Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



459 



ABOUT MEN OF LETTERS. 



THE MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. » 



In the Forum for September Mr. E. M. Chap- 

 man writes a very temperate review of Robert G. 

 Ingersoll, theologian. He pronounces Ingersoll 

 too much the creature of a half-century which 

 made more discoveries in the realm of natural 

 science than it could digest. His influence was 

 largely that of a rhetorician rather than of a 

 leader and inspirer of men. He was a half- 

 hearted and inconsistent evolutionist, only partly 

 true to the very philosophy which he professed. 

 He had no passion for the past. He fell a 

 willing victim to the promoters of the remark- 

 able mechanistic boom which prevailed about 

 the middle of the nineteenth century. " He was 

 so sure that physics and chemistry accounted 

 for everything that he seemed prepared to 

 excommunicate from the congregation of intelli- 

 gent men all who did not assent to a physico- 

 chemical theory of the universe, with the men 

 and women in it." He judged the past by its 

 worst rather than by its best. He measured 

 religion by its accidents rather than by its 

 essence. He was totally oblivious to the side of 

 Christian teaching which insists that there is a 

 place in every man's life for reverence and the 

 spirit of teachableness, " an equal call for him 

 to stand upon his feet, a free man, confident in 

 his ability to go forward along paths of service 

 and progress." Ingersoll thus fails to exert 

 lasting influence because he denied the element 

 of purpose in life, and men will not suffer their 

 lives to be put to intellectual confusion in this 

 wav. 



THE GRIMM CENTENARY. 



One of the centenaries of the present year 

 is that of the publication of the collection of 

 fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In the 

 month of May it was just a hundred years since 

 the first appearance of this classic of children's 

 literature. The Deutsche Rundschau for May 

 commemorated the event by a short article, and 

 in the Book Monthly of Seplcmbcr Julia 

 Chesson tells once more the origin of the 

 famous collection. 



Wc learn how tho brothers travelled about 

 the country, taking down from the lips of 

 peasants and women the talcs which had been . 

 current from generation to gener.ition, with .1 

 view to making an authentic record of them 

 as a contribution to the history of mythology, 

 the natural poetry of the people. The first 

 85 stories appeared in 1812; three years later 

 70 more tales were ready; and in 1837 the 

 edition dedicated to Bettina von Arnim con- 



tained 168 tales, to which were added nine 

 children's legends of Swiss origin. The tales 

 were not slow to win wide popularity, for they 

 appe:Ued to grown-ups as well as to children. 

 Soon translations of them appeared in various 

 European languages, notably in Danish, 

 I'rench, and English, and to-day the " House- 

 hold Tales " belong not io Germany alone, but 

 to the whole civilised world. 



ARNOLD BENNETT. 



The subject of Mr. H. Hamilton Fyfe's inter- 

 view in London is the popular novelist of 

 the Five Towns, who lives at Fontainebleau. 

 .\rnold Bennett, we are informed, has reduced 

 the profession of literature to a scientifically- 

 conducted business. " He studied ' lines ' and 

 ' openings ' exactly like a pushing young com- 

 mercial traveller. He got up early, and sat 

 down to breakfast at eight sharp. He decided 

 what he would do long before he did it. No 

 waiting for ' inspiration.' No dreamy idleness. 

 No false starts. After breakfast, settle down to 

 work ; write so much a day." 



The interviewer recalls a conversation with 

 the famous author in the days of his apprentice- 

 ship. " In a Soho restaurant, where even the 

 cigarettes we smoked were French, he told me 

 one night what he meant to do. He would in- 

 vent sensation stories — fantasies, he called 

 them — to make money, and also because they 

 amused him. He would compile also a manual 

 for authors. He knew this was wanted. He 

 was constantly asked by literary aspirants for 

 advice through the columns of his paper. His 

 business instinct saw a good opening here. 

 Then, turn and turn about with shilling 

 shockers, he would write novels about the life of 

 the people in the Potteries. Not the work-people 

 who, with magic fingers, make [xits upon the 

 wheel, and bake them, and paint them, and 

 glaze them, and send them forth all over the 

 world, to be eaten off and drunk out of and 

 washed in. No; these he did not know, and 

 his art is, before everything else, an art of close 

 intimacy. The middle class he did know, not 

 only how they lived, but what they thought. 

 He would take the men and women of one dis- 

 trict, a district which most of us think of as 

 grey, monotonous, depressing, and would show 

 that life had its vivid nn^ments, its ecstasies, its 

 humours, there as everywhere else. What Zola 

 did for Paris, Thomas Hardy for Wessex, 

 Trollopc for Barchester, Jane Austen for the 

 comfortable classes — rural England during -the 

 e;irly nineteenth century — .Arnold Bennett re- 

 solvi.'d to do for the Five Towns." 



