W

HEN fifty thousand copies of a new story have been sold in Britain, and probably as many more in the United States, in the course of a few weeks, and when it has been received by some with intense bitterness and fierce denunciation, while others have awarded to it the most glowing eulogies, all will be ready to admit that the book cannot be an ordinary one. Few will dispute that "The Christian" is not to be classed with those fictions and their name is legion-which excite no more than a languid interest, and which we lay down without taking the trouble to read them to the end. Whatever be its merits or demerits, this novel is one which must force all serious men to think over the problems which the author intended to set before us.

It is a curious fact that whereas in the United States Mr. Hall Caine's novel has been welcomed with almost extravagant adulation, in England it has been angrily, and by some almost contumeliously, condemned. I think that the explanation of criticisms so widely opposed to each other is that in England-chiefly owing to accidental circumstances and to the erroneous impressions of some of its earlier reviewers-the book has been judged from points of view far different from those which the writer intended. In England it has been assumed that the hero of the book is meant for an ideal Christian, and even for the follower of Christ needed by the nineteenth century. The author has then been assailed for putting forth an utterly false exposition of the Christian life, and for holding up to our admiration a weak, hysterical, self-deceived fanatic, whose work ended in deplorable failure. Mr. Stead, in the

*The remarkable diversity of opinion among the critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, with respect to Mr. Hall Caine's new novel, "The Christian," seems to give special value to this estimate of the work by Dean Farrar, which appeared in the "Contemporary Review" for October last. The critique, while discriminating, is yet just and sympathetic, and as such will, it is believed, be valued by the many, among SELF CULTURE'S subscribers, who are or who may become readers of the muchbelauded and at the same time much-contemned novel.-ED. S. C.

"Review of Reviews," writing with characteristic straightforwardness, and not without much genuine appreciation, understands the author to have implied that the Christ of holiness had failed, and that such an unhappy being as John Storm is now necessary to work out the redemption of the world.

There does not seem to be any real ground for such a view unless it be in the perhaps unfortunately selected title of the novel, and in expressions which have, apparently without sufficient authority, been attributed to the author. But if for any such reasons the motive of the book has been misinterpreted, we may feel sincere sympathy with the writer amid the flood of vituperation to which he has been subjected. Let him not take it too much to heart. In ancient days, he will remember, even Homer had his Zoilus.* In modern days critics no less eminent than Voltaire thought it enough to say of the "Divina Commedia" that the Inferno was revolting, the Purgatorio dull and the Paradiso unreadable. A contemporary of Milton described the "Paradise Lost" as "a profane and lascivious poem." Keats was ordered by the "Edinburgh Review" "to go back to his gallipots." Byron characterized Wordsworth's magnum opus as

"A drowsy, frowsy poem called 'The Excursion,'

Writ in a manner which is my aversion," at the very time that Coleridge was describing it as

"An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted."

Humbler mortals, if they have done their best, and if their motives have been high and pure, may listen with indifference to the abuse of critics and "the irresponsible chatter of harebrained frivolity." Wordsworth wrote to a friend who had commiserated with him on the contemptuous ridicule to which he was subjected, that he need not be grieved on this account, since he

* A Greek rhetorician of the fourth century, B.C., who was designated, from his severe criticisms on the author of the " Iliad," the "Scourge of Homer."

felt sure that in the long run his poems would be found to co-operate with all beneficent influences, and to make the happy happier. And Dante gave noble advice when he put into Virgil's mouth the words:

"Lascia dir le genti

Sta come torre fermo, che non crolla Giammai la cima per soffiar di venti: " which Carlyle translated into homelier English when he wrote, "Get the thing done and let them howl."

Leaving the title of the book out of sight for the moment, it is, on the face of it, a love story, in which a tragical complication is introduced by the passion inspired for one another by two natures radically opposed. Is it too much to conjecture, that in forming his conception of John Storm and Glory Quayle the writer was much influenced by the doctrine of heredity? The heroine is the grand-daughter of a French actress, and the daughter of a fanatical devotee. The hero is the son of a saintly mother and of a father devoted to worldly schemes. Almost every incident and scene in the story turns on the apparently hopeless relations between two natures so fundamentally dissimilar, yet powerfully drawn to each other by a mutual love.

