274 



I)IS(:()Vi:hy 



dranath Tagorc's poetical prose is frequently quite lost in 

 a plethora of words. The fact is that the essence of 

 poeticiil expression is the quality of suggestiveness, while 

 the essence of prose expression is the quality of directness. 

 The combination of these two qualities is almost impos- 

 sible, and the best writers sooner or later find themselves 

 out of their depth in trying to maintain it. Artificiality 

 sets in after the first few paragraphs, and personality 

 is lost. It is for this reason that we fail to detect Hearn's 

 personality in these tales. That is why they are not 

 literature of the first water, for in great fiction we are 

 invariably shown life through the medium of the wTiter's 

 own personality. 



In Karma we encounter the problem of whether a man 

 should give the woman of his heart a full, written confession 

 of the faults in his past life. However great the emotion 

 that impels a writer to tell the story that centres round 

 such a problem, it will never be fully conveyed to the 

 reader unless his sympathy with the hero of the story is 

 maintained. Our sympathy with the hero of Karma is 

 not maintained, because his character and his emotions 

 are enveloped in a mass of words. As for the angel 

 of his dream, she is a sentimental prig who, a year after 

 sending the man away from her as the result of reading 

 his confession, suddenly arrives in the city of his exile 

 and informs him that she will help him to bear his suffer- 

 ing, most of which seems to us to have been brought 

 about by herself. 



If de Maupassant had written on such a subject, he 

 would have developed the priggishness of the woman's 

 character with a conscious irony, and he would have 

 ended by making the man turn the tables against her in 

 refusing to have anything to do with her when she even- 

 tually turned up again to claim him. If Tchehov had 

 treated it, he would have shown two human beings played 

 upon by emotions too strong and subtle for them, and 

 he would have ended on a note of pity for both of them, 

 still wavering as to the future courses of their lives. Both 

 %vriters would have dismissed the plot in a quarter of the 

 space used by Hearn, and both would have inspired us 

 with feelings of sympathy or pity for one or both of the 

 characters. 



1 have purposely judged Hearn by high standards 

 because there exists a considerable element of greatness 

 in his somewhat uneven productions. He can touch a 

 responsive chord in our hearts by the perfect expression 

 of feelings that have come to so many of us. A Ghost 

 is full of such human echoes, of which this passage is an 

 example : " Oh ! the first vague charm, the first sunny 

 illusion of some fair city — when vistas of unknown streets 

 all seem leading to the realisation of a hope you dare 

 not even whisper ; when even the shadows look beauti- 

 ful, and strange fa9ades appear to smile good omens 

 through light of gold I And those first winning relations 

 with men, while you are still a stranger, and only the 

 better and the brighter side of their nature is turned to 

 you ! . . . All is yet a delightful, luminous indefiniteness 

 — sensation of streets and of men — like some beautifully 

 tinted photograph slightly out of focus. . . ." 



Of the papers in this volume " The First Muezzin " con- 



tains an account well wrought from many sources of the 

 origin of the Moslem Call to Prayer, and a prophetic 

 note dominates the essay on " China and the Western 

 World," which originally appeared in The Atlantic 

 Monthly as far back as 1896. Bath papjrs are written 

 in clear and forceful prose. 



E. L. 



The Electric Furnace. By J. N. Pring, M.B.E., D.Sc. 

 (Longmans, 32s.) 



How amazingly large and detailed science has become 

 in the last fifty years ! Physics is but a very small branch 

 of science, and electricity of physics, and here is a book of 

 five hundred pages on the electric furnace, a small branch 

 of electricity. The electric furnace, just that. And five 

 hundred pages of close print with diagrams, photographs, 

 index and the whole make-up of the modem scientific 

 handbook. WTiat amazing people these scientific authors 

 must be ! How do they manage it ? Do they themselves 

 know everything in the books they write ? What ex- 

 cellent memories they must have ! 



This book is the latest volume of the series of mono- 

 graphs on industrial chemistry that are being edited by 

 Sir Edward Thorpe. It is a general technical discussion 

 of the position and prospects of high-temperature 

 industrial chemistry. The author has many qualifica- 

 tions for writing this book. For years he has been engaged 

 in research in electro-chemistry, he has read widely, he 

 has visited many of the chief electro-chemical centres of 

 Europe and America, and he has a good eye for the 

 economics of a commercial undertaking. Also, like many 

 of the scientific book-writers of late, he has had an exceed- 

 ingly valuable war experience with the Ministry of 

 Munitions. The book is written for technical readers 

 only. Such like the information to be fresh, up-to-date, 

 relevant and as accurate as possible. This book, therefore, 

 I judge, will be useful to them and is well worthy of its 

 inclusion in Sir Edward Thorpe's series. 



The electric furnace is connected in the minds of most 

 of us with the name of Moissan and the production of 

 artificial diamonds. We have not heard so much about 

 these diamonds of late, and without doubt they are not 

 yet sufficiently numerous and large to disturb the pleasant 

 connection existing at present between Kimberley, Park 

 Lane, and the general public. In this book their real 

 place in the category of useful things is sufficiently 

 indicated by their not being mentioned at all. No, the 

 electric furnace's real value is in making less spectacular 

 things like steel, carbides, and nitric acid. 



The electric current has been used in manufacturing 

 processes in two ways. There is its chemical or electro- 

 lytic action, wliich is the principle on which the large- 

 scale manufacture of such metals as aluminium and sodium, 

 and the refining of metals like zinc and copper, depend. 



Secondly, simply as a producer of heat it has led to the 

 attainment of temperatures higher than those attained by 

 other methods, and this has naturally opened up an 

 important field of chemistrj" and, as it has happened, of 

 industrial chemistry, for many of the products isolated for 

 the first time in the electric furnace, like artificial graphite. 



