A NEWSPAPER STORY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLI, Issue 203, 27 August 1910, Page 13

A NEWSPAPER STORY.

C. E. Montague's "A Hind Let Loose* is a novel for journalists, and ior a few discriminating people besides who can appreciate good writing and fine satire. It is not long, yet purely for craftsmanship we should have cut it a little shorter. In the North England town of Halland were (or are) two papers —the Conservative "Warder," and the Liberal Brumby, a hearty John Bull, edited the "Warder"; Pinn, a Puritan, edited the "Stalwart." Both employed Fay, an Irishman, as chief leader-writer, but neither knew that the other employed him—he was "Fay" to Brumby, and "Moloney" to Pinn; and, the hour's suiting, he wrote Conservative or Liberal politics with equal contempt. But Fay-Moloney was found out, and dismissed with loathing. Alas! he could not be dismissed. Vainly did Brumby try to hurl Fay's .Conservative thunderbolts. Vainly did Pinn try to reach Moloney's rage of Liberal indignation. The readers of both papers were disgusted with the weak leaders of the imitators —as they were thought to be; for Fay, with diabolical cunning, had invented a Brumby that out-Brumbied the original; and Moloney, with malicious ingenuity, had written-up a Pinn that magnified the traits of the real Pinn to superhuman power. So presently Brumby and Pinn crawled back and re-engaged Fay-Moloney, and a third Radical editor employed him to write a third leader nightly—all on hi 3 own term_ It is highly imagined, and not without a warrant. The beauty of the book is that it is written to the height of the imagination. We see the impish Fay-Moloney at work, and read his reversible leading article, just as good for one paper as for the other; and the picture-notice, which is just as efficient as a concert-notice. We cannot quote: the whole is as excellent as the parts, but nobody with three sparks of intelligence should miss the book. Some phrases merely: The "lethal chastity" of architectural fancy—or the taste of the furniture-people who design chairs for the eve only. The fussing over a phrase, planing it down or bevelling it off, inlaying it with picked words of a queer far-fetched aptness, making it clang with whole pomps of proper names, that boomed into their places like drums and cymbals in sym- . phonies, or twinkle and tingle, shot with ironies, or rise and fail like a voice thai means more by the tune than the words. John Bull on his hearth-rug, "throwing an ascending series oi chests." ""Base was the slave who parsed." Nothing was more to his mind than ■ public speaking, in private, that was the true nectar, with no fly in it. "He could envisage, but could not build—only fumble about the formless bases of thoughts that, could they be given their rights, would spring clean up at the sky, all the world's grace in one jet, lifted on all the world's strength." "August muck" like ? "How little there was, after all, to blue-pencil in all things created. Little. Nothing. Brumby, to-night, could initial the universe." j "Clocks cannot strike twelve whenever they like." In his sphere, Montague is jpfit as go__. 1 as Meredith.