CURRENT LITERATURE.
Thai Fiddler Fellow. By Horace G. Hutchinson. (Edward .Arnold,)—The scene of Mr. Hutchinson's clever and well-written story is laid at St. Andrews, the metropolis of golf,—a game upon which the author is entitled to speak with the authority of a master. Golfing, however, finds but a subordinate place in the pages of That Fiddler Fellow, which deals mainly with the misdeeds of a villain deeply versed in the secrets of what is now called hypnotism, but which sixty years ago—the time at which the events narrated are supposed to have happened—was known as mesmerism. The power attributed to the practised hypnotist, of being able to commit a crime as it were vicariously, by means of the instrumentality of a passive subject brought under entire con- trol of his will, has been utilised several times by writers of recent fiction, but Mr. Hutchinson evidently writes with more know- ledge than some of his predecessors. According to him, it is essential to the commission of a crime by a normally unwilling subject, that not only the will but the intellectual perceptions shall be controlled by the suggestions of the hypnotist. The story is evidently intended to leave the impression that no pressure of suggestion could have induced Edith Macpherson to stab her lover, had she known that he was her lover, and that Mattel was only enabled to carry out his fiendish scheme by suggesting the belief that the person who appeared to be George Crombie was really Crombie's deadly enemy and her own. As it seems, from various passages in the book, to be Mr. Hutchinson's aim to show that his story is scientifically credible, it is rather a pity that he has omitted to give any evidence in support of the horrible possibility which he has used as an artistic motif—a possibility which, in the absence of such evidence, we emphatically refuse to accept. Of course scientific criticism of this kind would be unfair had not the author himself provoked it ; and, apart from its doubtful hypotheses, That Piddles. Fellow is a singularly in- genious and interesting tale,
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