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Lesser novels of a somewhat similar type have been legion since the rise of the gospel of agnosticism. None of them has had any such significance as the work of George Meredith or Mr. Hardy, which stands in another class, and has been separately considered. Yet some have had a wide reading and have doubtless exerted at least a temporary influence, due in no small degree to the part which religion plays in them. Miss Beatrice Harraden's "Ships that Pass in the Night" and Olive Schreiner's (Mrs. Cronwright) "Story of an African Farm" may serve as types. The former can be pretty summarily dismissed as a debauch of sentiment. Its brief popularity is not so hard to understand. Mr. William James somewhere has a fine passage in which he describes the ethical inspiration that came to him from reading a story of martyrdom. The vogue of martyrdom is indeed eternal. Our fathers read the grewsome details of pagan and papist persecution in Foxe, partly no doubt from piety, partly too because of their frank appeal to sensation; and, rude though it all was, there was also something virile in the effect. Hearts were warmed and blood reddened. They took their pleasure sadly in traditional English fashion; but it was gaiety itself as compared with the exercise of reading Miss Harraden; for here are no martyrs, no captains of their souls, but swimmers in a sea of blind circumstance, -the figure of the ship is too vital, with barely energy enough to make their moan before they sink. Such books

have sweetness-but it is the sweetness of overripe fruit; and tenderness - but it is the softness of decay.

"The Story of an African Farm" is a bundle of strange contradictions, far better calculated to rouse a sensation than to produce an intelligible effect, though its author is too true an artist to seek sensation for its own sake. The African Farm itself is nobly portrayed and wins the reader's heart; but the canvas is better painted than the picture. That is in the main a dance of grotesques. Tant' Sannie, the Boer woman, is a mountain of flesh animated by little but fleshly instincts; Bonaparte the hypocrite outdoes Tartuffe and Pecksniff in the extravagance of his Pharisaism; while Lyndall is less human than Undine herself. She has all of Undine's beauty, but instead of Undine's pensive longing for a soul, her elflike person houses only a bundle of nerves tortured into madness by unregulated vanity and passion. Gregory Rose, who loves her, leaves the faithful Em for her, and finally assumes woman's garb to nurse her through a fatal illness, is an effeminate cad whose one attempt to be heroic does not escape the ridiculous.

If the old German overseer be numbered among this impossible company, it must be reverently done, and only because he is too good to be true, with a childlike, Joe-Gargery' sort of goodness, which

1 Of course he lacks Joe's humour. For reasons to be indicated later, it is impossible that the Story of an African Farm should have the humour of Great Expectations.

warms the heart and touches the fountains of tears. Waldo, the uncouth boy, with his mechanical genius, his dreams, his love, his great adventures of the soul, and his tragedy, might conceivably have lived; and he, with Em-sturdy, patient, necessary Em-and the Farm itself, redeems the book. It could not have been written except in a time of religious transition. The problems of a baffled faith are of its essence. It is reasonably safe to conclude that the author had at least a little of controversial purpose in writing it, and that it is in some measure an agnostic tract. If this be so there is no denying the power with which some incidents are told and some arguments presented; nor any escape from the conclusion that in a battle with hostile circumstance the only persons who really seem adequate to the struggle, whether it involve life or death, are the old German whose faith touched ecstasy, and Em with a trust simply reaching

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"The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford" represents another type of theological character, introspective and morbid, yet sketched with a delicate hand. It is the story of a dissenting minister who runs a course parallel to that of Robert Elsmere in respect of his opinions, but differs widely from him in the circumstances of his life. Nervous, self-conscious, anæmic, this man drifts from one parish to

another, finding each less lovely than the last; finding, what is strangest of all, nothing in the people to whom he ministers really worthy of love, laughter, or tears; swayed by doubt, the force of which is however hard to measure, because there is so little to sway; hungering for friendship, but rarely able to show himself friendly; pulling himself together at last with a modified and altruistic stoicism which serves him for faith, and building a sort of manhood, for the construction of which his career as an orthodox believer seems to furnish neither clay nor straw. It is safe to say that no greater triumph of drabness has ever been achieved in English than this Autobiography. Peter Ibbetson's residence in Pentonville presents a riot of colour beside it. Yet it is the work of a genuine literary artist whose purpose one may presume was to narrate a soul's tragedy. This purpose is accomplished; the tragedy is as real as any of Mr. Gissing's; but the whole effect is weakened by the inherent flabbiness of the hero. If one venture to pity Edipus, it is with the pity so close akin to love. Pity flows easily enough into the wounds of Robert Elsmere and Mark Rutherford, each of whom faces a situation as full of genuine tragic possibility; but, alas! it is the pity which verges on contempt.

Of Mr. Mallock, who has chosen to cast numerous clever discussions of theology into the form of novels, I may not stop to speak, nor of the growing school of Modernists who, with Fogazzaro at their

head, are translating new theories of religious faith and practice into the speech of current literature, and finding in English an increasing host of Catholic as well as Protestant readers.

A word must, however, be accorded those who within recent years have made one phase or another of the 'social problem' the subject of their novels. The device is of course an old one. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" went round the world; Yorkshire schools and the Circumlocution Office felt the influence of Dickens; and nowadays no abuse need be so poor as to fail of its pamphlet in the form of a novel. The Chicago stock-yards have thus produced an elaborate horror known as "The Jungle"; while Mr. Jack London periodically prescribes to a sick world his purge of elemental blood and thunder. Much of this writing is hopelessly crude and temporary; indeed it remains crude and temporary even when produced by a man of large literary ability and experience like the late John Hay, as his "Breadwinners" remains to testify. But it is none the less significant both for literature and religion. It suggests the channel in which religious ideas and efforts are likely to flow in steadily growing volume. The meaning of Christianity for the mind, heart, and conduct of the individual in his relation to God and his neighbour, has been a subject of the first interest to multitudes of men for centuries. Its influence in the world has wrought immeasurable progress. Yet in all this time men have but partly

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