New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1888-10-07

Upon this Chequer-b board of Nights and Days
Hither and thither moves. and checks, and Stays,
And ono by one back in the Closet lays
In the deep and sombrc soul-westlings and
musings of the self-contaned boy Waldo one is
constantly reminded of Tennyson's poem Sup
posed confessions of sccond-r rate, sensitive mind
not in unity with itself" This soul passes indeed
through the same stages Of agony and faith and
doubt which Matthew Arnold has so wildly rep
resented in the magnificent soliloquy Of Empe-
docles on Etna,' but it does not attain the height
reached by the Greek sage. In Waldo, however,
we have not the Man Of Action but the Man of
Thou ght alone He cannot reconcile himself with
Life because fit field for his activity is unattain-
able Under other conditions he would have de-
veloped into Poet, and the gloom of his solitary
youth would have passed of in the relief of ex-
preston. But he is untitled by his cultureless
adolescence for the worlds work. Brought up as
a hermit the life of the anchorite is the only one
for which he has any vocation, and he squanders
the resources of a fine mind as flower wastes its
perfume and beauty upon some desert. This Of
course is represented as the irony of Fate or
Chance by the author, who it must be said seems
scarcely capable of percevng the brighter aspects
of life. 1t may indeed be that life on an African
farm tends to strengthen pessimst tendencies and
to obIiterate optimism, though on general prin-
cipes one would be inclined to doubt this. In the
present case, however, it is undenable that we
find only vivid forms of melancholy, and that
Waldo and Lyndall and Eve might be strayed in
habitants from the City of Dreadful Night,
The study of Lyndall is strong piece of analysis
but the girl remains mystery to the end. Her
ambition appears to be wholly material and she
is strangely wanting in moral sensblity. The
misfortunes under which she sinks are mainly
her own work In her yearning after power of
some kind she employs the most reckless methods
of attainment. Her sad and short career is the
wild effort of O wholly undisciplined and mex
perienced mind after freedom q futtering and
beating Of the bars in that prison-house of en-
vironment from which there is so little prospect or
possibility of escape
1t is a sad book with sad ending; and yet it
must not be concluded that it is in any way dull
There is power throughout it; power not only of
analysis but of observation. It's realism is
instinct with life. Its people are not marionettes
but living and women and children.
Occasionally the carefulness and minuteness of
detail remind the reader of Tolsto and Dostoi-
evslxy. The descriptions of the African farm
life and of the aspects Of Nature on the veldt
strike one as pictures which have been burned
IN upon Ine Dfa1n OF tnc W11ter through years
of monotonous repetition. The habitual reverie
which is Wado's normal state, and which is due
quite much to want of contact with his
kind as to natural disposition, seems to have
been the condition most familiar to the author,
too. Nothing can exceed the lccnness of her
perception, when she addresses herself TO the
description Of real life. but at every opportunity
she appears to sink back, with sigh of re-
lief, into the dreamy mental state in which
Waldo passes his life.
The pessimism of Olive Schreiner too is pc
culiar. AT the first glance it may be thought
one with the pessmsm which springs directly
from the materialism of the higher modern cult
ure; but it is not the same. 1t is that which
is born of the unguded efforts of bold and Wig
orous minds to solve the problems of life with
the aid of external observation alone 1t is the
pessimism of the Book of job rather than that
of SchOpcnhauer; faithful reflection Of the
dependency which is apt to steal upon those
who seek to wrest from Nature the secrets of
the universe. There is nothing new in these
questionings or in the effects Of their futility
upon the human mind but the old tragedy never
loses its interest, the venerable problems never
cease to fascnate.