NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17863, 8 September 1923, Page 11

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

THE ADELPHL In the second number of "The Adelphi" Mr Middleton Murry announces that the first number was a magnificent success. We are delighted to hear it. The new number contains the completion of Mr Tomlinson's admirable sketch, "The Estuary," some more of Gorki's recollections of Tolstoy, another of Mr D. H. Lawrence's irritating and acute articles, and some moving extracts from Katharine Mansfield's diary. The Contributors' Club contains items from John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells (who complains that books like "Futility," ''The Poor Man," and "Lady into Fox' are not properly treated by reviewers), J. M. Murry, J. W. N. (Sullivan, and H. J. Laski. "The Journeyman," one of the most charming of Writers, has an article which will be meat and drink to all those who lovo thoso great immortals Tchitohikov, Falstaff, Charlie Chaplin, Bealby, and Sganarelle. A note in Multum in Parvo mentions a surprising and really tragic fact concerning "The Adventures of Mr Polly." AVhen he was writing these adventures, Mr Wells felt he could go on for ever, and wanted to. Accordingly, he proposed to the publishers that they should issue "Mr Polly" in parts, and that he should go on until he was tired of it. This offer did not appeal to the publishers. They should be skinned alive. {London: "The Adelphi" Office.)

VISION !! On the cover of the second number of "Vision, a Literary Quarterly,*' is a clever drawing of a young satyr tripping along with a butterfly perched on the finger of an uplifted hand. lu this drawing the character and intention of "Vision" are symbolised. Hero, you are meant to understand, you will find some gay pagans showing you, without much reserve, how jolly is the flesh, how essentially dainty satyriasis. Australia, in its struggle towards a name in the world of letters, has not passed the stage of reckoning it an nchievement to stagger the average man; and epater le bourgeois is the aim of the Editors of this quarterly. "We believe," they say in a comically pompous "foreword," "that the generation now arriving, which has seen the bloody finality of the last centuryS tribal ethics in War and in Futurism, nil! turn agiin to Beauty and Passion," and they boast that they are helping by producing a magazine "as naked as Manly Beach." Those who like confused and artificial verse cooked up out of Wilde, and Heredia will liko the poems. Those who wish to be amused will turn to tho short article in which. Walter do la Mare is in all seriousness advised to imitate the Australian red-blooded verse. Mr Norman Lindsay scatters many drawings of centaurs and unclothed ladies through the pages—some of them amusing, some (very graceful. But the only thing in the quarterly worth anything is the reprint of Francis Thompson's reconstruction of Tom o' Beam's song. (Sydney: "The Vision" Press.)

NOVELS. Some one confessed the other day —perhaps Clement K. Shorter—that he had never read a single book by Silas Hocking. That good fortune 13 not ours. For review purposes, we seem to have sampled abtmt a hundred and one, aDd find it very difficult, subjected to yet another, to distinguish the liocking that is from the Hocking who was twenty years ago. But probably there is no difference. Mi Hocking writes automatically: when he has hit on the plot and the place, the task is done. In his latest volume, "Where the Roads Cross," the subjects are Capital and Labour, trade unionism of tho semi-sanctimonious type, and the "better to have loved and lost" kind or romance. For. 288 pages you have lo follow a hero, the end of whose journey you can see at page 8, or, which is just as bad, think you can; though there is perhaps a slight distinction in a Hocking nero whe does not marry and live happily ever afterward),, but goes instead to Melbourne in the dumps, lives solitarily with a Chinese servant, makes money, and reads onlv "The Argus." (London: Sampson Low. Through Simpson and Williams and the Australasian Publishing Co.) "Ponjola." by Cynthia Stockley,' is, of course, a tuie of South Africa; though it begins in Paris, you know that the scene will move «oou xo Rhodesia, as it promptly does. You suspect also that there will be strong drink there, and stronger passions, and again you have sensed the truth. And for the rest you have ths old programme—a woman saved from despair of human nature by a man who has found the veldt "a good place to lose one's ghosts." He, like her, has a past; but while hers is the shadow of a mysterious tragedy, and gradually fades, she discovers thai; he has also a present. In spite of what the silent spaces have done for him, he begins to suffer again, to go down hill rapidJv in mind and soul and body; and so therefore she has to save him as ho had saved her. And she does. There are other incidents, of course, orgies of drunken ar.d dissolute, men, a murder, ana all but a suicide. But the double salvation is the beginning and end of it all, the gold mines and human riff-raff being mainly make-weights. Unfortunately, they are also makelengths, the book being quite a third fuller than is necessary or effective. (London: Constable. Through Whitcombe and Tombs, Christchurch, and L. 31. Isitt,' Christchurch.)

