THE BOOKSHELF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 209, 3 September 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE BOOKSHELF.

NEWS AND REVIEWS, YOUTH IN OUR TIME. RECENT MINOR NOVELS. A book on the economics of farm life in Australia to-day i& reviewed on page one. Mr. Baldwin, at the annual dinner of the , Worcestershire Association, is reported to have said: "I will stand in a white sheet for a moment. I once said a few words in a chance speech about a book that gave me pleasure. The- consequence of that speech made me resolve never to mention another book, and I have never done it since. That book was written by one Mary Webb, and long after, when I was staying with a friend in Shropshire. I was told that charabancs wero run out from Birmingham labelled, 'To the Mary Webb Country.' It is a most appalling consequence to a few chance observations, and people sometimes wonder at my reticence. But I learned my lesson, and I have since practised a reserve which, if it lias not brought me popularity, has enabled me to go to bed with a clear conscience, which is worth all the popularity in the world." "THE DOOM OF YOUTH." Like Hamlet, Mr. Wyndham Lewis .is of opinion that the world is out of joint. He is indeed a most gloomy critic First he has the idea that the world is controlled by supermen (men of great wealth) whose power, although not always used to the full or necessarily for evil purposes, leads workers in the direction of poverty. The plutocrats are supposed to desire the cheapest possible labour and to push ever more men and women into the cheap labour market, that machines and human slaves may produce at their command. Mr. Lewis omits to tell us who will buy the things produced if the world is divided into workers and enormously weathy supermen (very few), and the former cannot purchase because they are underpaid. Next Mr. Lewis is worried about the precoeity of our youth, the disregard of experienced old age, and the extreme incompetence of the middle aged. He says that youth is rising to power and trampling convention and tradition to dust as it rises. There are no children, he wails; they are little adults. He would have us believe that short hair and short skirts were decreed'by the supermen, through the Press, in order to create yet more workers, for short hair and skirts destroy much luxury and make work more easy. The result, he eays, is that to-day "women are as cheap as dirt," and their men, called upon to spend less upon them, will require less wages. The power of the Press, Mr. Lewis implies, rules the world and the worker, and obeye the wand of the supermen. Youth, he eays, and beauty, and sex, are all alike doomed to extinction, and in "The Doom of Youth" he professes to show us how this is already partly done. Chatto and Windus say this volume is "full of fun and entertainment," which may be one way of saying Mr. Lewis is laughing at ue, but how are we to know if and when he is not in earnest?

THE FICTION SHELF. IN SEARCH OP TREASURE. Aβ readers of "Blind Corner" and "Blood Royal" know, Mr. Dornford Yates hae a pretty hand for a tale of treasure-hunting or Puritanian adventure. There is a mixture of the two in "Safe Custody" (Hodder and Stoughton). Two young Englishmen inherit a castle in the Austrian mountains, and with it the secret of treasure. Two parties of villains are determined to get the treasure and one party waylay the owners as they go to take over, and impersonate them. There follows breaking into the castle, and alarms and excursions in the "Prisoner of Zenda" style (with motor cars added), and a beautiful and high-spirited lady who attaches herself to the owner's help, to provide a highly romantic love- interest. The manner in which the biters are bit in the end is highly dramatic. The title ot "Success and Plenty" (Collins) has little apparent significance. Its author, T. L. Campbell, who wrote "The Miracle of Peille," presents to us a London suburban type, a simple and ineffectual youth whose worst enemies are the inhibitions imposed by his narrow, strict upbringing. After a stupidly quixotic marriage, which is a failure, he rebounds into 4 the arms of an independent young woman who might have been expected to show more sense. The most interesting development of the tale concerns the young man's acquaintance with a family of Russian emigres from whom he learne that happiness has very little to do with money. The tale is told with conviction, and it rings true, hut like its central character it is of limited interest. "Notice to Quit," by James Quince (Hodder and Stoughton), has several new idteas embodied in the story. John Golland'e father, wishing to retain the ancestral, home for his son, and believing this to foe impossible when all taxes and death duties are paid, failing insurance, changes places with his son, who agrees to be disguised as a man of middle-age, whilst his father poses as a youth of 24. This "vice versa" scheme brings a train of exciting and amusing complications. The author takes advantage of these to be acutely critical of the Government, the New Youth, and' the Hae Beens, the foreign financier, and South American revolutionaries, all of which come quite naturally into the story. The girls are quite wonderful, and all the characters well sustained.

BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY.

The attractiveness of the personal element in a story has never been greater than it is to-day. As the publisher, John Murray, of "The Nineteenth Century: A Biographical History," says: "We follow with keener relish the fortunes of a man than th» progress of a movement." Here, in 555 pages, including an index, Victor Cohen lias told again the great story of the nineteenth century. He has selected as representative men William Cobbett, Lancaster Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Parnell, Cecil and Bell, Robert Owen, Shaftesbury, Cardinal Newman, Cobden and Bright, Rhodee and Charles Darwin. Without originality in matter or in treatment he has made the narrative always interesting antl sometimes fascinating, and the ' cursory reader iinds no serious inaccuIt is a book to be enjoyed by I the youthful, whatever their age. J

