Early in March, 1895, one of the Boston clergymen advertised Robert Grant's "Art of Living," as our Boston correspondent reported at the time, and on Sunday, March 17, another prominent minister took up "Trilby." So it is evident that, even if Boston authorship is on the decline, as so many New Yorkers enviously declare, the Boston clergy are going to keep alive the interest in literary matters by emphatic words to their congregations. "Have you read 'Trilby'?" was the theme of the Rev. George W. Bicknell's sermon, and the topic crowded the church. The Reverend Doctor declared that he had spent five hours reading the book, and had decided that it was a story of magnificent possibilities, but that its morality was "as one viewed it." He considered the tale far-fetched and over-drawn and lacking in healthful flavor, and placed it in the same class of art with the nude paintings at the World's Fair—a position to which, we presume, the author would not object. Then he launched out into an emphatic declaration that it was time for the pulpit to speak out against art of this kind.
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Du Maurier's heroine has been heard of over in Brooklyn. A married woman, aged twenty-nine, got into a dispute with her husband, recently, as to the morals of the young model, and proved her point by "smashing him over the head with an earthenware jar." In the newspaper in which we read of this intemperate act, the husband's age is not given, nor the side he took in the argument, before he was shown to be wrong. The fact that he got his head broken proves little—except the folly of arguing with a woman; nor the additional fact that he refused to appear against his wife in court. But the case is one in which a good deal might be said on both sides—if earthenware jars were not introduced too early in the discussion.
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Mr. du Maurier has worse offenses to atone for than the breaking of the Brooklyn man's silly head. But for his entertaining book we should have been spared the unreadable prose of "Biltry: a Parody on 'Trilby'" and the unspeakable verse of "Drilby Re-versed," the former by Mary Kyle Dallas, the latter by Leopold Jordan. In vulgarity and banality, these two precious productions run each other a close race. Of the two we think "Drilby" a trifle the less objectionable, merely because the proportion of text to white paper is somewhat smaller. Both are poorly illustrated, and printed on much better paper than they deserve.
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E. C. of New Albany, Ind., thinks that "Trilby's" possibilities as a vehicle of evil to the much-considered American "young person" are emphasized by a conversation recently overheard by her between two feminine "young persons" in Indiana. "What is this 'Trilby' everybody is talking about?" asked one of these. "Oh," replied the other, "it's a book—a novel." "They say it is awfully bad," said the first young person. "Yes, I've heard so; but it isn't so at all. I read it clear through, and there wasn't anything bad in it. I didn't like it either; there is too much French in it." "French?" commented the first young woman; "well that's it, then—all the bad part is in French." "I hadn't thought of that," mused the other one; "I suppose that's just the way of it. Anyway, it isn't nearly as good as 'Dally.'"
PLATT. THE NEW SVENGALI.
THE HYPNOTIZING OF MORTON.