I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE.*
THE admirers, and they are certainly numerous, especially among Spectator readers, of Mr. Paget's previous writings will find in his latest volume of essays the rare excellences to which they have become accustomed in his work. There is one quality which, admirable but not essential in other forms, is the very spirit by which the essay lives and moves—that is lucidity. Mr. Paget controls a prose with a clear outline and quiet cadences, which falls on the ear graciously and communicates to the mind, unobscured by rhetoric, the profound or pathetic nature of the thought. A single sentence may supply an instance :- " There are parsons so poor that they might almost envy the bodies which they commit to the ground, beyond the need of necessaries."
Several of these essays reveal Mr. Paget as the champion of a cause which has become unreflectively diseredited in many quarters. Bred on its system and witness of its supersession, he has every qualification for an exponent of the aims and ideals of Victorianism. At least one product of a later generation has found the exposition illuminating and not entirely comforting to his self-conceit.
One of the most interesting chapters on this period is a study of The Water-Babies, a story which we, in childhood, immensely enjoyed but could not altogether absorb, as one absorbed the whole world of Grimm. Mr. Paget explains that childish hesita- tion, for Kingsley's fantasy, it turns out, is a pill, gilded pleasingly and elaborately, but none the less medicine. It is a De rerum natura so far as, or perhaps a little farther than, nineteenth century science could see it. " The moral is plain enough," he says. " Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be ; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be."
It is almost the Shavian religion, and the comparison is rich enough in suggestion to deserve lengthy treatment. Perhaps Mr. Paget will undertake it, or at least will give us some more such candid accounts of that great period of which we are, whether we like it or not, the offspring. We ought to be inter- ested in our parentage, for such interest is one of the ways to self- knowledge, but we are many of us, as it were, posthumous children, groping among records of the dead which Mr. Paget can, if he will, bring for us to life. He is an ideal liaison officer and mediator between the two generations.
- • I Hare Reason to Bdiere. _By Stephen Paget. London: Macmillan, Us. ed.1
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