ART. X.-JOHN OLIVER HOBBES

JOHN OLIVER HOBBES is not an artistic, ornate name. It is hardly an attractive name. There is something substantial about it, though; I had almost said commercial. It is respectable, democratic, and middle-class. The way of a woman in choosing a name is often similar to her way in taking a husband. The timid, shrinking, feminine ones do not call themselves Ethelbert or Algernon, they leave such gingerbread for their assertive, strident masculine sisters. They naturally attach themselves to John or George or a business-like initial, cowering behind a formidable mask of a name as some tender 'Arriet does behind her 'Arry. They would do ill to go for protection to a Loren or a Preston; to even a Francis or a Clarence, "Mary Jane Smith" will strike as much terror as "Wilmer Ray Smith"; indeed, my male readers will incline to think more. Some women cannot find noms de plume sufficiently soft and slushy among those of masculine gender, so we have our "Sadie" and "Violet Fane" and "Pansy." We have also our George Eliot, our E. Nesbit, and our John Oliver Hobbes. Mrs. Craigie, it is believed, deliberately chose this last name for its bourgeois smack. She believed her idealistic temperament needed a compensatory balance. If her realism owes anything to her assumed name, here is ample material for High School debates on the subject, "What's in a name?" From some of her stories one would hardly suspect her of idealism. Just as this name is getting to be familiar to American readers, and the elect are fairly sure when he is mentioned that John is a woman, the literary world is startled by news of her death. Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie has finished a brief life. She had fifteen years of production, which, fulfilling wonders as a literary artist, promised even greater. What she would have done, none can say; what she might have done, her admirers, blunting their grief on the divine plan, can only surmise. As Americans we are interested in her, for we gave her birth; as students and seekers after truth we admire and honor her, for she has made a permanent contribu

tion to the world's riches and carved a new niche in the advance

of literary expression.

When a few years ago, in 1891, a thick volume was published containing four novels-short because concise, not because incomplete and bearing the above mentioned pseudonym, some few discerning ones congratulated themselves on a "find." Here was something new, something really unique. Some were piqued later to discover that the author was a woman. This proves the stories were unique. A woman had never before shown a book so sexless. The genius of irony seemed to have guided the pen. Review the titles: "Some Emotions and a Moral," "A Bundle of Life," "The Sinner's Comedy," and "A Study in Temptations" -certainly not sleepy-sounding. No one ever went to sleep reading them. The people are not always nice company, nor such as we should care to associate with, but, for that matter, the strongest books in modern fiction abound in the most exasperating characters. Exasperation seems to have been added only in recent years to the stock of emotions of legitimate literary appeal. Certainly the writers who have impressed our time most strongly have trafficked in it largely: Barrie, Caine, Kipling, and John Oliver Hobbes. A critical justification would doubtless be that the appeal, while not distinctly pleasing, is deeply wholesome. In Lear and Othello, fretfulness at the credulity of the central figures swells the colossal effect of the whole. Moreover, is it just to blame the author for exasperating characters if they are true characters and if there is any benefit to be derived from their delineation? Thomas Sandys, and Anna Christian, and Bishop Sacheverell, and even Oscar Stephenson, though all nerve-racking enough, owe their paternity to the age. If we can produce such people, we ought to know about it. Perhaps we may improve our standard. While Mrs. Craigie's people, then, are not always companionable folk, such as we should enjoy on a day's outing, they are brilliant or-brilliantly dull. Her conversations sparklesometimes with a cold luster, to be sure, but they do sparkleand so many other literary diamonds turn out rhine-stones. Her pages fairly bristle with terse aphorisms, niceties of expression, subtleties of logic. If sarcasm is a weapon that cuts both ways,

