STEVENSON'S "JOHN SILVER."

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1669, 8 February 1913, Page 9

STEVENSON'S "JOHN SILVER."

W. E. Henley 7'a 3 the original- of the villanous • John Silver in "Treasure Island." The resemblance between the poetcritio of Edinburgh and London and the . dreadful, blind old man who shrieked,so horribly as' he rolled under tlie.• horses'' hoofs, may not bd. apparent at first. But then no one expects the ; original of , a literary character to, resemble the type ho has suggested., It is like the philoux jical relationships .between two, words ' a' ■; couple of thousand years apart,'in, which : tho kinship consists of. the. letter "a" '■ found at tho beginning of one word and at the end of another. Stevenson, wTote to Henley from Hyeres: ."I .will now make a confession.; It was the sight of ' your, maimed strength)and masterfulness that begot John Silver in , Treasure Island.' Of course, he is not in' any .other quality <i or feature the least like you, . but'the idea of the maimed man,' titling. and. dreaded by tho 'sound, was Entirely taten From you." Edmund Gosse. was'at 'Bfae~ : j mar while ."Treasure Island" was being written, and read out chapter by. chapter : to a fascinated audience. "I look back ; to no keener intellectual pleasure," says Mr.'Gosso, "than these cold nights -at 1 ,i Braemar, with the sleet howling outside, . wid Louis reading .his romance by the ■■ lamplight, emphasising ,the purplor : passages with' uplifted voice and' gestieulat- j ing finger."—E. B. Simpson, in "The R. h. Stevenson Originals" (Scribner's), , ■ ST. PAUL:-BIS LIFE AND TIMES*, , , v . • • 1» .6 « ' _ ;We have'receiv?d''7rom llessrs!''': Whifc- 5 f :ombe and .Topibs a 'copy pf!what .can, rath confidence bo aescriocd-as a masterly • 100k. '.It is entitled,"St. 1 Pitul: A:Stu'dy in ■ iocial'-and • KeligioU3! History," by Dr. „ Ulolf Deissmnnn, Professor of New Testament Exegesis -in the University of Ber- • in. No modern scholar has done more, r han- Dr. Deissmann to make real for t nodern readers the stirring times in' p rhich St. Paul Jived and tho state of so- ( liety in which tho infant Church grew, d ind developed. x lt is an era which can S lover lose its interest for the theologian, C he historian, and/ for everyone who -de- h ires to keep abreast of the results of the ipplication of modern methods to 'the h ingins of Christianity. As the result'of :s ii 3 journoyings in the East-aid his in- li •estigations' on :tho sMt,; Dr. 1 Deissmann* ■£ tates. that the New Testament has tber. -i ome greater to him than before, and he .oi ;oes on to'say! that "beside ;the Paul who p las been turned into a Western scholastic ■ bj >hilosophor, ( beside the..'aristocratisdd onventionalised, and ' modernised Paul bi . . I would fain set him whom I think h o have seen at Tarsus, Jerusalem, ■ and 'p )amoscus, in Antioch, Lydaonia, Galatia, " Jphesus, and Corinth, and "whose' words fs lecame ;alive to me at night on the decks a f Levant shipping .. . alive in w heir passionate emotion, the force of t< heir popular appeal. and 'their, prophetic m lepth. • I mean Paul the Jew, who in the lays of the. Caesars breathed tho air of 1! he Meditorraiiean and ato the '.bread cl rhich he had earned by the labour of his ir >wn-hands;',the missionary whose dark la hadow fell on the glittering marble pave- ' iient of the great city in the, blinding : S( lare of noon; the mystic devotee of !hrist, '.who; so far as he can be compre- „i ended historically at all,; will be under- „! tood not as tho incarnation of o system, ],; ut as a living complex of; inner polariies which refused to be parcelled, out— t. ontending -forces the strain of which ho „! nee alluded to himself in writing'to the u sints at Philippi: *1 am in a- strait be- „r ivixt the two."" The ideal. which Dr. hi leissmann has before him is a noble one, ti, nd in its realisation he has made full , use f all the' help that'modern. scholarship L nd archaeological'-research is able togive. if, 'he book i 3 published by Messrs. Hodder J n(| Stoughton.' 'th ■ ■ ■ . 1 ' "i . nf