LITERARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 75, 30 March 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

LITERARY.

There is so much naetiness in modern literature that I like to write stories which contain nothing worse than a little innocent murdering.—Mr. Wallace.

Reviewing two volumes of essays in the "Observer," Mr. Humbert Wolfe makes some comments that are hereby welcomed in this column: "When the dust and glamour settle will posterity, I wonder, remember our period gratefully ae one which produced essayists not unworthy of the company of Addison and Elia? Will they turn with a weary sigh from novels that would have l-ecn good as hurried notes dictated by a tired doctor to an inefficient typist, from playe that compete rather with the motor bus than with Sheridan, from poems in liquefaction, to Robert Lynd, Gerald Gould, and Ivor Brown, or in a different mood to A. P. Herbert and E. V. Knox? Will they say that in a world where everybody wore somebody else's heart on their sleeve, here were a few people who kept their own hearts— and their heads?"

In his latest publication, "Elocution I for Schools" (Allen and Unwin), Mr.| John Rigg, of Wellington, has done another useful work. His little book is excellent in its treatment, and with its assistance intelligent teachers should be able to do much to help banish that old, and unfortunately true idea, that Colonials have difficulty with vowels, naughty little things which seem to lurk about with the sole purpose of offending the aesthetic ear. The author has already given us "Elocution and Public Speaking," and the new publication is mainly an abridgment of that book with alterations to make it practical for school use. A chapter on phonetics has been included, and "pausing," the secret of good reciting, has been interestingly and competently dealt with. Of course a large number of moderns have it that reciting is a pastime that went out with stuffed birds, antimacassars and seed cake. Admittedly Little Willie and his "Inchcape Rock" are out of date, but Mr. Rigg holds that "recitation should be encouraged, as it is an aid to cultured speech." LEGEND BEFORE TRUTH. MR. MILNE'S REMARKABLE PLAY. An author is not always the best judge of his own work, and it is not often that one prefaces a new volume with the opinion that he thinks this is tlie best thing he has written. Mr. A. A. Milne does this in a short foreword to "The Ivory Door" (Chatto and \\indus), and we believe him to be right in his opinion. "The Ivory Door/' will not bo nearly so popular as "Mr. Pim" or "The Dover Road," but, unless we except that striking play "Success," it cuts deeper than any other of his works. The theme is the determination of a people to hug their legends in the face of the plainest truth. In the palace of the king in this play there is an ivory door. The story is that a former king passed through this door and never returned. Everybody who passes through it disappears. Prince Perivale is told the story as a boy by his father, and when ,he becomes king he cannot rest until he has tested it. On the day before his marriage to a princess he has never seen, he opens the door in the presence of his devoted body servant and passes through. Nothing happens to him; he merely traverses passages and comes out into the city. • But in the meantime his action has been discovered, and his death is announced. He must be dead, because he passed through the fatal door. He returns to the palace, but from the chancellor downwards his people refuse to recognise him. He is an impostor. Then the princess arrives. Another cherished legend is connected with her. Every king of the country meets his future bride by chance in a wood, both of them disguised. They fall in love, and then each discovers that the other is of royal blood. King Perivale has never seen his bride, but the people insist on fastening the legend upon him; it stimulates their sense of romance. The princess also insists on going through the ivory door. She, too, comes to no harm, but again the populace prefers its legend to the truth. The end of this profound play, which is written with Mr. Milne's customary technical skill, and is interpenetrated with restrained irony, is that the legend persists, and is handed down to succeeding generations. "The Ivory Door" is an allegory of universal application. EDITH SIT WELL. One of the met curious of literary cults in England ia the Sitwell family — Edith, Sach ever ell and Osbert. It is a cult in which the worshipped are among the worshippers. The SitwelLs have, or profess to have, a high opinion of themselves, and apparently a low opinion of most other contemporary writers. They have explored new avenues of publicity. Here is one in the volume before us, "Gold Coast Customs, and other Poems," by Edith SHwell (Duckworth). Far the most interesting feature of the little volume is not the ultra-exotic odour of the verse, but the portrait of Edith by Pavel Tchelitchew placed at the beginning. The portrait is so hideous and grotesque as to be a joke to those who do not know to what extremes modern art sometimes goes. The face has a shapeless elongated nose like the nose of a tapir, eye brews that do not match, and an eye that looks as if the lady had been in a fight. The body is ugly and the folded hands are huge, like those in a photographic portrait out of focus. Surely to offer such. a ghaatly thing to the public is an impertinence. Of the poems, it is difficult to write, for Miss Sitwell traffics in the bizarre and the esoteric. "Gold Coast Customs" is a long poem, dark with pictures of foul life; the ugliness and savagery of the Gold Coast are used in a fog of words to satirise certain aspects of London life. Exactly what Miss Sitwell is driving at we do not know. All we know is that a powerful impression of something horrible is conveyed. The shorter poems give us glimpses of beauty, but here again it is difficult, if not impossible, to know what Miss Sitwell means. Here and there are striking lines, like And the first soundless wrinkles fall like snow On many a golden cheek, and none may know, But though the following ("The Cherry Tree") has a confused suggestion of beauty, what exactly does it mean? Why has the Shepherdess black with the Sun Locks fair as a sheepskin waterfall? . . . Glittering wind from my cherry tree run And call li«r, call her, to me. Wind, pull at her sheepskin waterfall locks . . . These coral tears So rich and bright her whom the Sun lpyfc i^ck

