LITERARY GOSSIP

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21470, 11 May 1935, Page 17

LITERARY GOSSIP

The publication in what is described as Thomas Hardy* first novel will revive again th troversy over the propriety of resurrections, writes **Lucio_in "IJanchester Guardian." .^ es t v. e ably it was written dunng rather long period when his hterary fame was still uncertain. Williara Tinsley claimed to have launched Hardy and to have done badly out of it: I remember Tom Hardy well when he first called upon me. He told m» he was an architect but had given up his profession on account, I twnK. of some eye trouble. Anyhow, I Jfiea bis first novel, "Desperate Remedies, in three volumes. It went very flat. The only decent review I can remember of it was in the "Saturday," but that was a good enough notice to make a publisher thinlr he had got hold of something. So he gave Hardy £25 down for "Under the Greenwood Tree" and brought it out in two volumes. This also did little. Tinsley then offered £ 100 for a serial story for his magazine, and this produced "A Pair of Blue Eyes," brought out eventually in three volumes. "There was no great money in it; but I could see that Hardy was going to get a grip some day." Meanwhile Hardy told him that another magazine editor was offering him £3OO for a novel. So I thanked him very much and said. "Take the offer, my boy." I couldn't spring so much—the one I declined was "Far from the Madding Crowd." Of course I hadn't seen it— ' but even if I had it wouldn't have made any difference. Whether a novel is good, bad, or indifferent, a publisher has only got to think of one thing: is there money in it for him? Old Tinsley's candour is refreshing after the outpourings of some of the moderns. Mr George Robey's work in the part of Falstaff in "Henry IV." at His Majesty's Theatre, London, has drawn high praise from the "Manchester Guardian's" critic, Mr Robey is unquenchable and his Falstaff is Robey. His eyebrows may no more be painted in, but the ghosts of those tremendous arcs assert themselves. He has but to quiz the audience and all are set in a roar. Plainly he was trying to diminish, if not to abolish, himself, and plainly the feat was beyond him. There was no need for him to be nervous, as he obviously was. Shakespeare wrote for men of the stage, drolls unashamed of drollery, and one imagines that Shakespeare might hav® voted this to be the very Falstaff of his fancy—at . least so far as the more physical fooling was concerned. It was a Falstaff most native to the Boar's Head; he trailed no glory of a past gentility; he had lived on sack and spoken the speech of the streets since boyhood. As the playboy Falstaff of the impersonation scene Mr Robey was tremendous, every inch a player-king, and he delivered the "instinct" speech with power. The description of his ragged army was not so well done; that soaks to a kind of philosophy, and Mr Robey's Falstaff was iftdeed "a reverend vice, a grey iniquity," but not the kind of rogue who has a mood to ponder on morality. We hung upon his entrances and lamented his every exit. It was hard on the barons, who, after all, have plenty of good stuff to say, and had been adroitly cast. No less than the roll of drums was the roll of Falstaff's eye. Probably no West End audience has laughed at Shakespearean comedy like this for years. It was authentic laughter and not the dutiful titter which is paid to a classic by people who are wishing it would end. Lovers of. Thomas Hardy, says Mr Christopher Morley, still remember with pleasure an article which appeared in the New York "Times" shortly after Hardy's death in 1928. It informed the American public that "according to Sir Edmund Goose" Hardy's first novel, after 1 being rejected by two publishers, had been burned by the author. Professor Carl J. Weber, of Colby College, reminds us of this agreeable gaffe; and indeed Sir Edmund Gosse was anserine to believe that so careful a hoarder of MS. as Hardy had destroyed his firstling. Professor Weber, in a little book now published by the Johns Hopkins Press, brings forward evidence that the gist of Hardy's maiden effort has been lying unrecognised all these years in the "New Quarterly Magazine" for July, 1878. Only three copies of this magazine have been discovered by Professor Weber in the United States: one in the Library of Congress, one in the Brooklyn Public Library, one in the possession of Mr Paul Lemperly of Lakewood, Ohio, whose name is well known to collectors. But there must be plenty more of them, and I advise the cherishers of old magazines to rummage their bins. From Faber and Faber comes "Brighton," by Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton. They provide us with a picture of Brighton in its Regency glory, and in the postRegency reaction. The authors have combined in showing us the fishing-town of Brighthelmstone as Charles 11. knew it, the seaside resort familiar to Fanny Burney and Mrs Thrale, and Dr. Johnson, and present the whole process of its astonishing growth from a little village to a great city. The menace attendant on the secret rearming of Germany, which isconce more causing much uneasiness among the other European Powers, had been again and again emphasised by M. Andre' Tardieu , while he was the French Prime Minister. Now, in his book, "France in Danger!" which Gerald Griffin has translated for Denis Arches, M. Tardieu marshals all the arguments which he used in the days when, in his official capacity, he stubbornly opposed any relaxation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Herr Hitler's policy, he contends, fully justifies the fear; and suspicions he entertained in those days. "Germany is determined to fight again," he says, "unless she can get all she wants without fighting." "I first felt the real delight of poetry in a room in Yonkers, New York," says John. Masefield in his preface for the new American edition of his "Collected Poems." "It was there," continues the Laureate, "that I decided that I had rather write verse than do anything else in the world." Mr Robert Lynd says that sometimes a writer whom for years he has been unable to read has suddenly become tine of his gods. This has happened with Sir Thomas Browne, Jane Austen, and Charles Lamb. So, too, he stuck helplessly at first, second, and third attempts to read "David Copperfield," but he is now convinced that it is one of the three greatest novels ever written.