THE GERM-GROWERS.* CANON POTTER, of Melbourne, has written a book
sufficiently full of weird adventure to be a treasure for children, and with a vein of mystical meaning in which elder people may find a good deal to ponder over. The idea of the story is briefly indicated in the introductory chapters. We are told that there is a familiar Welsh form of legend which deals with some bold and fascinating, but repulsive, personage who mysteriously disappears. The chief hero of The Germ-Growers, Robert Easterley, is acquainted in boyhood with a young man, of a brutal temper, who vanishes suddenly; and two events seem to the narrator's mind to be connected with this disap- pearance. One is the apparition of curious shadows, which are distinctly not clouds, and which appear to stand out by themselves between earth and sun in something like the form of a boat lying on a wheelbarrow ; while the other is the breaking-out of an epidemic, which the local doctors declare to be indigenous, and for which they can find no cause. Such as it is, this disease, by its intensity, rivals the plague and the black-death, and is only stamped out by the strong measures which two young physicians who are then spending their holiday in this part of Wales contrive to get adopted. Robert Easterley, as a boy, inclines to the belief that demons have visited the district, have sown the seeds of pestilence, and have recruited their ranks by carrying away the missing, specimen of warped humanity, James Redpath.
Circumstances take Easterley to Australia, and in com- pany with a friend, Jack Wilbraham, he joins a survey party that is going to assist in laying the overland wire to Port Darwin, From a Black who accompanies them the two young Englishmen learn that a great corroboree of the tribes in the North-West is about to be held, and they make up their minds to join it under Gioro's escort. They find the Blacks, but these have lost their bearings, and while they are wandering about in search of the place of rendezvous, are seized with a panic at the sight of forms in the distance, and disperse, leaving the two E n glishm en to themselves, but spearing the black guide, whom they no longer trust, since he has become friendly with white men. The adventurers are accordingly left without food,. and with their only horse killed, in a desert about three hundred miles west of the telegraph-line, and hopelessly far from any other part where there is a possibility of obtaining succour. One chance remains, The travellers have reason. to believe that the natives fled from the sight of white men, and they think they have themselves seen human forms in one direction. Their native guide has told them that there is a colony of white devils, who are expressly distinguished from white men, somewhere in these parts. With some misgivings, it is decided to throw themselves upon the compassion of these strangers, rather than wander on to meet certain death in the wilderness. They pass through a sort of tunnel in a hill to a gallery in which men are working, and under which lies a valley with houses and trees and gardens. The man in command of this settlement receives the wanderers courteously, and promises them shelter, clothes, and food, the food appearing in the form of condensed meats, and proving to have wonder- fully staying qualities. Next day, the guests are allowed to see- some of the wonders of the place,—cars which are lifted by balloons, propelled by electricity, and rendered invisible by a paint which reflects only certain spectral rays that are imper- ceptible to the human eye. Then, when the imagination has been sufficiently impressed, Signor Davelli, as the leader calls himself, takes Easterley, as the more promising subject, in band, and tries to indoctrinate him with the spirit of revolt, and The Germ-Proven, Edited by Robert Potter, M.A. London: Ilutobiasota and Co. -to .persuade him that, if he will throw in his lot, with his new associates, he will be able to defy death and to transcend space. 'Indeed, Davelli gives a proof of part of his assertions by dis- appearing in a cloud, like a genius of Eastern story, and then solidifying again into the human form. Later on, however, Easterley discovers that, though Davelli and his band can defy death in its ordinary shapes, they are liable to melt like bubbles, and so pass from their new life into another existence .under changed conditions.