"Sinners in Heaven," by Cike Arden, is a prize novel for which the publishers make the claim that it is "audacious." It is certainly a little unusual, and worth a prize if entered in the lists of mere bread-and-butter stuff. The workmanship—choice of words, construction of sentences, marshalling of facts, etc.—is better than the average in sensational fiction, while the interest does not depend on. mere scandal or on mere breathless escapades, but on a bold combination of both, It is necessary, of course, to drag in an aeroplane to make the action fast enough, and aeroplanes have their limitations as incitements to the romantic imagination, but the author does as weir with his machine as most authors do —carries off the heroine on the eve of an unsuitable marriage, shows her "the sharp contrast between life in a country village with its smallness of outlook, snobbishness, and spite, and life in the wild places of the world, where convention and tradition are unknown," shows her this by actident and without malice prepense, and then leaves the "forces of tradition and convention" to deal with an "audacious and moving situation.'' The story is ]on2, but to those whose minds are tolerant of the marvellous it will not seem tedious. (Leonard Parsons, Lonrton through Robertson and Mullins, Ltd!, Melbourne.) OTHER BOOKS. De=pito his pre-occupation with the international problems of the day, and his hard labours on behalf of the League of Nations, Professor Gilbert

Murray is continuing his great work of translations from the Greek. To the eleven plays he has already translated he has now added the "Choephoroe," the second of the Aeschylean trilogy. Professor Murray's verse has lost none of its strength or beauty. He supplies the usual preface and critical and explanatory notes. (London: George Allen and Unwin.)

Perhaps no chapter of poet-war history is so little known as the rise and fall of Bolshevism in Hungary in 1919. So many stirring events were taking place everywhere that the Bela Kun adventure could receive oniy a sketchy and confused attention from the newspapers. Mr Bartlett was s:nt to Vienna, by the "Daily Telegraph" in 1919, and going on to Budapest he kiw the whole strange drama, taking part in it himself. His narrative is very detailed, hut wonderfully graphic and vigorous. Mr Bartlctt's story is supplemented by two chapters in which an A.D.C. to the late Emperor Karl describes the two vain attempts of the Emperor to regain his throne. (London: Thornton Butterworth.)

Messrs Nelson are continuing their series of eighteenpenny novels —reprints of works of enduring merit. The latest "batch comprises Rupert of Hentzau, The Red Cockade, Wee Macgreegor. The War of the Carolinas, Woliville Days, and Sophia. To have these books in good binding and well printed, at a. low price, is almost like being back in the days before the war.

One of the most skilful Burveys of philology produced in many years was Professor Jespersen'e "Language; Its Nature, Development, and Origin." A smaller work is his "Growth and Structure of the English Language," of which a cheap edition has now appeared. This admirable little treatise, profound and crystal clear—one of a, very few highly technical and scientific books which any educated person can thovoughly enjoy—is the fourth edition. It is full of life and human nature, extraordinarily rich and suggestive. Nobody should omit to buy it who would enjoy tho marvels and magic, the humour and the boldness and shrinkings, of that old and vigorous organism, the English language. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell.)

Two other pleasant books from Blackwell are "A Better Country," by I>r. B. W. Henderson, and "On Desert Islands," by H. Orsmond Anderton. Dr. Henderson's book is a reprint of tales and sketches from the '"Nineteenth Century" and other papers. Many who read his historical reconstructions when they appeared will be glad to have them in permanent form. Mi' Anderton's essays (in a pleasant cover, and printed at the Shakespeare Head Press) are tho work of a musician who is a scholar and a humanist.

Boni and Liveright have added to their attractive "Modern Library" a reissue of Van Loon's "History of Mankind"—or a reissue rather of Part I. of that work as a single volume. Those who have not read van Loon complete will appreciate the opportunity of being able to sample him in this small (and relatively cheap) pocket volume of 200 12mo. pages. They will appreciatechiefly, of course, the chance of being able to pass Van Loon in this less terrifying size to their children; but although "Ancient Man" is written for the youug, its appeal is not restricted to the young of any age. Whoever haa a fresh mind will find it interesting to follow this bold generaliser from "Once upon a time" to Now, while Van Loon has also added something worth while in his drawings. Deliberately informal and child-like, they are strikingly imaginative and suggestive, whether the subject is Nineveh or Babylon or the toilsome march round the Rocks of Bohistun or the spiral Tower of Babel. (Through L. M. Isitt, Ltd., Christchurch.)