LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19646, 15 June 1929, Page 13

LITERARY GOSSIP.

That Mr W. H. Hamilton, in his "Garland of Modern Scots Poems,'' has included as many as five poems by Andrew Lang may be merely indicative of the anthologist's preference (says an exchange) or possibly of his belief that Lang's day is returning. But be this as it may, here is sufficient proof that the memory of "Dear Andrew with the brindled hair" is still cherished. Writing a short time ago in his ''Books in General" column in the "New Statesman" apropos the foundation at the University of St. Andrews of an Andrew Lang Lectureship, "Affable Hawk" (Mr Desmond MaeCarthy) avowed that he has been waiting patiently for the summer of Andrew Lang's posthumous fame to begin. "It will come, it will come," he predicts. "Sir J. M. Barrie has said that Lang puzzled the Sassenachs a little. I am not a Scotsman, but I am not a, Sassenach either, and Andrew Lang never puzzled me Ho amazed me, filled me with envy. It is a good many years now since I called attention to his prodigious learning. Light, entertaining, delightful as his articles were, they were by no means without permanent effect upon the learned. Lane was an artist in prose and verse, which is something rarer than holding a first position as an indisputable atithority in any one branch of learning."

A correspondent, aroused by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's criticism of "pink bungalows," eends the "Observer" this retort: —

His grateful readers ever shrink From daring to dispute with Q; But surely we may paint ours pink If he builds his "Pavilions Blue?"

Mr Baldwin mused at a recent dinner on the symbolical significance which we attach"to the word "cricket": —

Men never say: "Oh come, that is not (roll, or lawn tennis, or marbles, or anything else." Nor, if I were to come o&t with my programme and state that I would cure un- • employment in aix months, would anyone pat me on the back and say: "You cannot say that; that ia not politics."

But it is worthy of notice (says an exchange) that this use of the word, though universal, is still classed as "slang' - by the best authorities. It is not mentioned in the 0.E.D.; perhaps Mr Baldwin's remarks will have the effect of bringing it under review for the next edition. Dr. Onions can have no more delicate task than to decide just when a word crosses the shadowy borderline between slang and orthodoxy. Cricket itself is over three hundred years old; how old is this "slang" use of the word?

Novelists of to-day as well as those of a former time (the "Newspaper World" remarks) are not exempt from the charge of making prominent contemporary personages the prototypes of leading characters in their pages. All novels are based on life and its actualities, and no doubt the figures that flit through the fiction of to-day are to some extent counterfeits of lining men and women. There is no secret about the identity of characters in Scott and Dickens, and in modern writers, concerning some in the earlier works of H. G. Wells. Now, in a novel which Miss Ellen Wilkinson is reported to have in preparation for the General Election, it is said that not only many prominent political figures of the time are introduced in her story, but that their publiclv expressed opinions are also embodied. In the matter of putting real folk contemporary with the writer into books, O. Donglag (Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan) admits guilt of a faux pas in her earliest volume and has naively confessed: "I did not know then it was a very daring thing to publish a book in which all the incidents were true, and in which all the characters could recognise themselves and each other. I did not even trouble, in some cases, to change the name.*'

In these days "the essayists," remarks G. K. Chesterton, "have become the only ethical philosophers."