In presenting the love story, the writer unquestionably meant at the same time to urge his own moral and religious convictions upon the consciences of his readers. But it would be as unfair to attribute to him the dramatically presented views of his various characters as it would be to quote as the sentiments of Shakespeare or Robert Browning the opinions which they merely put into the mouths of very dubious personages. For instance, the Prime Minister, who is John Storm's uncle, being an agnostic, and feeling genuine distress for the broken fortunes of a nephew to whom he is sincerely attached, comes to the very hasty conclusion that the relations between Church and State are unsatisfactory, and that the Church ought to be disestablished. That may or may not be the writer's own opinion; but from the merely dramatic and incidental presentation of the Prime Minister's views, we have no right to assert that it is. The Premier's conclusion is formed on very partial grounds, and is not brought forward as possessing much intrinsic weight.

This remark has a much wider application. All John Storm's opinions many of which are crude and violent — have been represented as though they were the author's own. This is surely a mistake in the point of view. John Storm presents the type of an intellect intensely sincere, but very imperfectly enlightened. He is passionate in his methods, and far too impetuous in his sweeping judgments. He means well; but he often acts most unwisely. He tries to revolutionize the world by impossible methods, and he fails to master the impulses of his own heart. He is without wide knowledge, and wholly without the serene wisdom which can make allowance for men who are struggling amid trying conditions. His mind is so ill-balanced that he sinks into strange follies. He has none of the large insight which can penetrate to "the heart of goodness in things evil," and see a germ of life in the mouldered tree. John storm is a fanatic, and an unwise fanatic, who egregiously fails in his schemes, of which many are foredoomed to overthrow because they are injudicious and ill-considered. But although he exhibits no skill in adapting means to ends, he stands for "the Christian," in so far as he realizes, with only one fatal and overpowering exception, the Christ-like ideal of self-renunciation. He is a man with all the burning enthusiasm which filled the heart of Charles Kingsley in his youth, but with little of his robust manliness and sovereign sanity. He represents a type which has sprung up in the Church since the days of Frederick Denison Maurice.

Amid all their intellectual limitations and moral onesidedness, such men present, to an age in which the faith of many has dwindled to a shadow and the love of many has waxed cold, the saving virtue of self-sacrifice and absolute sincerity. John Storm is a man of pure heart and high mind, if of very moderate intellect and very shallow attainments; the book is the study of such a mind driven into despair, into hysteria, into absolute madness, by the vain attempt to win victory in the most awful of human strugglesthe struggle to master an overpowering human affection. It is monstrous to attribute to the writer the design of presenting this distracted creature, torn asunder by two opposite impulses, as the

new ideal of the Messiah needed by our century! On the contrary, he overwhelms John Storm with the most disastrous failure. He shows that this failure has arisen because the young clergyman's soul has been so tortured by lack of power to subdue the love for a woman that at last he mistakes a murderous impulse for a "divine mandate," and narrowly escapes being shut up for life as a homicidal maniac. But here I must correct the entirely unwarranted inference that, in the scene between John Storm and Glory Quayle, which is the climax of the book, it was meant to be inferred that the hero and the heroine fall at the supreme moment into mortal sin. This has been assumed in more than one review. Such a dénoûment would have been shocking, horrifying, thoroughly inartistic, and entirely needless. I can only say that when I read the book it never even crossed my mind that such a sin was hinted at; nor can I find anything to justify the assertion that Glory Quayle only marries John Storm upon his deathbed in order to save her future reputation. There is not a word to show that the writer had any such thought in his mind, and it is unfair to attribute it to him when he gives no justification for it. He ought not to be held responsible for the mistaken inferences of his reviewers; and in future editions he will, I hope, exclude the possibility of so complete a misreading of his intention.

I think, too, that it would be well if the writer removed the impression which his book leaves upon the minds of many, but which he can hardly have intended, that the aims, the methods, and the whole work of the Church of England are hopelessly ineffectual; that she is not even attempting to grapple with the awful problems around her; that so plethoric a worldling as Canon Wealthy is a type of all the clergy who are not like the hero; that the Church is honeycombed with worldliness; that there are no sincere and whole-hearted endeavors to effect real and striking amelioration except the spasmodic denunciations and crude schemes of a man like Storm. I am quite sure that the author had no such intention; but I think that he would have done well, were it even by the addition of a couple of sentences, to show that this in no way resembles his real

opinion. If it did, no caricature of the conditions of the Church could be more

gross.

