BOOKS.
MISS LOANE'S NEW BOOK.*
IT is difficult for the ordinary writer to read Miss Loane's books year after year without an agony of envy. She is always writing on the same theme and yet somehow or other she is never stale, fiat, and unprofitable in the way that most of us are when we find ourselves in her position. Besides envying her her power of never repeating herself, or, if she does repeat herself, doing it with such "a difference that the old becomes new," we must envy her her delightful capacity for seeing the world of men and women around her in such vivid colours. How, we wonder, does she come to hear and see so many strange, amusing and memorable things ? How is it that charwomen, mothers of twelve children, old dames, grizzled sea dogs, and street Arabs say such exceedingly wise and witty things to her when to most of us they are inscrutable and vacant? We suppose the answer is something like that given in the lines :
"Gently comes the world, To those who are cast in a gentle mould."
Vivid comes the world to those who have vivid minds, just as adventures are to the adventurous. At any rate, and be the explanation what it may, her good sense, her humour, her eye for the picturesque never fail her any more than her wise and kindly sanity. In spite of her sad and squalid experiences as a nurse amongst the very poor, she has never lost her faith in human nature or in its capacity for improvement. We may put her mood far higher than that of Emily Brontë when she told us to,— " Journey on, if not elate, yet never broken-hearted."
She is not merely never broken-hearted, but in the best sense elate, and notw ithstan din g her shrewd apprec iation of the knaves and fools of this world, she always in the end contrives to show us that man is a noble animal. One of the very wisest of the essays in Miss Loane's new book is that on "The Choice of Occupation." It pricks many bubbles and dissipates many follies. In her own breezy and convincing way Miss Loane magnificently demolishes the " environment " humbug, the plea that we must expect little from the poorer classes because they are the victims of their environment, and that it is not their The Common Growth. By M. E. Loam, London; Edward Arnold. res.) kelt, poor things, if they not only break half the Command- ments but fail to show any sort of thrift or human prudence. She shows ftom her own experience how utterly untrue and unjust is this view of the poor. Again and again children who seem to start with no chance in the world do exceedingly well, while others who start with no such bad handicap do exceed- ingly ill. Here is Miss Loam's douche of good sense on this vital matter :— "Man was born a living soul, and therefore can never be wholly dependent on environment, nor can the same environment ever be the same to any two living souls. Two sons have an affectionate, ever-indulgent mother. One son attributes his failure in life to the temptations to selfishness and extravagance which early arose from the yielding weakness of her disposition. The other is con- vinced that he owes his success to the sunshine of indulgence poured out on his childhood, and the necessity laid on him by his own nature never to take mean advantage of her love. One son of a drunken and dissolute man is perverted by his father's influ- ence, and as a mere lad learns to ill-treat his mother and sisters, while another even earlier becomes their anxious protector. I know of a drunken, worthless, poverty-stricken cobbler and his wife who had twelve children, every one of whom grew into respectable, hard-working men and women, fulfilling all the duties of life, and providing their parents with the means—they could not give them the inclination—to follow decent courses in their old age. It is indeed an admirable evasion of man to lay his disposition on the charge of' anyone and everyone but himself, and his misfortunes to all causes save that of his own behaviour. These children were neglected and as far as possible misled by their parents, but they chose a very ordinary schoolmistress as their guide, and kindly, industrious neighbours as their examples. Had they been disposed to listen, there were others about their path who would have gone beyond the instruction of their parents, and introduced them to a life of crime. A few weeks ago a learned lecturer told his hearers 'that the Thames Embankment is crowded with men 'who only -need a chance.' It sounds a kindly and in some respects a hopeful doctrine, but in reality the Embankment is chiefly haunted by men who have lost the power to use even the best of chances, because chance in this sense implies choice, and they have not the strength of mind to make a prudent choice and stick to it. I have never yet learnt the life-history of wastrels of either sex, even from their own lips, without finding that they have had chances' in pro- fusion. What they have lacked has been wholesome discipline, and strict control might still save many of them from a life of personal degradation and social injuriousness. Working in the poorest and least desirable homes, one becomes convinced that original, inborn differences in character are often stronger than environment, whether good or bad, and learns to believe in the reality of 'given' souls which may have no traceable connection with earthly parents and temporal surroundings."
A reviewer who attempts to quote all the best things in Miss Loane's book sets himself an impossible task. All we can do is to put up as big and as conspicuous a finger-post as possible, and advise readers of the Spectator to buy the book and read it, and the rest of Miss Loam's books as well, before they attempt to dogmatise on social questions, or, again, before they allow themselves to be led by other and less safe guides in matters which concern destitution and the relief of poverty.
