LITERARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 180, 1 August 1925, Page 22

LITERARY.

! From an article in a New Zealand journal: "Addressing woman, Thomas Hood sang, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye ; may.' In reality he was calling husbands rosebuds —a humorous simile, but Hood was an acknowledged humorist." Alas, poor Herrick! Christchurch has been called, the Athens of the South, but in their preference for novels over other kinds of books its people resemble those of other cities. Last year 197,613 books and magazines were issued for home reading by the Canterbury Public Libray. Of these 154,175 were fiction, and 25,058 magazines, which doesn't leave much for histoiy, biography and literature. "With Brush and Pencil," by G. P. Jacomb-Hood, M.V.O. (John Murray), I"a little sheaf of gleanings from the stubble fields of memory." It was intended by the distinguished artist who wrote it merely to keep his own memory green. He gives it to the world, however, and thus enriches it with intimate word pictures of men and women famous in the world of art from Mr. Hood's | student days in the 'sixties. It is a charming literary and artistic directory jof his greater and lesser contemporaries, j and is of distinct value because it is in . no way slavish, and does not hesitate to withhold applause from some who have created a furore and who are notoriously .fashionable. "It is of no importance to any but myself that I frankly own to a feeling of revulsion at the work of Augustus John, Epstein and their disciples and imitators. It seems to mc to be on the very outskirts of fine art." The book is enriched with the best examples of his own work, notable one | thinks for its refined vitality. He seems j to be unacquainted with artistic "tricks." The author-artist has the immense advantage of a long line of forbears famous artistically and otherwise in British history, of splendid travel in many lands, and of close acquaintance with hundreds of men and women whose names are household words. The travel chapters are immensely intriguing not only as episodical i history, but because they contain his pictures of the great Indian Durbar and 'many remarkably fine artistic examples lof life and incidents in the lands he has I Visited. The artistic reader will be j struck with the modesty of the man and 'the inartistic reader with his humour I and wealth of minute observation of men land things. As a book of travel alone "With Brush and Pencil" may become famous, and as a remarkably vivid literary view of numbers of famous people it will be hailed with delight. THE WORI.D OP NOVELS. Since a legal lumhiary wrote "Ten Thousand a Year," in Victoran days, many authors have selected as a subject for a novel the young man working for small wages who unexpectedly receives a fortune and proceeds immediately to spend it. To be a man of leisure requires as much training and calls for a better and stronger character than to be a man of affairs, and it is usual for the recipient of the fortune to do and say many exceedingly vulgar and fool- ' ish things, but we doubt if in I every ...case -he takes the first opportunity to insult his employer and show base ingratitude to his friends. Yet most novelists make this an incident in the story. In "Every Man's Desire." (Duckworth and Co.) the young legatee is more than usually offensive, and his method of using his money more than commonly objectionable. Mr. G. U. Ellis, the author, sees life as it may be, but as we sincerely hope it is not. For a greater number of years than we are able to name, the Welsh people have borne a slur cast upon them by a humorous writer, who composed a jingle which has lived long in the memory of men. "Taffy was a Welshman; Taffy was a thief; Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef." In her series of novels, Edith Nepean, like Allen Raine, not only does Wales a service -worthy lof gratitude, but provides us with some I love stories of merit in an unfamiliar setting. The depth and passion of the Welsh character are akin to those of the j inhabitants of Brittany, to . whom the I Welsh are remotely related, and they, lin the land of song, offer a field for literary exploration and demonstration of~which this authoress has made good I use. Ih "Gwyneth of the Welsh Hills," ! "Cambria's Fair Daughter," "Jewels in the Dust," "Petals in the Wind," we have a quartet of tales well told, and appealing more particularly to girls of j countries to whom Wales is as remote as the land of Faery. Stanley, Paul and Co., publish the series. English readers of "The Diamond Thieves," by Arthur Stringer (Hodder and Stoughton), may be struck by the methods of the American police as much as by the extraordinary experiences of the heroine. The police have a hold over her and they use her as an agent in hunting down criminals. She earns every penny of her pay. The adventures in the book are exciting and the light thrown on some aspects of American life is interesting; particularly so in the adventure of the wedding festivities in the millionaire's house. The description of the luxurious rigidly ordered life of a society leader, where social duty becomes a tyranny, is good satire. Also, there are yards of devastating but engaging slang. John Murray has issued a cheaper edition of "The Shoreless Sea," by Mollie Panter-Downes, the young writer whose second novel, "The Chase," wasj recently reviewed here. "The Shoreless* Sea," written when the author was j sixteen, was received with a chorus of praise. It is rather hard to account J for, save on the ground that this is j certainly remarkable work for a girl, i "The Professor Among the Ladies" is a j new book by Elmer Davis, published by, Methuen. "The Professor Among the j ■ Ladies" sounds cheap if not actually j ! vulgar, yet the novel is one of the best, i and shows the author as a lover and i student of the up-to-the-minute Ameri-! can woman. Of the five women j who shelter under the professor's wing, ; four of them are each a type of thousands, and no man of social instincts and over thirty years of age but will recognise a favourite, of his own . amongßt the four. The fifth, Hazel Deming, is probably Elmer Davis' idea of what a girl trained in a bi-sexual college might become. This girl : is more nearly a dream than reality. She is truly feminine, yet is prepared to risk ■ her' life at any time for the sake of j . excitement and adventure. She is her- [ I self bi-sexual, and to a normal man nothing less than fearsomi yet fatally ' attractive. The book is a man's book, j It is analytical, remarkably humorous and never crudely unrefined. If we seek a fault in the author's teaching, it is jthat he considers any lie or subterfugo permissible to spare a woman's selfj confidence and protect her feelings.

