i8 
LAND & WATER 
November i^, 1917 
with everything else in our literature but the greatest 
passages Tshikespeare and MUton. "I think ", he said. 
■■ poetry should surprisd by a fine excess, and not oy singu- 
larity • it should strike the reader as a wording ot jus 
own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. 
• * * * * 
I have not quoted Keats ; I have barely, referred to a lew of 
his poems ; f have made no attempt to discover tho^ secret 
of his greatness or expose the beauties of his art. In a space 
like tliis one is forced to fasten on one or two details only 
when dealing with so great a writer as Keats and so exhaustive 
a biography as Sir Sidney Colvin's. The structure and 
peculiar merits of Sir Sidney's volume one must also ignore. 
But all the material one c«uld ask for is here; the 
poet's art and thought are very fully illustrated from his own 
words • there are several important additions to our know- 
ledge of him ; and the long critical chapters, especiallv those 
an A'ndymion and laabella are as exhaustive and sensible as 
thev are unafiected- This article cannot be called a review : 
but" I hope that it will be taken as an unqualified recommenda- 
tion. 
Books of the Week 
The Dwelling Place of Light;. By Winston Churchill. 
Macmillan. 6s.net, . . . .^ ^ j 
Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and 
Natural History. By Sm Francis Darwin, T.R.S. 
John Murray. 6s. net. 
Turgenev. By Edward Garnett, with a foreword by 
Joseph Conr.\d. Collins. 6s. net. 
TheChallenge to Sirius. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. Nisbet. 
Cs. net. 
THROUGH The Dwelling Place of Light runs a dual 
motive. It is the story of Janet Bumpus. a New 
England girl of good parentage hving almost in slum 
conditions, and dissatisfied with her hfe, so much 
so that she yields after certain reluctances to the advances 
of the manager of the mill at which she is employed, and 
agrees to marry him — incidentally she falls in love with 
him in the process of yielding. The life of a New 
England mill town is pictured with all the attention to 
detail and fidelity that is characteristic of Mr. Churchill's 
work, and the strike which wrecks Janet's hfe is as realistic 
as anything in Richard Carvel, which is saying a good 
deal. " Syndicahsm and the madness of it, as opposed to 
capitalism, are shown as an evil ; workers and employers 
alike lack the detachment and sanity with which their prob- 
lems should be approached, and that sanity is supplied by 
one Brooks Insall, a writer who surveys and criticises, in kindly 
fashion, the devastation wrought by the warring interests. 
irhis, however, is merely the material side of the book ; 
its chief significance lies in the spiritual development of Janet, 
her struggles to reach " the dwelling place of light," and her 
falls by the way. From the beginning of the work tragedy is 
inevitable, for Janet is of those born before their time, one 
■v^.o asks of life more than conditions will allow. The 
critical reader may detect a false note in the account of her 
ultimate fate, as if the author had loaded the dice against her 
before making this last cast, but she stands as a specimen of 
a type that appears in increasing numbers, as arresting and 
stimulating a conception as any that this author has given. 
m * * * * 
Rustic Sounds and Other Studies, by Sir Francis Darwin, 
is a book to which the term " ripeness " is peculiarly applic- 
able. It is the work of a man of many sympathies, one 
able to see beauty ip the common things of life, a student 
of his kind, and, apparently, possessed by an infinite curiosity 
which led him to intimate knowledge with such diverse sub- 
jects as Stephen Hales, the " father of English botany " ; 
the pipe and tabor, concerning which he dehvered a most 
instructive address to a Society of Morris-dancers — and repro- 
duced it in this book ; Jane Austen, whom, though he 
appreciates, he criticises as well.'and the criticism is illuminat- 
ing. Throughout all these essays runs a vein of quiet' 
humour ; for instance, in The Teaching of Science comes 
the remark — •" A. class of experimentalists exists from whom 
we all suffer— namely, cooks." . The illustration, at first 
sight, is hardly fitting in a disquisition on how science should 
be taught, but on second thought it is eminently fitting. 
