and occupy the entire continent; when the South American revolutions shall cease for lack of uninhabited territory suitable for retreat, the explorer will still find inexhaustible fields for his activity; he will search for the undiscovered past. Mr. Edward Hutton, anticipating necessity, has written "In Unknown Tuscany," and has garnered a surprising number of stories and incidents unrecorded by familiar historians, and many unknown to any but diligent students of manuscripts. His friend, Mr. William Heywood, has furnished his book with curious and valuable notes, and it has eight colored illustrations by O. F. M. Ward and twenty pictures in monotone. The colored pictures repeat the impression of the text in which the author dwells long upon the savage, unrelenting heat and its effect upon vegetation, but they also show the aspect of the climbing forest on the hillsides, and the poplars standing up spirelike, dark, dull green amid greenish gray, and grayish green. No book has been written about Tuscany for eighty years, says Mr. Hut

The

ton, and proceeds to rectify some of the misconceptions of earlier works in regard to government and laws, citing many curious instances of the survival of feudal usages, and showing the contests of the monks with nobles; the communes with the nobles; the communes with one another, and apathetic through all changes, unchanging little towns; almost the same to-day as in the years when the legends of the present altar pieces were making. story of a typical abbey and the doings of certain typical families are set forth in separate chapters, and most curious of all is the story of David Lazzarelli of Arcidosso, who, some thirty years ago, persuaded himself and some hundreds of other folk that he was the Messiah, and was shot down by the police because he paid no attention to the Tuscan equivalent of reading the riot act to him and his mob. He was not so lucky as the Persian Bab; the first fire was fatal to him, he died ignominiously in a hospital, and they found that the mark on his forehead, the two C's, back to back, was tattooed by perfectly mortal methods, and an author made a book about him, and his followers forgot him-luckless self-deceiver that he was! Mr. Hutton belongs to that unorganized group of contemporary writers of which Mr. Edward Thomas and Mr. Frederick Manning are also members, a group as intent upon beauty of style as Pater and his imitators, but seeking it not by way of the forgotten and startling word, but by the melodious phrase and the suggestion of beautiful sights and sounds, and by the expression of noble thoughts. In this country, Professor Palmer most resembles them, but one of the younger novelists seems to cherish a similar ideal and the influence of their books must be felt, in spite of magazine encouragement of rough writing on the ground that it is the vehicle of strong thoughts. E. P. Dutton & Co.

SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XLIV

No. 3398 August 21, 1909.

CONTENTS

FROM BEGINNING
VOL. CCLXI.

"The Hush in Europe." By H. N. Brailsford ENGLISH REVIEW 451 The Modern Surrender of Women. By G. K. Chesterton

Hardy-on-the-Hill.

DUBLIN REVIEW 462

[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small]

Book II. Chapter VI. By M. E. Francis
(Mrs. Francis Blundell). (To be continued.)
Heavy Fathers. By Rowland Grey

V.

[merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors]

VI.

The Humpback. Part II. By J. J. Bell, (Conclusion.)

VII.

In a German Country House. By Dorothy Amphlett

TIMES 467 FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW 473 EDINBURGH REVIEW 481

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL 493

[ocr errors]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

XI. New Hearts for the Old Way. By Archibald Fox
XII. The Willow-Wren. By Rosamund Marriott Watson
XIII. Plum Blossom. By C. Cranmer-Byng .
BOOKS AND AUTHORS

[blocks in formation]

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

THE LIVING AGE COMPANY,

6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cents per annum.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express

and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE CO.

Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents.

[blocks in formation]

To charm their woodlands with his faery singing.

His prelude seems the very voice of Spring,

Through the green larchwood as he flits and perches;

Even such an air a dryad's wraith might sing

Between the beeches and the silver birches.

Light-poised, half-hid, aloft upon the spray,

Hued like the olive, fine and willowslender,

Over and over through the lyric day He sings each delicate cadence, shy and tender.

But when the May flowers fade and grass grows long,

In wistful sequel, set 'twixt speech and sighing.

Faint fall the lingering closes of his song,

Most sweet-most sad: he knows the Spring is dying.

Rosamund Marriott Watson.

[blocks in formation]

"THE HUSH IN EUROPE."

An historian eager to determine what the English mind thought of the prospects and tendencies of civilization about the year 1909, would find ample and luminous evidence laid before him during a single memorable week of last June. One might suppose that the average educated mind of our time had consciously determined to record its confessions. Its chosen spokesman was Lord Rosebery, a personality singularly sensitive to the floating impressions of his time, original only in his felicity of phrase, typical in all the rest of that massconsciousness which invades opposing parties, makes sport of hereditary dogmas, and carries with it in its instinctive movements all but the inveterate minority and the deliberate eccentrics. His words are already the rhythm of all our thoughts-that sentence about the condition of Europe "so peaceful but so menacing," the other about the "hush in Europe" which "forbodes peace," and the rougher phrases about the "bursting out of navies every where" in a continent which is "rattling into barbarism." It was no individual utterance. Sir Edward Grey, the incarnation of reticence and caution went out of his way to agree with every word of it. Mr. Balfour agreed with Sir Edward Grey, and Mr. Haldane with Mr. Balfour. Thus it is then the British people sees its own condition and in this mood it looks out across its seas at the armaments of the continent. Pessimism mingles oddly with a certain grim resolution. There are peoples who see in their navies and their armies only a panoply of strength lightly worn and gladly displayed. There are men who, like Moltke, think even of war itself as the salt of life and the last vestige of "idealism." That is not our attitude.

Our

With rare exceptions we all think of armaments as an evil, though it be a necessary evil. War we unanimously condemn as a crime and a treason to civilization. Yet while we look before us and declare that we are "rattling into barbarism," we also delare that "we can and we will" build warships "so long as we have a shilling to spend on them." Our moral sense assents sadly to the first proposition, an innate pugnacity applauds the second. orators toss these contradictions at each other across our platforms, yet sometimes in the interval there sounds a deeper note, a sense that there must be somewhere a reasonable force which will break in upon the insanity of a continent, restore to it a peace that is more than a hush of foreboding, and recall it to its saner constructive purposes. But when we ask what this force may be, there is a general agreement that it is not to be sought in either of our ruling parties or in any section of the governing class. Lord Rosebery looks for it, if at all, only in that section of society which has no leisure to think and lacks the means to educate itself-among "the working men of the world." In that vision of a proletarian revolt in which the masses will say "no more of this madness and this folly," he confessed the bankruptcy of our directing caste. From a Socialist it would have seemed a natural boast. In Lord Rosebery's mouth it was a cry of despair.

It is the mischief of such an emotional commentary on our age, that it carries us too rapidly into generalities, and deflects us from the humdrum work of contemporary criticism into an attitude of prophecy which benumbs the will and the intelligence alike. Let us for a moment attempt to translate these glowing phrases into

« AnkstesnisTęsti »