A writer in the "Weekly Dispatch" says of the famous Lytton Strachey, author of "Eminent Victorians," and "Queen Victoria," that he challenges Barrie and Thomas Hardy in unostenta--1 tion. The man whose books have caused I such a stir, who is described as the finest critical intelligence at work in English literature to-day, is most retiring, and very little is known about him. In the current issue of an annual devoted to information about British authors his name does not appear, and the details of his career in "Who's Who" are the barest. His is one of those careers, however, about which there is little to tell. He is 44 years of age; he went to Trinity College, Cambridge; and he has written a number of books. When the Royal Society of Literature presented him with a medal for his "Queen Victoria" everybody looked forward to a speech from him in reply, but when the time came he rose, "a tall, stooping studentlike figure, spectacles on nose, with jetblack hair and Bhort, pointed beard. For a moment or two he smiled bashfully at the gUests, then mumbled a few words that could hardly be heard, and sat down with a sigh of Telief." A "Manchester Guardian" paragraph about an ultra-clever writer: —Stella Benson, the novelist, who is Mrs. O'Gorman Anderson in private life, is on her way back to England via California after over three years' absence in China, where her husband has a post in the Chinese Customs Service. She is very fond of the Chinese —a fondness which dates back to the time when she worked her way round the world, and tarried in Hongkong teaching English to a class of fifty Chinese boys for £11 a month, and in Peking assisting in the X-ray department of the American Rockefeller Hospital. This witty woman has capitalised her frail health to the great profit of her experience, for she has spent a good part of her life 'travelling rough' to ward off illness. She has worked on a ranch in Colorado 6000 ft up the Rockies. She has been 'help' in a San Francisco boardinghouse, 'book agent' in California (trying to sell 'Milton for the Babes'), teacher in an American university, shopkeeper in Hoxton, member of the staff of the Charity Organisation Society. She has been tiger shootin India, under fire in the Chinese Civil War, in an earthquake in the West Indies, and was the first Englishwoman to penetrate into the Indo-Chinese province of Laos-" NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORIES It is encouraging to see a volume of New Zealand short stories, small though it is, issued from a New Zealand publishing house. In these respects we are far behind Australia, but, as population increases, so will the demand for native literature. "Piriki's Princess, and Other Stories of New Zealand" (Whitcombe and Tombs) is by Mona Tracy, who is better known in Auckland under her former name of Mona Mackay. The ten stories in the '•olume appeared first in the Christchurch "Sun," and the book is dedicated to Mr. C. A. Marris, late editor of that paper, "in gratitude for his sympathetic encouragement of New Zealand writers." Mrs. Tracy also has contributed to this paper. The stories are for the most part slight—sometimes they are sketches —but they are well written, the plots of some are telling, and all have a genuine New Zealand atmosphe<%. The scenes of most of them are laid at Matapouri, in the Far North, and the Maori figures in all. Mrs. Tracy has evidently studied Maori life and history, and has made good use of material. It is known, for example, that in the early days of firearms, tribes slaved to get the flax that would buy them muskets from traders. "Four Tons of Flax" is a grim story of how a chief made a bargain to furnish this quantity for six weapons. The tribe worked day and night, but there was not enough, so another tribe was raided for its supply. In the end he sacrificed the food supplies of the tribe and his own daughter to get the guns, and then sallied forth confidently to meet the foe, only to find that guns were useless without powder and shot. Pleasantly humorous is the story of thp old Maori woman who, determined that her granddaughter should be married in European wedding dress—the family had decided that only the wedding feast could be afforded— went to the house of the M.P. for the district, and sat wailing on his verandah until he provided the garment. "Piriki's Princess," which gives the name to the volume, tells of a handsome young Maori ecamp who in London during the Great War posed as a prince, and married a little Cockney out of a pickle factory. The girl, dreaming ot her greenstone throne, was undeceived until she reached New Zealand, and found that her husband was one of the rank and file in a poor lot of natives. She hated life among the "niggers," but found consolation in the strange beauty and cleanness of the bush. No more factory work for her, she said, when it was suggested that she could get a position in town. We wonder whether tbe psychology of this is right. Tragic in a different 'way is the story of the English settler's daughter who, against her will, falls passionately in love with a young Maori chief, and takes her life as the best way out. The stories are well illustrated. There is promise as well as .interest in this little book. OUR BIRDS. Whether or not it is the increasing interest in New Zealand birds that has been responsible for "New Zealand Birds: How to Identify Them," the little book that Pefrine Moncrieff writes, and Whitcombe and Tombs publish, is very welcome. For practical, humanitarian, and other reasons, there should be more knowledge of native birds among the people. New Zealandrs have been shockingly foolish in their treatment of these birds, but they are now coming to realise l/heir value in the balance of Nature and their beauty and general interest. Mr. Moncrieff has much to say about these | values that is to the point. He empliasises the usefulness of some birds as enemies of grubs, and of others as agents in pollination.' And though we suggest in the most friendly way that he should not use' a phrase like "feathered denizens of the bush," we acknowledge compensation in his sense of humour. The pleasantest and quickest way to learn about birds, he says, is to go into the bush and study them. Mark Twain, he thinks, must have had the study of dead ■birds in a room in mind when he said that an ornithologist was a person who,; on seeing a bird in a tree, got his gun and shot at it. The book contains a dcs- j cription of every bird likely to be seen j in New Zealand, indigenous and im- j ported, and classifies them according to size and to scientific order. There is also valuable information about birds in general, and native birds in particular, and a list is given of English names and corresponding Maori ones. The book j is freely illustrated. It makes an excel-] lent gift to any boy or girl who has j tastes this way. We "hope it will have a I wide circulation.