The interest of the story now turns upon Davelli's effort to overmaster Easterley's will and gain his soul, and Easterley's struggle to escape. Wilbraham seems to have been rejected from the first, either as not sufficiently intelligent, or as too upright; but Easterley has a weak spot in the " lust for know- ledge ;" and is for a moment in danger of succumbing, that he may experiment with the powers offered him. Happily for -himself, he recognises James Redpath in the band of doomed men who obey Davelli's behests ; Jack Wilbraham is a wise -counsellor ; and in the critical moment an angel of good appears to bring help. The visitor explains that Davelli and hie band are either spirits lost from the time of the great revolt, or evil men whom these have associated with them to fill up the gaps which occur when the term of life allotted to the evil expires. Their purpose anciently was the common -Satanic one of mixing with men and tempting them " to call evil good, and good evil." Meanwhile, they have always had homes of their own in remote regions, and are responsible for the titanic remains which men find scattered over the world and attribute to an extinct race. Davelli, however, has lately established artificial seed-beds of pestilence in inac- cessible places like the desert of North-Western Australia and the recesses of the Himalayas. " His emissaries gather from all quarters germs of natural and healthful growth, and submit them to a special cultivation, under which they -become obnoxious and hurtful to human nature. And then they sow them here and there in the most likely ,places, and thus produce disease, death, and disaster among ,men. The black-death and the plague, and small-pox and cholera, and typhus and typhoid fevers have all had their origin in this way, and some of these are kept alive since by the carelessness of man. But of later years men are begin- ning to understand health and disease better, and so the power of these evil beings is becoming greatly restricted in this direction." Robert Easterley's last hesitations are dis- pelled by this knowledge of who his hosts are ; but as his will has wavered a little, he has to undergo a terrible conflict with Davelli, who attempts to hypnotise him, and having failed, -tells him to prepare for death. Need it be said that Robert -and his friend escape, by the help of their good angel, in a car, .though they are pursued, and their car disabled by a shaft which Davelli hurls, the angel again interposing to prevent the powers of darkness from achieving a complete victory P As it is, the wanderers contrive to make their way to a telegraph-line, and all ends happily. They decide that their story is too wonderful to be believed, and .keep it to them- selves, apparently till they have acquired that stake in the country which enables a man to tell "travellers' tales" with- out fear of contradiction or of being consigned to a madhouse.
In a book like The Germ-Growers, the story, however good, is of secondary interest to the allegory. It would be unfair to regard Canon Potter as holding the view of the people of Erewhon, that disease is as disgraceful as ordinary men think moral evil, but he appears to consider it a form of evil, rather than of imperfection. Otherwise, one can scarcely imagine devils of singular intelligence devoting themselves to the propagation of pestilence rather than to the suggestion of criminal desires and thoughts. The idea seems to be that a new plague cannot come naturally, though having come, it may be perpetuated by neglect. Surely the truer view is that diseases have a historical connection with the moral growth of a people, and are the instruments with which a besetting Jilin is scourged. The moral lessons that an early age was capable of receiving were the need of cleanliness and tem- perance in eating. Leprosy, gout, and other more or less .kindred diseases did their work " as the great correctors of enormous times." Then came a period of libertinage, and the scourge of modern vice appeared. We are living now -in a more decorous age, and its lust for money-getting is punished by an outburst of nervous disease that con- stantly ends in paralysis or mania. The plagues that we
get—less violent than those of antiquity or the Middle Ages —almost always end in sanitary reforms that do immeasurably more for the poorer classes of the community than for the wealthier. It is difficult to conceive devils so intelligent as Signor Davelli concentrating their energies upon physical illness and death, by which the character of the human race will be purified, when what they aim at is not so much to solace themselves with the sight of human suffering as to deprave the will and the intellect, Satan, as Pope tells us, has learnt wisdom, " and tempts by making rich, not making poor." Lady Holland once said that if she wished to make a man supremely miserable, she would make him a handsome duke,—that is, would make him capable of gratifying all his desires. Instead of looking for the fiend in the Himalayas and Western Australia, wo should expect to find him in the haunts of men, waging a war that was constantly crowned with transient successes, though marked in the end with even more signal defeat.
The idea that " the lust of knowledge " is the weak point in Robert Easterley which marks him out from the first as a possible victim, and which proves his greatest torture when he has to resist Davelli, will appear to many a weakness in the plot. Taken in its most obvious meaning, it seems curiously inconsistent with the author's view when he speaks of the lost spirits as withdrawing themselves from contact with civilisa- tion. If the fruits of knowledge are on the whole good, the craving for knowledge ought not to be all evil. What ()anon Potter appears to mean, however, is rather a desire for new experiences, which is prepared to gratify itself without regard to the moral law, though with no deliberate purpose of re- bellion. Professor Aytoun, in his Firmilian, who experiments in depravity and murder for the sake of a novel sensation, has given the humorous side of this weakness. It can hardly be doubted that it is not unfrequently the occasion of gross evil. A boy takes to drink, or a young man experiments in a vicious connection, with no other idea formulated in themselves than that they will cross the boundary of an unseen world. The feeling for power and the joy of audacity are mixed up with this impulse, and, like it, are easily capable of perversion. That some or all of these motives have entered into the aggres- sive scepticism which was fashionable a century ago, may be readily granted. What was needed in such an allegory as The Germ-Growers, was to distinguish that love of knowledge which is the highest exercise of a finely tempered mind from that which has no ethical qualities. It is, however, a fault incident to all allegory that its definitions should want scientific exactness. What may be fairly claimed for Canon Potter's work is that the interest of the story never flags, and that the moral is far removed from triviality.
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