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Authors and Books.

Sir Edwin Arnold, in the introduction to his « Light of Asia, » said that in composing the poem he had been inspired by an abiding desire to aid in the better mutual knowledge of East and West. It is doubtful whether he had any prevision of the extraordinary popularity that remarkable work would attain, or of two most unlooked-for events that have followed its publication: the formation of a small European cult of « Neo-Buddhists, » or more remarkable still, the translation of the work into Eastern dialects, in which, according to the publishers, it has become « a religious guidebook for the pious Buddhists, » superseding to a certain extent their own difficult and voluminous scriptures. There is little prospect of Neo-Buddhism taking any great hold of the European mind. Even in the great poem, in which the system is placed in its most favorable light, and paraphrased as far as possible into the language of the Gospels, there is much to repel those who have been trained in Christian doctrine. Its dark pessimism, and the importance it attaches to purely physical evils, are in sharp contrast to the New-Testament scriptures, and mark a distinction far more significant than any superficial resemblance in ethical precepts.

« The Great Renunciation, » however, could at the most only half fulfil the author's idea of bringing about a mutual knowledge; and therefore the publication of his complementary poem, « The Light of the World, or the Great Consummation, » is an event of much interest. If any readers of the former work supposed that the author was a convert to Buddhism, and had come forth as a missionary of the system, the new poem should disabuse their minds of the error. The « Proeme » of the book is brief and significant:

The sovereign voice spake, once more, in mine ear:
« Write now, a song unstained by any tear. »
« ؟What shall I write? » I said. The voice replied:
« Write what we tell thee of the crucified! »
« ؟How shall I write, » I said, « who am not meet
One word of that sweet speaking to repeat? »
« It shall be given unto thee! Do this thing! »
Answered the voice: « Wash thy lips clean, and sing!»

As a literary work, we should not be inclined to rank it quite as high as its predecessor; though it contains many passages of lofty musical expression and of great beauty. The fact that it covers such well-trodden ground is against its artistic success; but we would place it far above any previous epic dealing with the same theme. The prosaic and turgid efforts of poets, English and foreign, especially in the eighteenth century, who imagined they were producing immortal works, are alone enough to cause some prejudice against an effort of this kind. The first section, with its rhymed ten-syllabled couplets, is, we think, the weakest part of the work—some of the sentences being inordinately long and involved, and the rhymes occasionally coming in as a heavy drag.

In the introductory portion, the episodes of the shepherds of Bethlehem and the homage of the Magi are finely conceived and described. The first book introduces the reader to Mary Magdalene, five years after the Crucifixion; she is visited first by Pilate, who is on his way to the Emperor, to answer for his cruelties to the Samaritans. He suffers from a consuming remorse, and parts of the interview are highly dramatic. As Pilate takes his leave, there arrives the last survivor of the three Magi, a Buddhist, who has once again made the journey from India to learn more of the precepts of the great Teacher. In the succeeding books, Mary narrates the story of the Gospel, her convert occasionally taking advantage of a pause in the narrative to make some comparison or draw some parallel between the two systems of creed.

The following burden, the echo of the song of the angel-heralds, recurs again and again in the intervals of the poem:

Peace beginning to be,
Deep as the sleep of the sea,
When the stars their faces glass
In its blue tranquillity;
Hearts of men upon Earth,
From the First to the Second Birth,
To rest as the waters rest
With the colors of Heaven on their breast.

Love which is sunlight of peace
Age by age to increase,
Till Anger and Hate are dead
And sorrows and Death shall cease;
« Peace on Earth and Goodwill! »
Souls that are gentle and still
Hear the first music of this
Far-off, infinite bliss!

—There is something suggestive of Shelley's music in the chime of these lines; and in the following (describing the journey of the Shepherds to Bethlehem) and other similar passages, we have touches of description like those of Tennyson:

Therewith hastened they
By olive-yards, and old walls mossed and grey
Where in close chinks, the lizard and the snake
Thinking the sunlight come, stirred half-awake.

Here is another passage of beautiful description:

But over Galilee, the first rays spread—
Tender and pearly—of that Dawn, who takes
No taint of Earth, whereon her white feet walk.
The hills of Gadara were ridged with rose.
And every wimpling wavelet of the Sea
Rolled a light edge of silver on the gloom,
A blue belt widened—

The poet has both seen and studied the scenes that he describes, and the local coloring is well maintained throughout. Lovers of art will note the influence of two of Holman Hunt's greatest pictures—the Shadow of the Cross and the Scapegoat, which almost appear to be literally described in the text. The author was scarcely wise in bringing in the idle stories to be found in the spurious Gospels. Apart from the anachronism of including legends which originated centuries later than the era of the poem, their puerility sadly detracts from the dignity of the narrative.