CLEOPATRA. A GERMAN STUDY. Cleopatra is one of those women who always arouse a certain interest. She was not a good woman and her influence on those with whom she came in contact was disastrous. Yet she was able, intelligent, ambitious and she undoubtedly influenced the course of history. A new book about her ("Cleopatra—A Royal Voluptuary," translated from the German of Oskar Von Wertheimer by Huntley Paterson) has been published by Harrap. The author claims to be a realist of the type of Lytton Strachey. His history may be correct, and. he is certainly writing of a time when morals were lax beyond belief, and treachery and murder were quite every day events which excited little eurprise or disgust, but the author seems rather to revel in what is sordid and worse. Much unpleasant detail might be omitted. In other ways the book is rather discursive and could have been shortened with advantage. For instance there is a detailed account of events at Rome, especially of Caesar's murder, judgptl by its results one of the most important events in history, but one with which Cleopatra had little to do beyond the fact that eho was Caesar's mistress and was in Rome at the time.

Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies and combined with Greek intellect and unecrupulousnese all the sensuality and cruelty of the East. Ambitious to found an Empire for her race, she used without stint all her personal charms, force of character and strength of will to captivate the men with whom she came in contact. Her intrigue with Julius Caesar might have ended in her being the Empress of Rome, and her influence over Antony made her for a while the dominant personality of the East, and be regarded by Rome as its arch enemy. The etory of her life is too long to detail, but it is an amazing record of great ability and courage all turned to one definite end. Had she been a man she could not have done so much, but being a woman endowed with such faculties she came very near success. The very fact that she placed no limit on her ambitions was probably the cause of her downfall. Even in her last extremity her invincible courage showed itself, for she preferred to die a Queen by her own hand rather than submit to go to Rome as a prisoner and a flhow for the Roman populace. She was one of the world's masterful women, no better and no worse than the majority of her contemporaries, and though one's sympathies are often with her, still one realises that it was better for the world that Rome in the person of Octavius was the conqueror.

MEXICAN SCENE. "Aboriginals never benefit by contact with civilisation. Benevolent aesimilation does not exist except as a cruel joke. Education, which is the means employed in an attempt to civilise, is only harmful. Native children are taught to despise the ways of their race in a misguided effort to make them appreciate the benefits of civilisation. The people then lose their native honesty and trustworthiness. Education in the narrow sense results always in a certain loss, and there are the bad effects of the stimulation of vanity and false pride. It is only due to ignorance of history that we now attempt to make rapid changes in social development." Such is the opinion of an educated English lawyer, Mr. D. J. Hall, who spent many months in travelling in Mexico and living as, and with, the Mexican Indians. The account of his journey to the Navajo Desert country, and the long, long trail from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, ie told in one of the best travel books of these days, "Enchanted Sand" (Methuen). Strange places of Indian worship and community houses and deserted villages, thousands of years old, are now guarded from destruction by rangers of the U.S.A., and many hundreds of miles from civilised life the Government has placed little schools for Indian 'children. Away up in the Mexican desert ranges, from 7000 ft to 10,000 ft above the sea, there are many etrange groups and tribee of natives, in sleepy mud-built villages amidst the hundreds of miles of shifting sand, studded here and there with bare coloured castle-like hills and mountains, the sides and tops of which once had a large population. There are small isolated stores, forty or fifty miles apart, seldom visited by white people, and in the lower country pine forests and a few ranches where fruit is grown and canned. All over this country, far from towns, the inhabitants live in such queer ways that Mr. Hall's journey might well pass for a very agitating dream. The untaught natives, still keeping to the customs of their ancestors, are a peaceful, friendly people. The beauty of the country ie more due to the play of sunlight over an almost unimaginable expanse of weirdly-coloured desert than to any natural growth, which is limited to bush and shrub and cactus. It seems as if uncountable years ago all this area was under water before it was trodden by the feet of such animals as we eaw in Conan Doyle's "Lost World." Unmistakable traces of these creatures have been found. Mr. Hall's descriptive writing is vivid, but even he is unable to find words to tell us his experiences in full. There were hardships, of course, for the author travelled as a poor man, earning his food and bed as a ranch keeper, until he purchased a second-hand car.

A KIPLING PILGRIMAGE.

The newspaper on which Mr. Rudyard Kipling once served as an assistant editor, the "Pioneer," has passed from British control to Indian—making one of the most significant pieces of "Indianiaation" that has occurred in. this country in recent years (says the Simla correspondent of the "Christian Science Monitor"). First published in 1865, the newspaper has conscientiously served Anglo-Indian interests in India, and its change to an Indian-owned publication is viewed in India as something in the nature of a minor imperial event. Since its foundation, the "Pioneer" has virtually always represented the best characteristics of the British connection with India, and for many years v.as considered the most important newspaper in the country. Kipling served on the "Pioneer," at .Allahabad, and the "Civil and Military Gazette," at Lahore, between 1882 and 1889. It was as a result of his connection with these newspapers that he developed his flair 'for portraying Indian life and ' manners, and ifc was in the columns of the two newspapers that his first sketches of the Indian scene were produced. It is a popular habit with tourists and others in the country to drop in at the oflices of both newspapers to see where Kipling worked, and an editor of one of the journals recently said that ecores of Americans make pilgrimages to the offices in Lahore and Allahabad for the purpose of seeing where Kipling wrote.