I am well acquainted with a large number of clergymen, and among them all I do not know even one who distantly resembles Canon Wealthy. He closely resembles the worldly archdeacon depicted by Anthony Trollope in "Barchester Towers;" but though there have been epochs in the Church when men of such a type have been numerous, they have left very few, if any, representatives in the present toiling and suffering days.

As regards faithful, continuous, selfdenying labor, I know not only scores, but hundreds of clergymen who, in faroff country parishes, in bleak mountainvillages, in lonely seaside hamlets, in densely-crowded manufacturing centres, in black mining districts,-with no hope of reward, and on pittances less than the salary of a rich man's butler,— are hurling the whole force of their energy and enthusiasm against the force of prevalent temptations.

Day by day they are training the young; taking the little children by the hand; gathering the boys into brigades and bands; furnishing clubs and readingrooms for the young men; providing simple services for the poor and ignorant in humble mission-rooms; holding meetings for the mothers; befriending the servants; sending the sick to convalescent homes; finding a foretaste of heaven amid the miseries of earth by making all around them a little better and a little more hopeful.

Some of the scenes of Mr. Hall Caine's book are laid in parts of Westminster, London, well known to me, and I can say from long personal experience, that the efforts of the clergy were devoted ten times more to the poorest of the poor than they were to the rich; that wherever there was poverty, and drink, and crime, there the clergy were most unremitting in their infinitely trying work; that with an heroic faith which was often unsupported by any earthly encouragement, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and Broad Churchmen were to be seen toiling in the slums, not like the

Sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe
Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the
wretched,

Nursing in some delicious solitude
Their dainty loves and slothful sympathies;"

and that the police bore spontaneous and hearty testimony to the amelioration of desperate conditions and the marked diminution of crime. The rising generation especially were looked after, and every care was taken to improve the prospects of the future by inspiring the aims, and ameliorating the conditions, of those who are "the trustees of posterity." And all this is being done by clergymen whose earthly prospects are as poor as they possibly can be. Mr. Hall Caine's book may be most useful to all, from the true and indeed realistic pictures which it presents of the

"Dim populous pain and multitudinous woe,
Unheeded by the heedless world, which treads
The piteous upturned faces underfoot
In the gay rout which rushes to its ends."

All which he describes exists, and even worse than he describes; and, amid the fanfare of self-glorification in which we in England have been recently indulging, it is well that we should remember how many dim isles of misery lie in the splendid ocean of our national prosperity. Anything which may arouse us to do more than we are doing is useful; but if, while we are doing our very best, there is still a fearful residuum of crime and misery, it would be wrong to make it a reproach to us that man cannot do, and never has done, the work of Providence; that much of the best work, now and always, is quiet, noiseless, unknown work; that never were the efforts of the many who are "striving to raise strong arms to bring heaven a little nearer to our earth" more numerous and more energetic than they are now; that, so far from those efforts being left unblessed, the ameliorated conditions of life among the very lowest, the steady diminution of crime, the universal preaching of the Gospel to the poorest of the poor, furnish abundant cause for hopefulness and gratitude.

But while I have endeavored to place Mr. Hall Caine's "The Christian" in a light which may obviate unjust condemnation of it, by pointing out that it must, in the first instance, be judged dramatically and artistically as a simple story, I must add that it is full of very valuable lessons. Glory Quayle is not to me at all an attractive heroine; but the story of her erratic career may serve to illustrate how fearful is the battle which many a loving and impulsive woman has

to fight single-handed in this cruel world. The coincident delineations of the life among the jeunesse dorée are full of powerful warning, and may serve to check the heartless and cruel villainies towards women of which they are said to be guilty by those who profess to know them, as I do not pretend to do. Assuming that the sketches of some theatres, of the race-course, of some men's clubs, of the music-halls, of the low public-houses, and of the irreligious section of fashionable life in the west end of London are accurate, they certainly deserved the indignant reprobation with which John Storm denounced them; even if his method of counteracting their inherent evils was foredoomed to be ineffective.

The state of society is not, indeed, worse, but, as far as we are able to judge, far better than it has been in most past ages even in Christian countries; but it is well for us not to rest upon our oars, and so be swept devilward by the subterranean currents; nor should we ever be tempted to say "Peace, peace" when there is no peace. The warfare with evil in the world needs all the best energies of all the best men in every age, and "in that warfare there is no discharge.'

