In Social Ideals in English Letters (Houghton, Mifflin, and Co,
Boston and New York ; Gay and Bird, London ; $115) Miss Vida D. Scudder has produced a series of studies which Ire marked by a great deal of knowledge, discrimination, and felicity of expression. She has read widely and deeply, and the value of her appreciations of the lights thrown by books on the social aspirations and conditions of their writers and their times is heightened by the fact that she is careful to avoid letting her own advanced (though by no means revolutionary) sympathies warp the soundness of her literary judgment. Her intense interest in the pathos of Langland's picture of the hard lot of the peasantry in feudal England, and in his striking conception of the dignity and illuminative power of honed toil, does not tempt her to regard " Piers Plowman " as a classic, or to be unwilling to admit that his "visions," "redolent of the Boil," are "heavy with it as well" So again, at this end of the live centuries of English literature, Miss Scudder, while recognising the "noble passion" and the "convincing tone " — derived from "minute and ready practical knowledge of actual industrial life" —in Mr. Blatchford's " Merrie England," points out that "the reasoning powers of the author are simply those of the child" ; and that "the book is riddled by fallacies from cover to cover." She has much to say which is both just and pointed about Mr. Ruskin's teach- ing on questions of social reform. His influence, she says," at a com- plete discount fifteen years ago, is at present rising again into a force which must be reckoned with in England,"—a fact which has been well elucidated in Mr. J. A. Hobson's thoughtful book, lately reviewed in our columns. But perhaps the most impressive feature of the latter part of Miss Scudder's book is the stress which she lays on the clear teaching of Matthew Arnold as to the virtues of some approach to material equality, even from the point of view of "culture." Many people will say that it was Matthew Arnold's own fault if he was not taken quite seriously as an apostle of egalite. Miss Scudder will lead some of them to wonder whether, after all, the fault has not lain with his readers.
Previous page
