LITERARY NOTES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 76, 1 April 1899, Page 2 (Supplement)

LITERARY NOTES.

r-^Ji^ Stevenson letters now running through. 'Scribner' are much more atitractive in tone than his 'Valima,' budr get. -They were many of them written irom. Edinburgh at the bright time the poet-novelist was jotting down 'Virginbus Puerisque,' and fcubble over with good spirits. One of the present portion contains Stevenson's first impressions of the friend, mentor, and collaborateur who was presently to exercise such a powerful influence over his career. We refer, of course, to William Ernest Henley. The latter was then bed-ridden in Edinburgh Infirmary, and* his cheery fortitude and optimism beneath a possibly permanent affliction amazed all who knew him. It was at this time Henley •wrote the wonderful 'In Hospital' yerses. These will undoubtedly live •whatever becomes of his 'Book of .Verses' as a whole. Of his meeting •with Henley, Stevenson says:—'Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here (at Edinburgh) to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poqr fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very Ejad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed. A girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on the counterpane •with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull, economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.'

How thoroughly Stevenson parried out the resolve to be of use to Henley very few know. That meeting was the turning point of the latter's 'career. Henley touched off his friend to a T in one of the Hospital rhythms called 'Apparition.' Stevenson 'didn't <quite relish the portrait, and it created s, temporary coolness:— Thin-legged, thin-chester, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered; in his face— Xiean. la.rge boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 'The brown eyes radiant with vivacity— There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 'A. spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion, impudence, and- energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck. Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist; 1A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist.

! The 'Academy' has been improved jn many respects by the infusion of new Wood, though we regret to notice a Ttendency to resurrect some of the Billy affectations of the 'National Observer' in its hey-day. An instance of this in a recent issue was the absolutely uncalled for and irrelevant attack on 'John Halifax, Gentleman.' To defend a novel which has stood the ■supreme test of selling in thousands at six shillings (it is only, quite recently cheap editions have been obtainable) for half a century would be absurd. Every middle-class young Englishman reads the book in his 'generation. It is as inevitable as •Robinson Crusoe,' and quite as profitable. That the editor of the 'Academy,' who considers the lucubrations of that dismal creature Joseph Conrad the'finest book of 1898, and gushes ilJimitably over Mrs Craigie, should despise Miss Mulock's masterpiece is perhaps natural. Long after 'Tales of Unrest' and 'Seme Emotions and a Moral' are forgotten and unobtainable, Mohn Halifax' will be selling briskly.

Those who want witty anecdotes, chatty reminiscences and personal gossip will seek for them in vain in ithe Earl of Selborne's 'Memorials, Personal and Political,' which Maemillan and Co. have just published in two Twell got up volumes. The only gleam *»f humour in the book is in a footmote to the great Lord Chancellor's "Bpeeeh. on the opening of the Law As originally worded part of fthe speech ran:—'Conscious as Your Majesty's judges are of their own iri:!firmities,' which when read to the assembled judges, provoked from Lord OBowen the interruption, 'May I suggest, Lord Chancellor, that it might ibe better to say 'of one another's intfirmities." ' The passage was eventually delivered thus: 'Your Majesty's Judges are deeply sensible of their own anariy shortcomings.' The Memorials larfe an earnest record of the great work done for Church and State by a Xord Chancellor, who—as the Earl of Hosebery remarked in the House of [Lords—embodied the great conception and combination of those lawyers of. the Middle Ages, who were also great churchmen. Lord Selborne was a pilla.r of the English Church, and, 18.S will b e remembered, refused the •lord Chancellorship in 1868 because lie opposed the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. The Memorials proceed in a dignified and stately fashion, and are not to be skimmed with a light lieart, but they will be indispensable ito those who wish to be well informed in the history of the times from the sixties to the nineties, and to know 'something of the true inwardness of 7the politics of those days. On the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the tendency to disestablish the English Church, Ritualism, the "Treaty of Washington, the Geneva Arbitration on the Alabama claims, Irish affairs, Egypt, Home Rule, there is much that is new and interesting, many singularly accurate forecasts and much light thrown upon the inner political life of the Cabinet. The critical biography of Gladstone at the end of the second ■volume is a fine piece of characterisation by one who although disillusionised could write, 'I was too long under the master's spell not to have some fellow-feeling with them (those who followed Gladstone implicitly), for I know how impossible it is not to admire and how very easy to love him.' Considering that Lord Selborne was identified with all the chief legal reforms for the last thirty years, there is,comparatively little about his legal work, and save an account of the Hyves case nothing about his practice Bt the bar. His daughter tells us how lie was the unpaid lawyer of the poor and how 'three times 'in the last two years he was addressed as "Earl Selborne and' Sons," on e of which clients began by stating that he could not pay, but troubled the firm, knowing the earl was honest for a lawyer.' iThis delighted the firm. Altogether it is a notable book of a notable man, eburehy and weighty and requiring a j deal of patience in the reading.