Mr. George Bernard Shaw's books have been a long time in attracting the attention of wealthy book-collectors, but in the last year they have taken a very remarkable leap forward in value (says the "Observer"). A book like "Widower's Houses" (1893), for example, which two years ago was worth only £3 or £4, has recently gone up to £25 or more; £65 has been paid for a firstrate copy of "Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant" (two volumes, 1898); aiul for "The Unsocial Socialist" (1887), in the original red' cloth, £66 was recently i' bid. These prices all refer to ordinary copies in good condition, but for "association" copies values are, of course, < much higher. Only recently the copy ] of "Man and Superman" (1903), which . Mr. Shaw gave to A. B. Walkley (to whom the play was dedicated) sold iotas much as £230. ( THE WORLD OF FICTION. Mrs. L. A. Coppard has issued through ; Jonathan Cape a picturesque love story j of an Englishwoman in Italy. The beauty of the scenery and the gentle, kindly hospitality of the Italian villagers 1 as described by the authoress are an invitation to the tourist seeking some- ! thing off the beaten track. Perhaps the tourist may find the place, but possibly there is much of the loving heart of Mrs. Coppard in her presentment of the inhabitants of "The Orange Court," and ' the natives may not be so marked a combination of English unselfishness and Italian warmth of character. Like Dickens, Mrs. Coppard found the lack of sanitation hardly covered by the ecent 1 of a wealth of flowers, and the eccentricities of the mistral a burden to , the foreigner. Her picture of a young . Italian "whose feet, beautiful as a girls, sprawled in his boots, his thin hands in aristocratic gesture hung gawkily from liis too-long coat sleeves. His shirtcuffs were always act ray, either up or down, his ties flowing loose or awry, 1 and his head overdue ;it the barbers," will revive memories in the minds of many who have met his countrymen so cordial, courteous, friendly and untidy. The Italian-; are mad motorists, "taking turns on the mountain roads with outer wheels spinning in the air over a precipice rising sheer from the sea." Of the war she says, "It is won but it is not over. There is still what it has done for us whom it did not kill." It takes 300 pages to bring the lovers together, for the man is shy, "uncertain, coy and hard to please," and the woman is kept wondering, alternately delighted and alarmed, or charmed and depressed. A novel for good women who like a wholesome story of the emotions by a writer who understands men—and loves them. From Chapman and Hall comes "What Care I," by C. A. Nicholson, which is one of those stories told, by the caprices of the author, back to front, the chief details coming in narrative form from one or two of the characters whose memories are made to seem defective or who have to be pressed to tell the story the author could have made clearer by beginning at an earlier stage. This picking up of threads is apt to be a tedious business in these hurried days. A young journalist marries a fisherman's daughter and neglects her. She runs away with an opera singer who is already married and has one son. The runaway wife has a daughter (by her legitimate husband), who is brought up to believe the opera singer is her father and the son her brother. The erring wife (when the daughter is 16) is deserted by her lover, and she—in desperate need—returns to her husband, and dies immediately, leaving him with the girl whose parentage he doubts. It is at this stage the author «ends his liero (the father) into a reverie of all night length, from which the reader is expected to gather sufficient facts to proceed with. The father and daughter are soon more like lovers than is comfortable, and the daughter discovers that she loves her supposed brother, now absent, and finally accepts her mother's husband as father without doubt. Ultimately the mother's seducer arrives (with his son), and convinces the hero that the seduction was rather the work of the dead wife. The hero forgives, permits his daughter to marry the seducer's son, and dies of nothing in particular whilst dreaming in a boat. You will find the novel very much better than is indicated herein, but these intertwined, entangled, spasmodically related plots are rather irritating. Mrs. Ivenny with her thorough knowledge of 1 Jidia has written a novel to demonstrate the unfortunate position of the Indian bride under the existing law of child marriages. In "The Two Brides" (Hodder and Stoughton) she draws a comparison between an ordinary English bride married to an English Civil Service official, and the bride of a similar official of Indian b:ith, but Western education. Both men are stationed in India. It is probable that for the sake of emphasis, llrs. Kenny has made the Indian child bride more unhappy, vicious, uncontrollable, and ill-treated than is usual, for the majority of Indian women are extremely gentle in youth and quite accustomed to discipline. This particular bride bites, scratches, and wrecks the bridal chamber, leaving her husband nothing but a chair to slumber in. However, he wins her confidence and sends her to England to be broken in an J educated. What would hapnen in a case such as this when the families concerned had no money, the authoress does not tell us. "The Two Brides" records much unfamiliar domestic detail of Indian life. To anyone with a knowledge of ne<*ro dialect the locality of Ronald Firbank's Prancing Nigger" (Duckworth) may perhaps be guessed correctly, but to us it has appeared alternatively West Indies, South America, Argentine, or Biazil, according to the section of the volume we have been reading. The author invests his negro characters with the faults and affectations of American Society ("High" Society—with capitals) and if read as would Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" the book Is amusing. The author has a gift for description far exceeding his ability to record or invent conversations, and his attempts to o-h-e life and personality to his puppets If ail throughout; they are people of a dream, but he can give reality to a locality) which is reason enough for our disgust with our own failure to decide upon a definite place. BOOKS RECEIVED. Young Woodley, by John Van Druten (Putnam) . A Fatalist at War, by Rudoir Binding (translated from the German by I. F. D Morrow) (Allen and Unwin). The Prospects of Democracy and Other Essays, by Alfred Zimmern; Trails of the Hunted, by James L. Clark: A Gem of Earth, by Marjorie Booth: The True Heart, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Chatto and VVindus). Three Persons (studies or Sir Henry Wilson, Colonel House and Colonel Lawrence), by Sir Andrew Macphail; Remembered Yesterdays, by Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike; Predestined, Dy Anne Dumeld; Hildegarde, by Kathleen Norris, first cheap edition; The Case Book of Sherlock Holme*, first C&eap. MuoossOt - ~ "