LITERARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LII, Issue 72, 26 March 1921, Page 18

LITERARY.

Stevenson lovers will be interested in the recent sale of Colonel .1. P. Ni.«bfit- i Hamilton-Grant's Archerfield property < .near North Berwick. ]n the grounds of ( the mansion (a commodious building ' commanding lovely views over the Firth ,of Forth) is a small building which was 'the scene of K. L. Stevenson's wonderful I story, "The Pavilion on the Links."' Mr. -Toseph Conrad makes an interest- : ' ing confession in a letter to Mr. James Huneker. the American critic: ". i when you overwhelm mc with the mantle of Flaubert, it is an ominous garment to put on a man's shoulders. Yet there is one point in which I resemble that great man; it is in the desperate, heartbreaking toil and effort of the writing; :the .lays of wrestling as with a dumb devil for every line of my creation." Tlier.- are signs of the times in the i following paragraph from the "Times" 1 literary supplement: "Mr. Edward Car- < pentor"* Civilisation: Jts Cause and Cure | and Other Essays,' first published in < ISfiO. is about to appear in a seventeenth ■ I and enlarged edition through Messrs. , j Allen, and Unwin. The whole trend of ; thought was against the author's concluI sions thirty-two years ago, and in a new J preface he .recalls the first reception of ' \ the book, in. order to measure the extent ' Ito which these views have since 'been : j justified."' j During Mr. Woodrow Wilson's long ' j illness his doctors tabooed any heavy • j reading. >So the books of political I science, the sober tomes of history, in j .muli the now ex-President formerly took 'delight, were set aside in favour of— .Stanley Weyman. Mr. Wilson might j have chosen worse says "Liber" in the I ""Dominion,"' and we heartily agree with ' him. But what, he asks, have the AmeriI can "best sellers" to say of Mr. Wilson's preference for English fiction over the domestic article? The Anglophobe Hearst journals will no doubt see in Mr. Wilson's choice another proof of that Anglophilism with which they have so absurdly charged him. Americans are developing a special line in minor poets (says an English visitor to the United States), and book buycTs give the young poet greater encouragement than he gets in England. One young American poet recently set out to prove that his compatriots are interested in poetry by crossing the Continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, without any money < in his pocket. He depended on hie 'i poetry. In the cities ho sold poems to ' newspaper editors; in the rural areas he > earned his food and lodging by enter- . taining farmers by reading h*s poems ! round the fireside. And lie got to the i seaboard without suffering acutely from 1 starvation. The -writer wonders if the ■ feat could be repeated in England. G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole recently took opposing sides in a debate 1 on the proposition that "the modern , novel is a sign of social decay." Mr. Chesterton took the affirmative, and Mr. Walpole the negative- Edmund Gosse, the distinguished critic, acted as J judge. In opening, Mr. Chesterton said: | "The novel has become a sack in which a person stuffs anything ho happens to have about him, with the result that it becomes to a large extent shapeless. 1 have a great respect for the genius of Mr. H. G. Wells, but in his later novels he has put pages which are simply his essays. . The novelist's tendency is to philosophise and preach: to express annoyance with certain institutions: to insert a recollection of travels in Ice-1 land, or to discuss proposals for a new kind of umbrella: and, in fact, to use the novel for purposes for which it was not intended." Mr. Walpole countered 'with the statement that: It (the novel) is going through an intermediate stage towards a new development, which will probably prove a step upwards. Present writers' have a freedom and possibility | of treating life which were denied to their predecessors. Can Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and the late Henry James be accused of | 'formlessness'? Lucky is the generation that has such representatives.' , Ed- ' mund Gosse decided that neither of the I ; disputants knew what "form"' was, and j . that the audience was no wiser than I when it arrived, and were now not quite | so sure of what they had known before, i A book by Walter Rathenau. one of 1 the ablest directors of German industry, I and controller of the supply of rawmaterials during the war, should be interesting. '"The Xew Society" is a consideration of the social and economic ', outlook ac a German sees it, and i though he is mainly concerned with c-on- ! ditions in his own land, the book has a . wide interest. He is convinced the prei sent system is doomed. "Except by tlie ■ greatest exertion,"' he says, "nothing ; I will come right. Our lake-city of I ; economics and social order is ripe for J i collapse, for the piles on which it is j ■ j built are decayed. It is true that it ', i I still stands, and will be standing for an 1 I hour or so, and life goes on in it very i J much as in the days when it was sound. l! We can choose either to leave it alone, ■ and await the downfall of the city, I > among whose ruins life will never bloom i again, or we can begin the underpinning j : at the tottering edifice, a process whieu I i will last for decades, which will ailow ! no peace to any ef us, which will be i toilsome and dangerous, and will end | ! almost imperceptibly, when the ancient j ■ city has been transformed into the new.' , j , ] This captain of German industry, who j .; is also a well-educated man, and the ; :• mithor of social and economic studies, is j . terribly severe on his country and hi* i .- countrymen. "It is a petty thing to Stey j . that we were destroyed out of envy, j fjWhy did not envy destroy America and j . England? The world regarded ii« at \ s once with admiration and with repul- ! -ision: with admiration for our svstfi- i jrjmatfe and laborious wave; with repul-' -jsion for our tradesman-like obtrusive-! I ' ness, the brusque and dangerous char- •. aeter of our leadership, and the o.steu- I ; 'tatious servility with which we endured ■flit. If it had been possible anywhere I I. [outside of our naked and national j gjogois'ii to discover a German idea, it! would have been respected." And this: i 'Nowhere was this conception of the. !' judgment of God so blasphemously cxc aggerated as with us (iermins, "when i the lord of our armed hosts, at the de- ' t mand of the barracks greedy for power, - of the tavern-benches, the State bureaus, n and the debating societies was suma moned. and charged with the duty, fors i /ooth, of chastising England—England, c I which they only knew out of newspaper t J reports!" There is much strong tritit j cisni of the existing- economic and social .J ! order. What his exact remedy is he - Hoes not make qr.ile clear, but he l>e- '. iieves in a nation ill which culture will y belong to all', in which the manual i- worker wril be allowed to do a portion c of his work "'in intellectual employ's ment." and every brain-worker will be it obliged to do some physical labour. Williams and Xorg'ate publish the book.