ENTHUSIASTIC AMATEUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 940, 16 August 1957, Page 17

ENTHUSIASTIC AMATEUR

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER-a Life of Sabine Baring-Gould, by W. E. Purcell; Lape Green and Co., English price |F a writer deliberately embroiders his tales to entertain his readers, and invents incidents to fill out his archaeological records, does he forfeit his right to be regarded as reliable by succeeding generations? If, moreover, his novels owe so much to the styles of contemporary authors that they could be out of character with his own activities as a minister of the Gospel, and if his writings are so prolific that a starry-eyed admirer could ask whether he were the good man of his name who wrote such beautiful sermons or the other, learned, man of the same mame who wrote novels, is it strange that he is known thirty years after his death only by the hymns he composed, and they not of the highest order? Sabine Baring-Gould appears from William Purcell’s biography as a man of the widest interests. A churchman moved by the full impact of the Tractarian movement in the Church ‘of England, he was both squire (by inheritance) and parson (by presentation) of the isolated Dartmoor village of Lew Trenchard. There he was able to indulge his interest in all things antique, and write voluminous studies on archaeology, hagiology, folk song and story, as well as a shelf-full of novels, and innumerable books and pamphlets on Church doctrine and practice. He sought no limelight of literary parties, he replied to no criticism of his superficialities. Yet for several decades he

had a reading public such that J. M. Barrie could place him "among the first 10 contemporary novelists." He lived in his day, he wrote for his day. He pioneered the collection of folk song of England and the survey of his native Dartmoor, he was a populariser of Anglo-Catholicism, as well as a gifted preacher and loved pastor. His fault was that he was an enthusiastio amateur rather than a student, a journalist rather than a writer. He edited earthy folk songs mercilessly to make them acceptable for Victorian drawingrooms. He invented saintly legends on the flimsiest of evidence. His work has always to be checked and suspected. Yet the world would be the poorer without his "Uncle Tom Cobley (sic) and all," and his hymn, "Now the Day, is Over," not to mention the confident, extrovertive "Onward, Christian Sol-

diers."

G.

D.