Possibly the study, Rustic Sounds, which gives a title 
to the book, will give pleasure to the majority of its readers 1.1 
greater degree than the rest of the contents, for there is in it 
a keen appreciation of the music of the countryside, and an 
Jvident love of nature that has not blunted the sense of 
criticism " Tlie greenfinch is a pleasant singer, or perhaps a 
conversationalist," says the author-and how many who 
have listened to this bird would think to .settle his place in 
one phrase after this manner :^ And' the green woodpecker 
" goes through life laughing, but I am not sure that I should 
like his taste in jokes." These a're little thnigs that bespeak 
the quality of the work, and they are sufficient to as^sure the 
reader that on a winter's night, with a good fire, he could 
find many worse companions than this book. 
***** 
Certain sentences of Turgenev's, in Mr. Edward Garnett's 
appreciation, Turgenev (Collins, 6s. net), bespeak the genius 
of the great Russian. For instance, " If you analyse your 
sufferings you will not suffer so much," and the famous letter 
to Tolstoy. But, for Mr. Garnett's own part in this book, 
lie doth protest too much, so that his work is neither a sketcli 
of Turgenev's life— save for passages in a couple of chapters 
nor an analysis of his work, but merely a eulogy. And 
Turgenev, more human than Dostoevsky, saner than lolstoy 
a reformer in a better sense than Gorki, and more of an artist 
than any other Russian witer, needed no such panegyrics_ 
But Mr. Joseph Conrad has written a foreword, and for 
the sake of that foreword the book should command attention. 
In a matter of five pages Conrad has spoken of " that for- 
tunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no 
doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice,' in 
such a way that one sees Turgenev, and is grateful to Conrad 
for the vivid portrait. Mr. Garnett's study, to hedge a 
little, will be of value to those who do not know Turgenev s 
work and who need that somebody should point out to them 
its excellences, though for that it is better to read Garnett s 
introductions to the collected edition of Turgenev's works. 
Conrad sums up in a sentence the reason why DostoevSky 
and his kind are the popular Russian writers in this countrv 
in preference to Turgenev. " If you had Antinous himself 
in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in protesting 
that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one 
per cent, of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the 
Double-headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant 
grinning through a horse collar." Mr. Garnett has tried to 
express this in many pages ; Conrad's foreword in its entirety 
is a brilliant summary of Turgeney's value to the world. 
***** 
Having won for herself a distinctive place as a writer of 
south-country people and their surroundings. Miss Sheila 
Kaye-Smith," in her latest book, The Challenge to Stnus, 
moves jier story farther afield. Frank Rainger, the central 
figure, grows up beside a village maiden in the Isle of Oxney 
on the Kent and Sussex border, but roams half across the world, 
sharing in the American civil war and seeing the dead cities 
of Yucatan before life drives him back to Oxney. He travels 
the full circle of life and, on his return to Maggie, the best of 
his years have gone, but Maggie, type of the earth that bore 
her, is constant, and her man does not come back in vain. 
One may thus outline the whole of the story, since it is a 
book in which the plot is of small account. It is in the word- 
painting, which this author accomplishes as few can, that the 
chief charm of the book lies ; dawns in Oxney, the half-starved 
army of the Confederacy, \'icksburg in the last days of the 
defence, Yucatan as Rainger found and experienced it-— 
these things are shown so vi\-idly that the reader cannot fail 
to realise them, while the story of Lorena, in thebook's latter 
part, is poignantly beautiful— Lorena herself is an arresting 
creation. Six novels out of ten show talent, and perhaps 
one in a score betrays genius on tlie part of the author ; here 
is one in which genius is plainly evident, caviare to the crowd, 
perhaps, but work of an unusually high order. 
Copies of " The British Firing Line Portfolio/ 
containing a series of Engravings in Colour by Captain 
Handley-Read and forming a wonderful record of the 
Battle-area, may be obtained, price 5 guineas each, 
from the Leicester Galleries, Leicester Square, W. 
COCCL£S 
WIHO- SCREENS 
,&WINDOW5 
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'THE ONUY ^ 
SAFETY CLASS 