A most attractive chapter is entitled "Mother and Me— and Father," and the first of the moving anecdotes of the brave and delightful children, almost always girls, who, when mother is struck down with illness, take command of the house, concerns a soldier's daughter, and shows that a hero in the field may sometimes be also a. hero in the home :— "Nearly everyone knows what Mother can do, but only an invalid Mother knows the value of Me, and very few people seem to know that it often takes 'Mother and Me—and Father' to prevent the world from turning the wrong way round. In one most touching case, Mother was about thirty-six, and her health had broken down after the birth of her eighth child : Me was just eleven, and had been specially excused from attendance at school in order that she might wait on the sufferer; Father had been a soldier, and was a little short of forty. Pension and wages amount to £112s. 6d_ a week; he has .260 in the savings bank, and his life is insured for the same sum ; every one of the eight children are entered in the Prudential Endowment Fund, which entitles them to a small sum of money on reaching the age of fourteen, and again at the age of twenty, and the wife is to receive a 'benefit' when she is forty-eight. These habits began very early in married life, for when he went to the South African War leaving Me, aged three, her little brother, and his wife ill in bed his absence was not a lean grief,' An hour after the farewell the sick woman turned her pillow—very wet with tears—and found that her husband, in addition to all other provision, had slipped five bright sovereigns under it as a special gift for the child who was born three days laterr.
"Me, whose baptismal name is Mona, is a great friend of mine, and gives me many details of her life and work. After what has been said of Father's saving habits, the liberal scale of diet and the large part of the recital filled by cooking may be found a little surprising by those who imagine that thrift on a guinea and a half a week means living on three-quarter rations, supported by the dim hope of still more slender meals forty years hence. In estimating Ale's achievements, it must be remembered that at the present day, and in her precise state of life,' a girl of eleven is usually a very young child, and fourteen is the ordinary age to leave off white pinafores and begin to take housework seriously:' Unfortunately we cannot quote all of " Me's " description of her life in her own language or the charming idyll of how father on his half-day on a Wednesday makes the family "a. beautiful great plum-pudding." We must, however, find space for the account of Father's Sunday afternoon :- "Father's a teetotaller, and when the other men has a bottle of brandy for a Christmas present, he has a box of cigars. lie smokee one every Sunday afternoon, and eats two pennyworth of almond rock, and reads the paper, and we each has a penny to do what we like with. Father's very good to we, and us must be good to he. Our George abet never took to Father like the others. When Father is late coming home of a night, he'll never say :'Where't dad?' It's all along o' Father not being with him when he IFB2* little, and doing for him same as he done for us. He was born when' Father was fighting them Boers, and he was close on three when' Father come back. George were sitting on Mother's lap the first4 tea Father were having in his own house, and George says to Mother : Looky there at that sojer, Mother, eating of your sugar!' When Father was at the war, I used to say to Mother, 'Ain't we got no daddy like other children ? ' and she'd tell me as plain as she could, but I didn't hardly understand. When he comed home we was real proud, and if anyone hurted us we'd sing out, 'I'll tell my daddy,' whether we meant it or no. Of course I remembered hint for a long time, and in bits I never forgot. The day he left he says to Mother : Good-bye, sweetheart. P'raps I'll come back with medals on my breast and a wooden leg.' I didn't know what medals on the breast might be, so I didn't Care; but I'd seen a wooden leg, and I was too frightened even to cry. I didn't know you could say your prayers except of an evening, so I waited, and mother was quite took aback when I knelt down and said: Please, God, don't let daddy have a wooden leg."
We must now leave Miss Loane's book, but, before we do so, we will give an example to show that she is perfectly prepared on occasion to tell us a good story without the slightest moral, but merely on account of its picturesqueness or poignancy. This is what the widow of an old salt once told Miss Loane about the way in which men loved their ships in the old days of the Navy :— " And yet in those days men would love a ship—I mean the very ship herself—in a way they can't do now. There was one Mintham used to talk about until I'd say in joke : Why, anyone 'ud think she was your first wife !' After all the times I've heard him name her, rye clean forgot whatit was—something heathenish, as they usually was in those days. Well, one day we went out walking on Chatham extension. • Come away home,' he says all of a sudden ; I feel bad." What is it?' I says all of a tremble, for his face was quite purple. They've been and turned her into a coal-barge,' he says,' and she's that shrunk they're hauling her round with a single hawser.' I hadn't the heart to laugh, for if he'd seen his own mother a slave to savages, he couldn't have spoke more solemn."
That is a delightful comparison, "slave to savages," and shows what excellent rhetoricians are the "natural and non- chalant persons "—as Walt Whitman called them—who live in mean streets. One of the exasperating and idiotic habits of the well-to-do and cultivated is to imagine that they have a monopoly of the instinct for words. They have nothing of the kind.
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