LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18243, 29 November 1924, Page 11

LITERARY GOSSIP

In the history of letters there are precedents enough for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's lament that the public has preferred Sherlock Holmes as against his own preference for "The WhiteConipany" and it s successor. "Sir Nige|« Over and over again, says the ''Manchester Guardian," it has happened that public appreciation of an author's work has not been quite on the lines of the author's own desires. Browning believed in himself as a dramatist in spite of public neglect, saying to a friend at the very end of his life: "Shall I whisper to you my ambition and my hope? It is to -write a tragedy better than anything I have done yet. I think of' it constantly." Thackeray might be considered happy when Trollope could write at his death that all the world agreed that "Vanity Fair, "Esmond," and "Pendennis" were masterpieces, the general nublic preferring: '.Vanitv Fair." the critics "Esmond," and personal friends "Pendcnnis"; but Thackeray was not content, for his great ambition was to write a success?' 1 ! play and he n"ver achieved it. . . .' Wc may gnosis tb'nt Thomas Hardv would nuf "The Dvnasts" far "Tess," but the miblif has fa™M otherwise. ,iu=t as the public cared little for Meredith's verse. Trite sayings from recent newspapers:— "The slow, deliberate Britisher imaginary as the hustling American." — G. Bernard Shaw. "Every child is, both in the most superficial and in the most solemn r,enae, a holy terror." —G. K. Chesterton.

"I.would rather have written 'Uncle. Tom's Cabin' than The Critique of Reason.' "—Charming Pollock. "Piihlic opinion should condemn scientists who desecrate their nowers to cause misery among the nations." Afro Annie T?esant. "WJi<»n the comes. J- am disnospd to think thnf he wW choose tosnepk to his twierntion p«i'+h«r from' tlio Tvlnit rinr from the nlntforTTl nor fmrn fVio -nrJn+.-d page, hut from the stage."—Dean Inge.

Twain di'd not nretend. ■Rousseau, to tell evervfning. Toward the close, of volume 2 of his "Autobiography," which has just appeared, thiß most human of men is forced to conf?ss what might be termed an ultimate disillusion:

I have been dictating this bio-, graphy of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents of my life which 1 am ashamed of, but I have not got one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will be complete and unimpaired when I finish this autobiography, if I ever finish it. I believe that if I should put in all those incidents I would be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this. book. "Condition," by John Drinkwaber, in the "Literary Review": If one to lov« yen better came, , ' The paradise within my heart I would surrender to ■ that Same, And unlamehting would depart. Till then undaunted I'll embrace Mv. fortune, asking no man's leave, . And • nledge you in the mariet place And wear your favour cp my sleeve. . Miss Eleanor Mary Evans, a niece of George Eliot, was buried recently at Chilvers Coton, near Nuneaton, England. Chilvers Coton is the "Shepperton" of the famous stories, a.lijf erary Mecca. In the church George Elliot was baptised; in the churchyard, where her niece was buried, lie her father and mother and that well-belov-ed brother, Isaac, whom she immortalised as "Tom Tulliver." Chilvers Coton was the scene of "Amos Barton's" ministrations and the vocal gymnastics of the wonderful choir, with its organ, bassoon, and key-bugles. One of the bells in the tower is a George Eliot memorial bell.

The binding of books in this day and time is a prosaic enough business (writes a librarian in the ■ '"Literary Review"), even the most expensive covers being made of no more unusual material than commonplace leather. Formerly matters were far different. It is recorded that during the heyday of the French Revolution human skin was one of tlie most popular materials, being plentiful and cheap, although, hardly so handsome as vellum, which it most closely resembles. A Russian poet, in more recent days, is said to hare offered to his lady fair a collection of sonnets bound in hw own skin, .removed when he suffered «n amputated leg. History does not record the lady's action in the case. Deer skin, hog skin and fox skin were also once popular, and a pair of buckskin breeches worn around the world by Mordaunt Cracherode, father of the English book collector, served later to bind a volume in his son's library, which in time reached the shelves of the British Museum. Bookbinders say of human skin that it is "darker and more mottled than vellum, of a rather coarse textured surface, with holes in it like pig skin, but smaller and more sparse."

In "Discoveries," his latest volume of essays, Mr Middleton Murry discusses the mystic quality of Shakespeare in a consideration of what he describes as "the most perfect short poem in. any language"—to wit, "The Phcenix and the Turtle." Who can read that amazing and apparently unrelated product of Shakespeare's genius without "Obstinate queationinfrs Of sense aiid outward ■things. Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank miagivinga of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realised." No one has dared to pretend that "The Phamix and the Turtle" is wholly intelligible, but "through it Ave haVe a glimpse of a mode of experience wholly beyond our own." Assuredly, Shakespeare meant something very vital. He had discovered something which he was trying to convey in human symbols. Here, if anywhere, was a true cryptogram which escaped the diligence and curiosity of Mrs Gallup and her persistent disciples. Mr Murry has a theory of his own, which he expounds with much persuasiveness, as to Shakespeare's, soulbtate when he wrote "The Phmnix and the Turtle." He had striven to reconcile the world of his apprehension and the world of human life; to express the one in terms of the other; and he had been convinced of the futility of the task even frorn his transcendent genius: "Because his intuition was deepest, his was the deepest consciousness of the impossibility of ever fully and truly manifesting it " Here, concludes Mr Murry, is the explanation of those * x i uislt * passages of pure poetry which, though dramatically irrelevant, break again and again through- the structure of the Xs As for Shakespeare's trageKS'tbey are an. attempt to : invest life as it is with the garment of the hfgher intuition-to mark the antinomy between a vision such a s kindled the soul of Lazarus returned from the grate, and the world in which he moved*