LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 15

LITERARY GOSSIP.

Some passages from Mi" Jofaa Buchan's "Andrew Lar.g aad Border," the Andrew Lang Lecturer delivered before the University of St. Andrews last year and nonprinted as a pamphlet: The beauty of the Border landscape. especially its classic grace and V:s gentle pastoral melancholy . . combined with an old humane tradition among the people, was apt for the production of a classical scholar. Bat it must be scholarship of a special kind, not an arid, philogical or antiquarian quest, but an interpretation of life. Lang was widely read is th-s classical authors, and he had a considerable store of exact learning Belie was determined to treat the Greelz and Latin writings as literature, and the Greeks and Romans as people o_ like passions with ourselves. He ha.il an appetite for minute scientific inquiry, as he showed ia other spheres —in anthropology, for examp!e T sad, somewhat to his undoing, in history. But as a classic he was always the humanist. To him Horace might havd had his farm beside the elans of Yarr. and Theocritus sung to the evemilkers of Ettrick. He did not belong to the great and austere school if scholars which is identified principally with Cambridge: Bentiey and Parse?:. and Munro and Mavor, and in oar own day, A. E. Housman; but though he lacked their prodigious critical apparatus he was perhaps nearer to the essentials of the ancient world. This made him an incomparable translator of the things in Homer and Theocritus and the Greek Anthology which caajpK his fancy. He was what pedants call a vulgarisateur. and wise people art interpreter. The Border tradition taught him that letters cannot be divorced from life, and in what Stevenson called the •'abhorred pedantic Sanhedrim." he was' never at n» ease, for his puckish humour jarred on its solemnities. But I am very certain that he would have been mare comfortable than most of its members had he been suddenly transported w» a Greek stadium or a Roman dinner table ... He did not. in Dr. Johnson's phrase, love Scotland better than the truth, and he was candid to his country, so that, as he used to say. his course was apt to foe attended by the outcries of blistered patriots.. Also, though he was always reverent in the sacred places of our land, he was inclined to chaff us about our foiMes. He had a touch of esprit malm in ftee of the noisy Caiedoniamsm of the music-hall and the Burns dinner. In 1909 I induced him to write a prelawe to Charles Murray's - Hamewith, m which there are these words: To speak for myself I am never so bragr as when I cross the Tweed at Berwick from the south, or go on the Mas at Wimbledon Common and hoar the Scents (for there are several, mdtidfne one peculiar to Gourock) of .my native tongue" It is a charaetanste £assa-e with its mingled sincerity and mockery I know &e West coantor better an he did, and lam P«P«£«l Sv; -maintain that there is no aceea, P °ecSfaf to and tbitUns C this. He used the name of that watering-place beam* be Uked Us sound. aiTd'beeausa itw» a change from the conventional lr\ Ecclefechan, or *£**2&*g: Sort Sf Israel for Philistia's bwafc. Ernest Closson's "The Fleming ia Beethoven," lately translated from the French by Muriel Fuller, concentrates upon the composer's faculty for business dealings B*o*e UsA%£ is commonly sheTthere: Beethoven was an excellent *»"» <u bushtSs a fact which * P«*J«J consistent with his provertnw eeneroshv ... He knew how to value own music too. When fixing. hj» Pr ce he would take the A«tu>lkw of the exchange most carefully, into amount STwhat careful <&«*»£ he showed when he offered P«3*W gj Paris, the agency of his ««*«» 1807«... Contrary to all precedens he had the text of his first Massi te*Wjlated into German so that it might be performed in the concert-room andfie arable to Lutherans ful edition of the "Must Sokaanaf gave him the idea of writing two 'other Masses. The quaint notion or waiting thirty-three variations on a theme of DiabeUTs originated ini «. simple question of money. The «utej. Diabelli, having conceived the idea of publishing variations by composers on a waltz-theme of cub own composition, asked Beethoven to undertake one variation. The cobv poser refused at first: the theme J» an absurd one, etc., etc. And ttaa. suddenly, he asked Diabelli wttat fee would give him if he undertook t» write all ihe variations himself? Diabelli, surprised and dielislMass, offered fifty ducats, which Beettoaww*. promptly accepted. So exacting was the composer that that worthy nana Thomson—the Edinburgh putdJs&wr who used to overwhelm bixa wffla Scotch and other airs to harmonise—ended up by being thoroughly annoyed with him . . . Better observe**: "It is a remarkable fact that ten ' Missa Solennis,* which is so ds3» cult to perform, was fought for by all the well-known publishers ia Geresaay; and that the four last quartets, at Haft time beyond the scope of aH bat m few executants, fetched » dttcsss each.* When A. E. Housman delivered his ' Cambridge lecture on ps«ftrjf„. "The Times" predicted that ilnwe would be some "pretty ©ntcsaasf* when its full test came to be pairlished. Some voices have, ha. Met, been raised in protest against Mr Housman's utterances, Mr Gerald. Gould, for instance, refuses to zgeem with him that literary critics ssw so rare that they appear onsr mm in a century or once .ia tw» centuries. The word "critsc^s^C ,, 1* maintains, stands in the EngSisi* language for such writing as vrm produced by Coleridge, and Lamfa. by Wordsworth and MatßMir Arnold, when speculating on Horary subjects, and by this test, evttt It *» look no further than oor mm country, this statement is cnoncoas. i ! That public praise alone is oofc I sufficient incentive to novel-wiitita« I seems demonstrated, says Mr GSfc bert Frankau, by the fact that ae* I man with a comfortable KHBirJWI income has ever saceeedtei i* becoming the popular stofjMWlsr of his day. According to Professor Ernes* Weeklev, contemporary writer* snap be divided into the ever-fcrawaMr majority which does not tmlentaMl the difference between, "who" ami " whom " and the dwindling miwacity which does. Discussing the modernistajf of the spelling in recent anthotajgies of Elizabethan verse, Miss Rose Wcai** lay suggests that there is a east for -regarding the spelling of the wart* of a poem as so essential a part -"WP that poem's original structaxe fhat ! to alter it is to alter the poem. j j Everyman's Library will rmek ! its 900 th volume with **A -Bi«era|i3*" ical Dictionary of Foreign Lltßt** ture," by K. Farquharson Sharp*