By Mary Arnold "The Captives' is an admire able example of Mr. Walpole's skill' and imagination. Maggie Cardinal, the daughter of a country clergyman, left penniless his death, is taken to London bj two maiden aunts who belong to a tiny religious sect, the Kingseote Brethren, whose main tenet is the imminence of the Second Coming. The description of the life of this sect, of their leader John Warlock and of the chapel services is amazingly fine, as of the perpetual contest in Maggie, who struggles he-tween violent aversion for the narrow Kingscote life and an almost overpowering attraction towards itg, cloving. clinging lure. She eventually breaks away, indirectly through Martin Warlock (the preacher's son), with whom she falls in love as he with her, But Martin has a wife living, and though Maggie is perfectly ready to go off with him, he refuses, partly because he feels himself incapable of faithfulness to any woman, partly from love of his father. Then the latter dies and Martin, in some distorted, way ascribing wop, btm. Allen and 8s. 6d. net.
"We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps," observes Sir Thomas Browne in his magnificent Religin Medici, "and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the litigation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking ce ceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps." There is probably as much truth in these sentences, though the fragments extant of dream literature do not warrant the belief that dreamland is a wider and more wondrous land than the wide wake wor as in all the treatises written recently on the Freudian analysis of our sleeping life. The gist of Mrs. Arnold-Forster's study of her own and other people's dreams, which has not been restricted to collecting evidence for some particular theory and aims, directly and disinterestedly, at finding out "the working of the various mental] faculties in the dream state,'' is that the world of sleep is as various and complex as the world we inhabit when The Freudian theory of suppressed nh," generally of a sexual nature, may or may not he the key to certain pathological conditions, but the weight of scienfic opinion is now overwhelming-gainst the idea that all dream experiences can be referred to this secret. motive in some shape or form.
OverMaN saxe UNDERMAN, Among the youngest school of novelists Freud is still the master-psychologist in the science of motive, but there are already signs of a return to a broader and mote humane method of tracing the transactions and reactions between the Coverman" (the conscious self that is) and the "underman." who is the sum of all human activities within that have become automatic or semi-automatic in the course of the ascent of man from the state of a mudfish ambitious to become amphibious.
Mrs. Arnold-Forster's collection of dreams and their consequences will, as Dr. Morton Prince points out, be much more useful to the scientific student than most. of the works which endeavour to fit tacts in general to a particular theory, old or new. She also shows us how the control of dreams may be secured, especially as regards the quality of terror which is so apt to survive—as a ghostly and form: less discomfort of the mind—even when the sleeper is wide-wake [It is most often so with small children.] She would say to herself, before going to-bed, and also when dreaming distressingly, "You know this is only a dream." At first this formula would always awaken her; afterwards it did not do so, but the continued dream would cease to he distressing. Here is an example of this method of dream control:
A Drea or Conspiracy.
Daring the course of a long dream 1 had succeeded in tracing the existence "lof a complicated and dangerous plot against our country The conspirators had turned upon me on discovering how much T knew. T was s0 closely follow: ed, and my personal danger became so great, that the formula for—breaking off a dream flashed into my mind und automatically gave me back confidence; I remembered that I could make myself afe; but with the feeling of safety iso realized that if T were to wake my valuable knowledge of the dangerous conspiracy would be lost, for T realized that was "dream knowledge." It. was a dreadful dilemma—safety called me one way, but the conviction that my duty was to stay and frustrate the traitors was very strong. I feared that I should give way, and I_knelt and prayed that I might have courage not to seek safety by awakening, but to go on until T had. done what was needed. I therefore did not wake: the dream continued. The arch-conspirator, a whitefaced in a bowler hat, had tracked down to the building where I was concealed. and which by this time was surrounded; but all fear had departed, the comfortable feeling of great heroism. only fully enjoyed by those who feel themselves to "be safe, was mine. It became a delightful dream of adventure, since the element of fear had gone from
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.