The poet is not « orthodox » —few poets are. Mary teaches unmistakeable Universalism. With prophetic foresight, she predicts the rise of sacerdotalism and of the then unknown dogmas of Imputation and Substitution, and emphatically repudiates them.

Love's glory—not Love's gore—redeems all Worlds!

She is very severe on mercenary professions:

Mark!
For what were wrought in purpose of reward
Though the high goal be Heaven, wins us no Heaven,
Wins wages only of this World and men;
The portion of the hypocrites.

And as regards the work of the churches, this is one of the poet's own reflections:

Banners which bore His cross, have mocked His cross,
Scattering His land with slain; till now at last,
Truly the sword, not peace, is what He brought!

The poem is a tempting one to quote from; but we forbear, especially as every lover of good poetry will secure the book. If we mistake not, it will yet have a great missionary influence in India. The acceptance of the half-Christianized « Light of Asian » marks a certain dissatisfaction with the old creed; and « The Light of the World, » a simple paraphrase of the Gospel—without the « Blood and Fire » which mediaeval Europe endeavored to mingle with it, and which is so utterly obnoxious to the Hindu—will prove acceptable in quarters where creed-hampered missionaries have labored almost in vain.

The Antiquity of Letters is being demonstrated by evidence as irresistible as that which proves the antiquity of man. Professor Sayce contributes to the Contemporary Review for December an important article on the latest results of Oriental archæology. The discovery of an old Arabian or Minæan civilization, and the original possessors of the alphabet which the Phœnicians were supposed to have invented and passed on to the Jews, throws quite a new light on the early history of the Old Testament:— « The discovery of the antiquity of writing among the populations of Arabia cannot fail to influence the views that have been current of late years in respect to the earlier history of the Old Testament. We have hitherto taken it for granted that the tribes to whom the Israelites were related were illiterate nomads, and that in Midian or Edom the invaders of Palestine would have had no opportunity of making acquaintance with books and written records. Before the time of Samuel and David it has been strenuously maintained that letters were unknown in Israel. But such assumptions must now be considerably modified. The ancient Oriental world, even in Northern Arabia, was a far more literary one than we have been accustomed to imagine; and as for Canaan, the country in which the Israelites settled, fought, and intermarried, we have now evidence that education was carried in it to a surprisingly high point. In the principal cities of Palestine an active literary correspondence was not only carried on, but was maintained by means of a foreign language and an extremely complicated script. There must have been plenty of schools and teachers as well as of pupils and books. » In writing of some of the results of recent page 58decipherments, he states that a considerable proportion of the inhabitants of Babylonia could read and write, but that in Assyria education was not so widely spread. Women as well as men enjoyed the existing advantages, and boys and girls pursued their studies at the same schools. The ancient civilized East was almost as full of literary activity as in the world of to-day; books were multiplied, and there were plenty of readers to study them. From this he argues that « the Israelites in Canaan were surrounded by nations who were in the enjoyment of ancient cultures and abundant stores of books. There is every reason for believing that the Israelites also shared in the culture of their neighbors and the literary activity it implied. We now know that Egyptians and Babylonians wrote and read not only in the time of David and Solomon, but ages before; why should not the Hebrews also have done the same? If the historical authority of the Old Testament Scriptures is to be overthrown, it must be by other arguments than the unwarranted assumption that letters were unknown in the epoch which they claim to record. »

A contributor to the Spectator writes suggestively on the educating power of books. He says: « ؟Do they strengthen men's insight into life and their power of acting wisely in life, or do they spread a bewildering haze o'er life and attenuate men's power of acting wisely in it? If they do the former, they educate; if they do the latter, they paralyse. After all, millions of men have become true men without the aid of books; and millions will become true men for years and perhaps centuries to come, without the aid of books. Books alone will never educate men whom they do not teach how to live. It is life that educates; and it is only those books that help us to live truly which educate in the same sense. There are too many books which teach us to live falsely, to live in a half-and-half fashion; which teach us to question without helping us to answer our questions, to wish without obtaining; to hunger for that which is not bread, and thirst for that which satisfieth not. Such books do not educate, they deteriorate the mind; and of such books there are probably many more than of those which raise it. »

Mr Vincent Pyke, late m.h.r., who occasionally courts the Muses, has published the following little sonnet, in which he has made a decided lapse into prose in the two concluding lines:

Mors Janua Vitœ
All things that bloom—of much or little worth—
Must fade, and die; and be renewed again;
Death is of new existence but the birth,
And birth but new existence after death,—
Small space is there between the primal breath
And that we last respire upon the earth;
No space between the final sigh of pain,
That severs mortal memories in twain,
And the first tremor of the fuller life
That dawns upon us when Death's friendly hand
Throws wide the portals of the glad new land,
And wakens to existence largelier rife
With grander possibilities than fools
Can comprehend—being blinded by the schools.

