DISCOVERY 



273 



makes monotonous reading. Mrs. Radcliffe, chiefly 

 known nowadays as the authoress of The Romance of the 

 Forest, created the " novel of suspense," and showed a 

 marked ability for descriptions of romantic scenery and for 

 puzzling the reader as to the development of her plots. 

 She gives the reader the impression of the existence of 

 supernatural agencies in the background, but, somewhat 

 to his disappointment, explains them away at the end of 

 her tales as merely material agencies. Terror was brought 

 to a much higher pitch in the novels of Lewis and Maturin. 

 Both wrote conscious melodrama and never spared a 

 scrap of gruesome detail, and both owe much to Con- 

 tinental, particularly German, literature ; but The Monk 

 and Melinoth the Wanderer move vividly and powerfully to 

 their tragic ends, and never cease to hold the reader's 

 interest. The Oriental tales of terror, whose vogue was 

 t.irted by Becliford's Vathek, and the Rosicrucian novel 



irted by Godwin and dving a natural death in Shelley's 

 \ .luthful and hysterical romances, gave place to the new- 

 fashion set by Sir Walter Scott in Thomas the Rhymer and 

 The Lord of Ennerdale. 



Since the days of Scott, the tale of terror, though it has 

 long ago ceased to be the fashionable rage, has been widely 

 developed. In America Hawthorne and Poe confined 

 themselves chiefly to the supernatural tale of terror. A 

 vast number of writers in England contemporary to them 

 [iroduced tales of material as well as of supernatural terror. 

 Amongst later novelists the pastmaster of terror is 

 Stevenson, whose Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde may be 

 I • 'iisidered as ushering in the psychological novel and 

 indicating its even greater terrorising possibilities than 

 the supernatural one ; Joseph Conrad has done some 

 remarkable work on somewhat similar lines, while Hugh 

 I \\'alpole possesses a weird capacity of allowing a suspicion 

 of supernaturalism to hover in the background of his 

 romances. 



.\ bibliography would have added value to Miss Birk- 

 head's book, but the footnotes supply a wealth of refer- 

 ences to the bye-ways of eighteenth-century literature. 



E. L. 



we find the creative artist creeping into the role of the 

 accurate scientific observer. In describing wild life in 

 the Severn estuary, Kidd suggests a possible explanation 

 of the southward migration of birds " before the food- 

 supply fails them, and before they have any physical 

 want known to us indicating a coming change in the 

 conditions of life." He puts this down to " the deep 

 emotional effect on all wild nature of the waning light in 

 the declining year, and the uncontrollable instinct to 

 follow the sinking sun begotten in those whose habits of 

 life it affects " ; anti he goes on to show how " deep down in 

 the psychology of peoples lies the corresponding primor- 

 dial instinct of the waning day." He indicates the fact 

 that dj-ing men have begged to have their faces raised 

 to the setting sun, that many of our houses are built to 

 face the west and our great European cities have grown 

 towards it, till the " west-end " has in most cases become 

 the residence of fashion, and how the " emotional, adven- 

 turous, sanguine " races have trended westward till they 

 have conquered the ocean and followed the sun " over the 

 virgin continent of the New World." 



In utterances such as this we have the key to the spirit 

 that dominates this great little book. It is an undog- 

 matic, questioning spirit, probing suggestively into 

 questions of science and natural history which have yet 

 to be solved. In particular it concerns itself with the 

 problem of how far it is instinct and how far mental 

 process that governs the actions of the animal kingdom. 

 Since the time of Darwin a vast amount of literature has 

 been devoted to this subject. But no scientist or philo- 

 sopher has surrounded it with so beautiful and quiet a 

 setting as one can find in these short essays — a setting in 

 which wild bees drone, moor-hens skim across deserted 

 waters, and the nightingale sings from the shadows of 

 great trees ; into which the shot of a gun or the clank of a 

 railway train penetrate only to fade awaj' again quickly 

 and to remind us symbolically that man's civilisation is 

 ephemeral and that " it is the things of nature alone which 

 are eternal." 



E. L. 



A Philosopher with Nature. By Bexj.^mix Kidd. 

 (Methuen & Co., Ltd., 6s.) 



Those who have read Social Evolution and The Science of 

 Power will always remember Benjamin Kidd as a man 

 who brought the mind of a poet as well as that of a scien- 

 tist to the study of sociology. He possessed the faculty 

 of opening up vistas of new meaning behind the hard facts 

 of everyday political and international life. To him all 

 the world was a stage, and he portrayed its past, contem- 

 porary, and possible future evolution with a dramatic 

 suggestiveness. Whether we agree or disagree with the 

 ideas that he read into international history, we who have 

 read his work will be grateful to his genius for stimulating 

 the mind to fresh trains of thought on social and inter- 

 national tendencies. 



In this book of collected studies we see a quieter side 

 of his mind — that of a natural historian living and delight- 

 ing in the animal life of the countryside. But here again 



Karma, and other Stories and Essays. By L.vfc.'^dio 

 He.\rn. (George Harrap & Co., Ltd., 5s.) 

 These posthumously collected and republished stories 

 and papers of the late Professor in English Literature at 

 Tokyo University make rather disappointing reading, 

 and they hardly do justice to his personality. A con- 

 sciously adopted poetical prose, which is the medium that 

 this well-known .Vmerican literary critic has used in the 

 twolongesttalesin this volume, " Karma" and " A Ghost," 

 is an insidiously dangerous form of literary expression. The 

 great Russian novelist Turgenev tried his hand at it, and, 

 though we cannot say that he entirely failed, we can say 

 quite certainly that the tales of this type which he wrote 

 are not comparable with his other work ; De Quincey 

 came near to success in this direction in The English 

 Mail Coach ; Walt Whitman's vers libre attains to great 

 heights of beauty, but often falls into bathos and 

 bizarrerie ; the effect of that modern mystic Rabin- 



