LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18674, 24 April 1926, Page 13

LITERARY GOSSIP.

Books that disappear (a well-known novelist wrote the other day) would make an interesting subject for those who explore the byways of literary history. Two such there have been in the past season, books by the two men who of all living English writers best, perhaps, merit the title of genius. ''St. Mawr," which was, I understand, the story of a stallion, by D. H. Lawrence, came, saw, and vanished. I have not read it, nor have I yet mot anybody who has. It has not, to tho best of my knowledge been suppressed by the police, like the same author'c "The Rainbow," nor has it been reviewed or advertised. It was, and now, bo far as I know, it is not. The other notable phantom of the season has been "The Trial of Jesus," by Here the disappearance, if not quite so utter, has been sufficiently complete. The book was reviewed. But. a conspiracy of silence seems to have gathered about it. Nobody talks about it, nobody reads it. Was it the general opinion that a respected writer had for enco made a mistake in {act and that the kindest thing was to pass by in silencet I cannot say. To judgo from the review the worst that can be said of the play is that a great poet has forgotten his wings and made of the most passionate episode in history a dull and dreary thing. An interesting note from the New York "Evening Tost":— "My Old Kentucky Home," whore Foster wrote and composed his most famous song, is at Bardstown, about forty miles • by road from Louisville. It is now an international shrine, and in the two years in which it has been open to the public it has jumped to second placo on the list of national shrines (in America) in point of popularity. It was originally the home of the Bowails of Kentucky—kinsmen_ of Foster's—and dates back from 1795. On the Fourth of July next will be celebrated the centennial of Foster's birth, near Pittsburg. He was born the same day on which the deaths occurred of John Adams Thomas Jefferson, the second and third Presidents of the Uuited States. He died in 1864 in his thirty-eighth year. In the few years during which he lived at the Rowan home at Bardstown he waa responsible for 196 musical creatious. Of these 142 were songs of his own composition, for which, he also wrote the music. ' . '

Foster, wrote "My Old Kentucky Home" in 1852, while staying at Federal Hill, the Eowan home. The same year, at about the same time (says Young E. Allison in his brochure, "The Old ' Kentucky Home''), he • wrote "Massa's in de Cold, Cold: Ground." The words convey a picture of the grave of the elder Rowan in the mourn-, ful solitude of the ; family burial ground, remote yet vrithin plain view of the brooding windows and of the sunny, cornfields. . Over it then "the ivy was a-creeping".as it creeps yet. There is tho willow tree where the 'mockingbird sang, underneath ; which V old massa am a-sleepiug.'* Foster knew the stories of that strong- old man who was at once the whole law and . the beneficent providence of his slaves. He had listened with the spiritual ear of genius:

Down .in the cornfield ~ ' 'Hen that mournful eound. \. Al! the darkies »n> i-wfeping ... Must's in the cold, cold. gtoupd. I What anepitaph! '• , v A modern translator-of. Montaigne (a reviewer wrote, the pther day of the new. 6ve-volume edition by Dr- Ives, published- simultaneously by .the presses, of Harvard and Oxford) runs much the same risk as the. Dr. Moffat who recently presented us with a version of the Bible in modern speech. He has to encounter the dangerous foroes of tradition, of habit, of affection for the old simply because it .is old. lie must incur the suspicion of making changes, not because they are better, but because thoy are different. Montaigne, like* the Bible, occupies a special position. There are- admitted a intakes .in the Florio .and ,Cotton translations, the only ones we have, but not. mistakes of the magnitude and significance which appear .in t.h« Authorised Version ,of the Bible-; . It may also be contended that Montaigne, writing in 1 old French.' is best 'presented to us in old English .(FuHfio was.' contemporary _with Shakespeare), and certainly Florio'a translation has a freshness and ingenuity which we cannot hope to recapture, in this country by any. taking of painq. Cotton's, too, is a very... adequate and vigorous rendering, which, like the others, gives the spirit- even' when it takes liberties with- the letter.. Mr Ives savs severe things of Floriojs "fatal freedom and fluency" and' his unauthorised interpolations, nswell as of Cotton's otaissions, , "generally-, of obscure or puzriing. passages." The scientific spirit of to-day leave* no loophole for "fatal freedom," and its omniscience no excuse i for dodging'a difficulty.. H^ncethese four bulky,volumes ' to present Montaigne in the letter as he wrote. ' One cannot decide the question of literal accuracy by the method of samples, but the question of comparative readablenesa cannot be ignored. Here are three passages from one of' the early essays • chosen .■ at random:—, FLORIO. A gentleman of ours, exceedingly snliject to the gowt, instantly solicited by his Physitians to teave all manner of salt meates, was wont to answer pleasantly, that when the fittes or panges of the disease tooke him, hee : would have somebody to quarrell with; and that crying and cursing, now against Boloni sapsege, and sometimes by railing against salt-meats, tongues, and gammons of bakon, he found some case. COTTON. ' | A gentleman of my country, marvellously tormented with the gout, being importuned by . his physician* totally to abstain from all manner of salt meats, was wont pleasantly to reply, that in the extremity of hia fits he must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues and the -hams, was. some mitigation of his pain., , IVES. A gentleman of .pur day, who was terribly subject to gout, being urged by his physicians to abstain altogether from salt meats, was wont to reply jocosely that' in the paroxysms and iorture of the diseasb, he wanted to have something to lay the blame on; and, that, striving and cursing at one time ' about sausage, and another about tongues, ana again about ham, he felt, greatly relieved.,. Do we find a certain flatness in "terribly subject" compared with "marvellously tormented, and in "he felt greatly relieved" as a substitute for "he found some ease" Perhaps that is because medical cliches cannot avoid .tho fate of other cliches. It is something to have the afflicted philosophy established as a. contemporary and not as a compatriot, or, as the cautious Florio leaves him, a gentleman ' at. laige; and to know that'the was siniply sausage, ,of no defined nationality.