LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 12478, 14 April 1906, Page 7

LITERARY GOSSIP.

I Speaking of Lord Acton in his in- ' augural lecture at Oxford. Professor J Oman said that he went down to see

Lord Acton's library in Shropshire before it came to Cambridge. " I never saw anything," he said, "which co much impressed upon mo the vanity of human life—such vast apparatus, such endless labour wasted—save so far as tho actual accumulation of tho dead books was a permanent gain to Cambridge."

Paul Laurence Dunbar, the negro poet, who died the other day nt the early age of 33, has been justly called the recognised chief singer of his race. Dunbar was pure black, with not n drop of white blood. His father ran away to Canada before the war, and his mother was freed by Lincoln., proclamation. Ho got a common school education, and made his living by running an elevator at Dayton.. Ohio, even after he had published volumes of verse. Ho was discovered by Mr W. D. Howells. and was employed till his health failed in the Congressional Library at Washington. 31 r Dunbar visited England some years ago, and Dr. Robertson Xicoll had tiro pleasure of meeting him at Dr. Parker's. He was a very genial and communicative man, fond of talking about his own work, but speaking of it in a modest and manly fashion. Mr Dunbar had been seriously ill for several years before his death, which he anticipated in the lines published in " Lippincott's Magazine" last December:—

"Because I had loved so deeply, Because I had loved so long,' God in i-iis great ©om pass ion Gave mo the gift of song. Because I had loved so vainly. And sung with such faltering breath, The Master in infinite mercy Offers the boon of Death."

Admirers of tho late George novels, and more particularly of his London novels, will be keenly' interested in an article entitled "Some Recollections of George Gissing," which appears in tho "Gentleman's Magazine." It throws one more search-light into the struggle through which a real, but comparatively unpopular, literary for** has to press its way to acceptance. "Ho spoke to mc intimately," says tho writer, "of tlie subjects that lay nearest his heart, and I may, without vanity, say I learned to know a side of his character that has never expressed itself in print and was even unknown—if the wholly misleading obituary notices are any guide—to his oldest friends. lie was essentially a loving man; a lover of tho ideal and the beautiful; a lover of Nature; a lover of animals—the old collie now lying by my side was his faithful friend, and remembered by him even in his Inst illness."

They had mot first in Surrey, where they spent a summer together, and where Gissing spoko openly of the ludden things—the library purchased at the sacrifice of dinners, tlio tutorship nearly lost because he did not pefsess a decent coat, the horrible cellar whore he wrote by tho light of a grating constantly obscured by passers-by—all of which miseries were at last to gain publicity in "Henry Ryecroft." In tho days of that Surrey summer, however, Gissing was much too reticent to write of these themes:—"ln those long, lazy summer afternoons spent in a dreambound garden, or in the cleajr starlight nights when wo walked through silent woods or across a heather-scented common, he would talk by the hour in that golden voice of his: could ho but havo written as ho talked in those rare hours of oxpansioai, his hooks would h:\vebeen masterpieces. He spoko much of himself; not with any hint of egoism, but as friend sneaks to friend. He spoko of the eaxly struggles that had bittern and eaten into his soul as a corrosive fluid, leaving sores no aflerdraught of happiness was ever able to erase, for no one resented the insults and humiliations of poverty moro bitterly than Georgo Gissing."

The episode which, more than any other, drove tho horror of poverty into his soul, was a visit to the United States. Ono of his short stories had been pirated in an American newspaper, and Gissing crossed the Atlantic only to learn that American editors could "get as much of such stuff as they wanted without paying for it." Then George Gissing, the fastidious artist, who caught the glamour of a lost world in "By the lonian Sea," was to faoe the raw glare of modernity in all its fierceness. For a time he survived by travelling with an agent for patent gas-fittings, the agent doing all the booming, and the novelist the practical demonstration. The partnership came to an end, and Gissing had to keep himself alive for weeks on doughnuts. "Only onoe," writes his friend, "did he meet with sympathy and kindness, and, strange to say, this was in a lawyer's offices where he found an old clerk, in shabby black, reading the Bible during the dinner-hour. The old man did his best to helD him, and Gissinjj never forgot this strange friend, and often spoko of the incident, as the one bright spot of colour in his drabgrey memories of America; but it is characteristic of his peculiar sensitiveness with reference to any personal experience that he never attempted to turn it into "copy." Ho realised, however, its dramatic value, and when asked why he never made use of it. replied, "Because I never care to put my deepest feelings in print. Do you suppose I have ever drawn my ideal woman for one of my heroines? She is for mc, and not for the public."

In his last published volume of essays, Mr Augustine Birrell gives an example of the satire of Frederick Lockjrer, author of "London Lyrics." Tlie object of the story was a judge of very pro«iic limitations. Mr Birrell writes:—"My father-in-law (Lockyen was only onoe in the witness-box. I had tho felicity to see him there. It was a dispute about the prioe of a picture, and in the course of his very short evidence ho hazarded the opinion that the grouping of the figures (they wore portraits) was in bad taste. The judge, the late Mr Justice Cave, an exoeilent lawyer of the old school, snarled out, 'Do you think you could explain to mc what is taste?' Mr Lockyer surveyed tho judge through the eye-glass which seemed almost part- of his being, with a glance modest, deferential, deprecatory, as if suggesting 'Who am I to explain anything to youP' but at the same time critical, ironical, and humorous. It was but for one brief moment; the eyeglass dropped, and there came the mournful answer, as from a man baffled at all points: 'No, my lord ; I should find it impossible!' The judge granted a ready. almost a cheerful, assent."

The town of Derby, Connecticut, has prohibited Jack London's books from tho public library, and requested its inhabitants to boycott all magazine? containing his stories, on the ground that in a recent lecture tour Mr London made several somewhat anarchistic remarks highly derogatory to the Government.