The late Capt. Burton was exceptionally free from the animal propensity for destruction euphemistically known as « sport. » Lady Baker, writing of him says: « He was very particular about the taking of life, and would not allow anything in the house to be killed, saying we had no right to destroy life. One of his greatest remorses was shooting a monkey. 'It cried like a child,' he said, 'and I can never forget it.' … The day before his death he saw a little robin drowning in a tank in the garden, crowds of birds sitting round on the trees watching it drown and doing nothing for it. He got Dr Baker to get it out, and warmed it in his hands, and put it in his fur coat, and made quite a fuss until it was restored, and put it in a cage to be kept and tended until well enough to fly away again. He was very fond of kittens, too, and always had one on his shoulder. When he lay dead, his kitten would not leave him, and fought and spat to be allowed to remain. »

؟What (asks a home paper) shall be done with M. Jules Lemaitre, the critic of the Débats? He has his knife into Shakspeare, whom nobody, he says, cared much for until he was « illustrated, enlarged, and enriched » by Gautier and M. Taine. And to think that the divine Williams actually has a statue in Paris! This candid critic admits that he cannot read English, and that he does not intend to try. French is good enough for him. He is wroth indeed with those traitorous Frenchmen who rank Shakspeare as « a European genius » while they consider Racine as only a « national » one. Well, Frenchmen, traitorous or otherwise, are not the only men who have done that. But despite the « insufferable » Tempest and the boorishness o As You Like It, Shakspeare owes what reputation he has to the French readers and critics who invented him. « We, the French, invented Shakspeare quite as much as the English did. » There is nothing so instructive and so original as French criticism; and perhaps a translation of M. Lemaitre's views upon « Williams » would be a pleasing speculation for a publisher in England, where we know so little about the poet who ought to sit below Racine's salt.

The Pall Mall Gazette has revived the following anecdote: « It may be interesting to record that Newman was once near to becoming a journalist instead of an ecclesiastic. From 1838 to 1843 he was editor of the British Critic, the organ of the Oxford movement. 'I believe I am correct,' says Canon Oakeley,' in saying that it was Mr Newman's articles in the Critic which led to his being invited by the proprietors of The Times to come out in that journal with some remarks upon literary projects of the day, and that the result of these overtures may be seen in the celebrated letters of « Catholicus. » ' These letters made such an impression upon the directors of The Times that they were anxious to obtain Newman's services regularly on their staff. He was offered a large salary, one report says as much as £1,800 a year. 'Shall I be free,' asked the young man, 'to say what I think?' The reply may be imagined, and Newman declined the tempting proposal. »

Some surprise has been occasioned in Rome by Carducci, one of the most gifted of living Italian poets, consenting to be nominated a member of the Senate by the late Premier. Carducci has always been conspicuous for his extreme opinions, and has written some very bitter things about the House of Savoy; and when the Government created a special professorship of Dante in the Roman University, he refused it, and the chair has been vacant ever since. He also refused the Order of Savoy, and the pension which is attached to it. But the Queen, who is a passionate admirer of his poetry, seems to have tamed him; and he thus explains his submission:— « Inasmuch as the Queen is a beautiful and noble lady, it shall not be said that a Greek and Girondin poet passes by so much grace and loveliness without saluting them. »

The new illustrated weekly, Black and White, is a bold experiment in journalism, and so far as can be judged from appearances, is likely to be successful. Its promoters have done wisely in departing from the models of existing papers of the class. Black and White is more of an art-magazine and less of a newspaper than either the Illustrated London News or Graphic; and it has secured an excellent literary and artistic staff. Sambourne's full-page cartoon is in his best style; Mr Robert Louis Stevenson writes of his cruises in southern seas; there is a sonnet by Swinburne; Mr James Payn contributes a good story, admirably illustrated by W. Rainey; Mr Herkomer has a splendid full-page study, « The Confession; » Harry Furniss, Frank Dicksee, W. Hatherell, F. Skinner, J. F. Sullivan, and other artists, all contribute of their best; the portrait of Cardinal Manning, engraved from a crayon, is exceedingly lifelike, and a fine work of art; there is a grand double-page engraving of Rembrandt's portrait of his mother; and altogether the purchaser will admit that he has received exceedingly good value for his sixpence.

The Dunedin Star home correspondent writes: Messrs Hutchinson have, I hear, accepted a story by a New Zealand gentleman named Vogan, which is called « The Black Policeman. » The same firm have under consideration a story by Mr Oliver Growden, of South Dunedin, which ran serially through Zealandia.—Only one story was published serially in Zealandia, so this must refer to « The Mark of Cain. »