344 



The Review of Reviiiws. 



LITERATURE. 



MEREDITHIANa. 

 Scribne/s for September publishes a further series 

 of letters by George Meredith. 



SAVAGE ON TENNYSON. 



AVriting to John Morley, he said : — 



I should have written to ask leave to review Tennyson's 

 Arthurian Cycles ; but I could not summon heart even to get 

 the opening for speaking my mind on it. — I can hardly say I 

 think he deserves well of us ; he is a real singer, and he sings 

 this mild fluency to this great length. Malory's Morte 

 Arthur is preferable. Fancy one affecting the great poet 

 and giving himself up (in our days ] — he must have lost the key 

 of them) to such dandiacal fluting. — Vet there was stuffs here 

 for a poet of genius to animate the figures and make them 

 reflect us, and on us. 1 read the successive mannered lines 

 with pain — yards of linen — drapery for the delight of ladies 

 who would be in the fashion. — The praises of the book shut me 

 away from my fellows. To be sure, there's the magnificent 

 " Lucretius." 



ON BIBLE, FAITH AND PRAYER. 



Writing to his own son Arthur, he says : — 

 Don't think that the obscenities mentioned in the Bible do 

 harm to children. The Bible is outspoken upon facts, and 

 rightly. It is because the world is pruriently and stupidly 

 shamefaced that it cannot come in. contact with the Bible with- 

 out convulsions. 



Look for the truth in everything and follow it, and you will 

 then be living justly before God. Let nothing fl.mt your sense 

 of a .Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding 

 wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. 

 We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The 

 school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance 

 of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen 

 Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, hut 

 prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which 

 catches the gift it seeks. 



To R. L. Stevenson he wrote : — " Take my advice, 

 defer ambition, and let all go easy with you until vou 

 count forty ; then lash out from full stores. Vou 

 are sure to keep imagination fresh, and will lose nothing 

 by not goading it." 



To Admiral Maxse he wrote : — " Saw Irving as 

 Romeo. The Love Play ceases to present a sorrowful 

 story, and becomes a pageant with a quaint figure 

 ranting about." 



NO CYNIC. 



To W. Morton Fullcrton he protests against the 

 charge of cynicism : — 



None of my writings can be said to show a want of faith in 

 liumanily, or of sympathy with the weaker, or that I do not 

 read the right meaning of strength. And it is not only women 

 of the flesh, but also women in the soul whom 1 esteem, believe 

 in, and would aid to development. There has been a con- 

 founding of the lone of irony (or satire in despair) with cynicism. 



ON GLADSTONE. 



Of Gladstone he writes : — 



On Tuesday night I was the guest of the Kighty Club, was 

 introduced to Gladstone (who favoured me with the pleased 

 grimace of the amiable public man in the greeting of an un- 

 known), and heard a speech from him enough to make a cock 

 robin droop his head despondently. We want a young leader. 

 This valiant, jirodiyiously gifted, in many respects admirable, 

 old man is, I ("ear me, very much an actor. His oratory has the 



veteran rhetorician's arlilicos — to me painfully perceptible when 

 I see him waiting for his cftocls, liming those to follow. Morley 

 and Asquilh are able lieutenants. The captain is nowhere. 



STIMULANTS AND LITER.\TURE. 



To Mr. W. G. Collings he wrote : — 



I do not abjure wine, when it is old and of a good vintage. I 

 take it rarely. I think that the notion of drinking any kind of 

 alcohol as a stimulant for intellectual work can have entered 

 the minds of those only who snatch at the former that they may 

 conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants ma)- 

 refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body after 

 labour of brain : they do not help it — not even in the lighter 

 kinds of labour. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. 

 Productions cast off by the aid of the use of them are but flashy, 

 trashy stuff. 



"OUR LITTLE INDIAN STEAD." 

 This is the title which a writer in the Modern World 

 bestows upon the late Mr. B. ]\I. Malabari. He 

 says : — 



The name of Mr. Malab.xri is a household word among 

 Indians and those who knew him by report perhaps are more 

 numerous and less unconcerned in the loss though are hardly 

 cognisant of the real services of the Parsi journalist. The 

 universal sympathy and regret felt towards the passing away of 

 our little Indian -Stead is so unanimous that Mr. Malabari 

 really deserves all for his solid services towards the substantial 

 improvement of Indian people. 



The writer speaks of his developing English to such 

 fine mastery of st\'lc and diction that in prose and 

 poetry he was admired, congratulated and hailed iiy 

 eminent men of letters like Lord Tenn^■son. Lord 

 Shaftesbury, John Bright, and hosts of others. The 

 writer further says : — 



The fundamental basis for the construction of a nation, lay, 

 in his opinion, in the removing of all social evils found in the 

 society. With this strong belief he set on his mission o( work 

 and his name as a thorough but silent social reforurer is 

 sufficiently well-known. Mainly he concerned himself wilh the 

 elevation of women. He endeavoured to set right the evil of 

 early marriage. It is no praise if we say that he was instru- 

 mental in the passing of the Age of Consent Bill in lS)i. He 

 was also the originator of the Seva Sadhan Sabah which 

 endeavoured to ameliorate the condition of Indian women. 



A GREAT PHILOSOPHER. 



Last month Germany celebrated the eightieth liirth- 

 day of Professor Wilhelm Wundt. and the Deutsche 

 Rundschau for August has marked the occasion l)v a 

 paper, by llerr Ernst ileumann, on the famous [ihilo- 

 sopher and his work. 



Professor Wundt began life as a student of medicine 

 without any idea of esentualiy taking up philosophv. 

 From 1851-56 he carried on his studies at Tiiliingen. 

 Heidelberg, and Berlin, but his contributions to a 

 medical journal between 1858 and 1862 show that he 

 was gradually leaving pure medicine for research in 

 connection with the intellectual life of man. From 

 physiology he was led to psychology, and from psy- 

 chology to philosophy was not a very long step. In 

 1864 he became Professor ol Physiology at Heidelberg ; 

 and in 187^ he was called to Lcipsig. 