she must needs have been an unhappy woman. The pen of irony has had few such masters since the terrible Dean of Saint Patrick's. It is safe to say that one does not turn a page of the four stories already named, of Robert Orange, The School for Saints, The Herb Moon, The Serious Wooing, or The Vineyard, without pausing to read some sentence again and to conclude either that it is strikingly true or that it is keen to feather-edge and has a good deal of truth in it. The sophistries of her society people are worthy of Thackeray while her simple folk remind one of the region of Raveloe, Dolly Winthrop, Mr. Macey, and Silas Marner himself. But the charm for an athletic reader, of these jets and juts of wisdom, sarcasm, humor, and pathos, is that one has to make such intellectual leaps to keep alongside. She indicates the chasm, but she does not help us jump. A sedentary, lethargic reader will be left behind-in disgust. The author cares little; natural selection blesses her with appreciative way-farers. I said no one went to sleep over Some Emotions and a Moral; I should say sleepy people cannot read far enough to get up a drowse. Mrs. Craigie has traveled far from George Eliot in the matter of psychology, and has prophesied the school of the future, Suggestion.

The last page of The Sinner's Comedy is an epitome of our author's matter and manner: Anna Christian, wife of a drunken brute, loved by Bishop Sacheverell has just died of a broken heart. The Bishop's sister says:

"Will you preach tomorrow as usual?"

"Of course," he said, without looking up from his paper. "Shall I not live as she would have me live-working?"

But the future, as he saw it, was dim.

Some years after the Bishop of Gaunt confided his brief love story to a friend.

"But why," said the friend, "since the husband had forfeited every right to be considered, why didn't you punch his head and bear the woman off in triumph?"

"To tell the truth," said Sacheverell, "I was tempted to some such decisive measure-sorely tempted."

"If you had succumbed," said the friend dryly, "she would have recovered."

"Don't say so,” said Sacheverell, putting out his hand; “I think I know it."

The friend, who was a psychologist, went home with more material for his great work on Impulse and Reason.

If the gods have no sense of humor they must weep a great deal.

This may be dangerous doctrine, if interpreted literally, like The Statue and the Bust; but we like a woman who can handle a climax without writing a text-book on psychology.

Cynicism? .

"I have been harder hit than you," said Legge, "I died twelve years ago; the only thing about me that lives is my stomach. I remember they fed it with chops-on the day She was buried. Life is certainly humorous.”

Wit? Why multiply instances? Look on any page. It loses its flavor, detached.

Character? When Robsart entered Rose Arden "sighed, smiled, and chose a brighter thread." You don't need to be told what she thought; it is all there.

songs,

Unlike most satirists, Mrs. Craigie could write exquisite

"Love is a bubble

Love is a trouble-"

has gone the rounds, and the lines of the last stanza are eloquent beyond most modern songs:

"Love is a jig

So tread you a measure;

Love is a dirge

So fill you with grief.

Love is bright wine

To quicken your pleasure;
Love's the North Wind

And man the dead leaf."

The song Rose Arden sang is almost as beautiful in its pathos as "Tears, Idle Tears," which, indeed, it suggests:

"O weep, my heart, for summer days are fled,

The earth is cold, and roses that were red,
Birds that once sang and little things that flew
Are dead.

"The pallid day is moist with chilling dew,

There is no moon, because the wind that blew
The clouds across the sun is stern, poor heart,
Like you."

After this we feel like Robsart, "Dear Girl, sing something cheerful."

Nonsense verse she might have written, too, had she cared to try. In The Serious Wooing,

"There was Harry Augustus, Lord Beauleigh.

He was good, really and truly;

And when pretty dears looked at him with their leers,

He wished 'em to Heaven, did Beauleigh.”

But with all her cynicism and all her sarcasm she is not a pessimist. Individuals are silly and mean and abominable, but she has not lost faith in humanity. The lump is good and waits only for the leaven. She has the sharp tongue and the tender heart of the true reformer. Because some good people are uncomfortable companions, and some bad ones good fellows, she does not turn the moral standards topsy-turvy. In The Herb Moon she says: "A famous priest once wrote that the majority of sinners are so excessively unpleasant that one wondered how the Almighty could feel love for them." Mr. Bernard Shaw would have substituted for "sinners" "saints." There lies the difference, she shirks not truth, even courts realism, but truth for her is not circumscribed by her little horizon of experience. There may be something beyond. It cannot all be put into a syllogism and shot at every mark.

Thones P Beyn

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