Much of the meaning of the book as the dramatic presentment of a certain modern clerical type is contained in the singularly interesting, and by no means umsympathetic, sketch of a severe revival of medieval monasticism. The Father Superior is represented as a good and holy man, and it is not at all hinted that any of the monks are immoral or hypocritical. But, by a masterly analysis of thoughts and motives, enshrined in a most interesting narrative, Mr. Hall Caine shows how fatal in some natures is "The strife

Of poor humanity's afflicted will

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.” The monastic life- as may be shown in multitudes of historic instances, and by the express testimony of not a few mediaval monks and supreme saints-though, in the holiest characters, it produced admirable types of saintliness like St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas, yet in the case of multitudes, who were wholly unfitted to meet its responsibilities and difficulties, fostered a hopeless misery, a blighted uselessness, and an unspeakable degradation. Mr. Hall Caine shows that for many natures. -even when

men are sincere and pure

such reversal of the divinely appointed conditions of ordinary life is illogical, and may lead, even in the case of noble and well-intentioned men, to dangerous results.

There is surely much that is of far more than passing interest in a book which was evidently intended to grapple with themes so serious as these. But I think that "The Christian" has one yet deeper and wider lesson. So far from implying that the ideal set before us by the Saviour of the world is obsolete, it indirectly yet decidedly sets it forth as divine and unapproachable. We cannot imitate the externals of the life of Christ, as sweet St. Francis of Assisi vainly tried to reproduce on the bleak hills of Umbria the outward features of a life spent on the hot levels of the Galilean lake. Nor can most men reproduce the spirit of Christ by trying to live celibate or wandering lives, or by such frantic endeavors as those of Stigmatists and Convulsionnaires. We can only follow Christ's footsteps from afar, though we can aim at

THE LATE HENRY GEORGE

OURNALISM has recently had to mourn the death of two New York editors, whose activities in their professional calling won eminence for both, though under unequal conditions and in diverse paths. With regard to Mr. George, the eminence was perhaps more truly notoriety, and notoriety achieved not so much from devotion to a great newspaper career, as in the case of Mr. Dana; but from devotion to an idea, which became the dominant force of his life, and to the exposition of which the apostle of land nationalization brought rare powers of earnest, forceful and often eloquent argument. There was, moreover, in Mr. George's case, a pathos, of which, when he was struck down, everyone was instantly sensible, in the sudden termination of an honest and purposeful life, while taking active part in a great election contest as the representative of an economic cause which he emphatically made his own, and at the same time valiantly championing the interests of sound morality and good government. If Mr. George has not had length of days, it was his, in his

showing at least those elementary Christian graces which are the very antithesis to the self-asserting, persecuting, and malignant arrogance of all forms of Pharisaism.

Such a life is not attainable by convulsive and hysterical efforts, but by uttermost faithfulness in "the trivial round and the common task." Our best efforts to be good, we know, are often unsuccessful. And if our lives often seem to be hopeless failures, it is something to know that the limitations of our success may be only temporal. If these lessons are not, in so many words, emphasized in "The Christian," it is because they lie outside the special object of the book. Yet such lessons are neither excluded nor denied. After all deductions, and all qualifications, it seems to me that "The Christian" is of much more serious import, and of much higher permanent value than the immense majority of novels which the Press continues to pour forth in such endless profusion. It is a book which makes us think.

F. W. FARRAR.

AND C. A. DANA life-time, to see the fruit of laborious years spent in thought for humanity, and in arduous toil, at the hazard of his life, for the amelioration of his fellow creatures living under economical conditions which, whether ill or well conceived, he deemed could be bettered, if not radically changed. To these high humane ends, Mr. Henry George brought, besides unquestioned ability and great single-mindedness of purpose, that which always wins the great heart of the people— ardent enthusiasm, undaunted courage, and an honesty and disinterestedness of motive, worthy of a less speculative and, practically, more attainable cause. That death interposed as it did, was not an unkind fate for him, since it cut him off when his name was in well nigh everyone's mouth, not only as the exponent of economic views which, rightly or wrongly, he had toiled strenuously to propagate, but as the denouncer of that giant evil of the time-"Machine" government in municipal affairs, and the fearless advocate of a righteous civic administration.

It is said that Mr. George leaves behind him a new economical work, well nigh completed, in the writing of which