"THIS MAN'S DOMINION."• TROUGH This Man's Dominion purports to be,
and is, a story of the conflict between religious scruple and love, yet all its characters are, throughout, consciously or unconsciously, so continually engrossed in the unending struggle to solve great problems of existence which is caused by the passionate revolt of the best type of man against whatever is irreconcilable with its deeply implanted, instinctive love of what is good, that this struggle seems to be in reality the book's main theme. Man identifies goodness with what brings glad- ness—not for self only, but others also—and consequently, when teachers endeavour to inculcate a gratuitous, voluntary killing and trampling under foot of self, he makes answer that there is surely enough inevitable suffering in life to purify from evil without requiring the addition of artificial sacrificial fires, and that the abundance of real crosses venders the imposition of manufactured ones needless. Justly convinced of the nobility and dignity of intellect and reason, men resent any attempt to stifle them ; and though (like Carlyle) they may strive to find comfort in Goethe's line, " Wir heissen Euch hoffen," that does not pre- vent their being haunted by dread lest hope should have no more solid foundation than wise, when all that the bodily eye sees corresponds to Poe's grim definition of life as-
" The play is the tragedy Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."
When religion in various forms steps forward and offers to solve the problem, her aid is apt to be rejected because of the taint of professionalism inseparable from creeds, and the im- pression they give of being a conventional repetition of other people's sentiments rather than a sincere expression of individual belief ; and also in some cases because of the abhorrence excited by the bigotry of disciples capable of believing that whoever does not pronounce their shibboleth aright is doomed to eternal perdition, even though the offender be in other ways blameless, and a best beloved and most cherished relative. And, altogether, as poor humanity goes along its pilgrimage amidst a maze of perplexities not to be disentangled on this side the grave, it seems to be journeying in a labyrinth to which there is no prospect of discovering any clue save that metaphorically indicated by the quaint saying, "Patience and perseverance and a bottle of sweet oil will take a snail to Jerusalem."
The insolubility of life's mysteries, however, does not pre- vent their engaging a large share of mankind's attention; and in our author's treatment of them he (or she) displays thoughtfulness and ability enough to make this book worthy of
• This Man's Dominion. By Peas Cromarty. London; Methuen and Co.
perusal on this account alone, and apart from its decided merit also as a work of imagination. Harley Sandon, the hero, is from first to last a manly and vigorous incarnation of protest against superfluous self-effacement, and of faith that though life is "a moment of anxiety," it is nevertheless " beautiful even in great stress of weather, when you have your own, and follow what you were meant to follow." The spirit that animates him finds vent in such words as these- " Life for me—my own life—no make-believe." And again :
"Myself !—I go forward with whatever gain I have made, to join the race beyond the Hindoo Kookih and yield my contribution to the glorious federation that already exists. This world is indispensable, and I don't call it a riddle of death. I don't blaspheme it as a horror. I don't feebly make the best of it as a bad job. I find a strange and subtle fitness to myself in it. Nature and man, at every point, are made to meet each other, to effect something together. So with man and man. The rela- tions are wonderful, the antipathies and struggles, the desires and affiliations. Sin and pain and fear, love and hope and con- quest—lo ! the crucible and the furnace! and in the midst the spirit of man, unconsumed, becoming aware of itself."
But though he elicits cordial sympathy and approval, he cannot be said to furnish any weapons wherewith to combat the difficulties mentioned above; and as no reasons other than those of the Bible are ever given for his faith in Christianity, we are driven to conclude that his acceptance of the authority of texts was only partial, and that in regard to the meaning of those whose literal interpretation would have clashed with his rejection of self-immolating doctrines, he did not hesitate to rely upon private judgment. Frances, though not the leading female character, is so much the most remarkable, that we should certainly designate her as the heroine, but for the impossibility of applying that name to any one who is not so intrinsically a part of the story as to be neces- sary to the action. A sphinx-like being, graceful, brilliant, pathetic, with a touch of diablerie, a strange lure of fas- cination, and a personality at once definite yet inexpressible, the gleams of light flashing upon her now and again in the enshrouding darkness reveal a personage so unlikely to have a counterpart in either real life or fiction, that we are tempted to wonder if she may not indeed be the sort of dream-creation she playfully claims to be; for she comes, she says, from Xanadu, and is ever seeking to find the way back to her dear mystical country, but failing, because " there is no one who knows. Every way one is told of goes in quite the opposite direction, through the usual, along by the ordinary, up and down the stupid, to the land of bathos and water- gruel." She is a creation who may well have been inspired by Wordsworth's " our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, the soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had else- where its setting, and cometh from afar; " and may be meant to suggest that a theory of previous existence in some other state will possibly account for the "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised" that often trouble the inhabitants of this world.
Previous page
