When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

Little Essays of Love and Virtue, however, is, after all, only upon a special subject, even though of extreme importance. There are others among the books we live by which I must speak of here. It is tiresome to point out that we are all self-made men or women, consciously or unconsciously, in the sense that if we gain control of our habits, to a very large extent we acquire control of our lives. If, in Some Things That Matter Lord Riddell did no more than point out this old truth, his book would not be worth mentioning. What makes it so well worth mentioning, so much more deserving of discussion than any I can enter upon here, is the fact that Lord Riddell tells how to observe, how to read, and how to think—or perhaps I should say how to develop the habit of thought. I think, so able are his instructions, so pointed and so susceptible of carrying out by any reader, that his book would carry due weight even if it were anonymous. But for those who want assurance that the author of Some Things That Matter is himself somebody who matters, let me point out that he is one of the largest newspaper proprietors in the world, a man whose grasp on affairs has twice placed him at the head of news service for two continents—once at the Peace Conference in Paris and afterward at the Disarmament Conference in Washington.

Some Things That Matter is the best book of its kind since Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, a little book of trenchant advice to which it is a pleasure again to call attention. Of all Mr. Bennett’s pocket philosophies—Self and Self-Management, Friendship and Happiness, The Human Machine, Mental Efficiency and Married Life—How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day is easily of the greatest service to the greatest number of people.

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I read Dr. George L. Perin’s Self-Healing Simplified in manuscript and enthusiastically recommended its acceptance for publication. Dr. Perin was the founder of the Franklin Square House for Girls in Boston, a home-hotel from which 70,000 girls, most of whom Dr. Perin knew personally, have gone forth all over these United States. His death at the end of 1921 was felt by thousands of people as a personal loss. He left, in the manuscript of this book, the best and simplest volume I know of on what is generally called autosuggestion. And I have examined a great many books of the sort.

Discarding all extreme claims, Dr. Perin says in the first place that the mind can heal; that it may not be able to heal alone; that obviously no form of healing can be successful without a favourable mental state; that the favourable mental state can usually be acquired by the sincere and conscious effort of the sufferer. This effort should take the form of certain affirmations.

It is at this point that the ordinary book on autosuggestion breaks down—so far as any practical usefulness is concerned. Either it degenerates into a purely technical treatise or it becomes lost in a mysticism which is to the average reader incomprehensible. What has long been needed has been a book like Self-Healing Simplified, readable by the ordinary person who has his own troubles to contend with and who knows not how to contend with them; who is willing to believe that he can do his part by cheerful resolutions and faith toward getting well, but who has no idea what to do.

Dr. Perin tells him what to do, what to say, what to think and how to order his daily life. Actually Dr. Perin does much more than this; his own confidence and personal success inspire confidence and give the impulsion toward one’s own personal success. However, excellent as the book might be, it would be worthless if it were not clearly and simply expressed. It is. I remember no book of the kind so direct and so lucid.

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It is a pleasure to feel that his new book, Poets and Puritans, introduces T. R. Glover to a wider audience. The author of The Pilgrim, Essays on Religion, The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society, Jesus in the Experience of Man and The Jesus of History is a scholar and somewhat of a recluse whom one finds after much groping about dim halls at Cambridge. A highly individual personality! It is this personality, though, that makes the fascination of Poets and Pilgrims—a volume of studies in which the subjects are Spenser, Milton, Evelyn, Bunyan, Boswell, Crabbe, Wordsworth and Carlyle. Mr. Glover notes at the foot of the table of contents: “An acute young critic, who saw some of the proofs, has asked me, with a hint of irony, whether Evelyn and Boswell were Puritans or Poets. Any reader who has a conscience about the matter must omit these essays.” There you have the flavour of the man! It is expressed further in the short preface of Poets and Puritans:—

“Wandering among books and enjoying them, I find in a certain sense that, the more I enjoy them, the harder becomes the task of criticism, the less sure one’s faith in critical canons, and the fewer the canons themselves. Of one thing, though, I grow more and more sure—that the real business of the critic is to find out what is right with a great work of art—book, song, statue, or picture—not what is wrong. Plenty of things may be wrong, but it is what is right that really counts. If the critic’s work is to be worth while, it is the great element in the thing that he has to seek and to find—to learn what it is that makes it live and gives it its appeal, so that, as Montaigne said about Plutarch, men ‘cannot do without’ it; why it is that in a world, where everything that can be ‘scrapped’ is ‘scrapped,’ is thrown aside and forgotten, this thing, this book or picture, refuses to be ignored, but captures and charms men generations after its maker has passed away.