De Morgan’s Latest
When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Whatever else I may say about De Morgan’s new book, I absolutely refuse to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no difference how long it is, since the writer’s charm pervades it all. But it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than ever there was in Thackeray’s day. And if we are going to spend our time reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be doing, or thinking, or reading.
However, one can’t say very well that he greatly admires a stork, or would if he had a short beak and short legs. De Morgan’s style is his own, and he will tell the story his own way, though we all have a quarrel with him for leaving the most interesting bits to a short “Pendrift” at the end. Did Given’s lover contemplate taking his East Indian poison when the newspapers announced that she was to marry an Austrian noble? Think of cutting that episode off in a few words, while an entire chapter is devoted to a “shortage of mud” for little Dave and Dolly, who were making a dyke in the street! But then, De Morgan doesn’t know how to stop when he begins to talk of children. How he loves them, and all other helpless creatures! He can’t speak even of kittens without a touch of tenderness:
Mrs. Lapping explained that she was using it (the basket) to convey a kitten, born in her establishment, to Miss Druitt at thirty-four opposite, who had expressed anxiety to possess it. It was this kitten’s expression of impatience with its position that had excited Mrs. Riley’s curiosity. “Why don’t ye carry the little sowl across in your hands, me dyurr?” she said, not unreasonably, for it was only a stone’s throw. Mrs. Topping added that this was no common kitten, but one of preternatural activities and possessed of diabolical, tentacular powers of entanglement. “I would not undertake,” said she, “to get it across the road, ma’am, only catching hold. Nor if I got it safe across, to onhook it, without tearing.” Mrs. Riley was obliged to admit the wisdom of the Janus basket. She knew how difficult it is to be even with a kitten.
It is bits like this that make Mr. De Morgan’s story so long, and it is bits like this that reconcile us to its length. I believe most readers won’t care greatly whether the two poor old sisters who have been separated so many years ever do meet again. There is no feeling of climax when they do—merely relief that the thing has finally been put across. It was beginning to look as if it never would happen; and though the reader himself, as I say, doesn’t greatly care, he can see that De Morgan does; he has apparently been doing his best to bring it about, but the cantankerous ones just wouldn’t let him.
On the other hand, who can help loving Given o’ the Towers—all sweetness, beauty, and light? Only—isn’t she really more of a twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself? Truly Victorian, however, are our “slow couple”—Miss Dickenson and Mr. Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards, quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing her to have a romance at this belated hour—her charms faded and gone. But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson’s chances for happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were “good gossips,” and would always have topics of interest in common.
The Pendrift at the end—quite the most fascinating part of the book—tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time sixteen years old.
“You know,” says the girl, Cis,—who is new and naturally knows things, and can tell her parents,—“you know there is never the slightest reason for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and——”
“Shut up, Mouse!” says her father. “What’s that striking?”...
The young lady says, “Well, I got it all out of a book.”
One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely’s, “out of a book.” The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here—that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men.
M. H. P.
The Economics of Social Insurance
Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization—as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.
The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the subject to give a university course in the various forms which social insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.
After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved—as in various types of non-contributory insurance.
Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged to insure with a private corporation. The author’s answer is that, even if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk involved would warrant—larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of the business of the insurance company. But the poor man’s chances of loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his earnings—and even then he might die before he reached it.
The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to American practice is the burden of the present work.
The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea; but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty—the aspects in which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.
Llewellyn Jones.
Prose Poems of Ireland
Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
If you believe, with Chesterton, that “should the snap dragon open its little pollened mouth and sing ’twould be no more wonderful a thing” than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy red-breasted bird; if you are of “the young men that dream dreams” or of “the old men who have visions” the songs and the tales and the wanderings and the mysteries of “Red” Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with a sense of your real nearness to “something lovelier than Heaven.”
Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet, and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at dusk—regardless of the optician’s orders.
H. B. S.