LITERARY NOTES.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 175, 18 April 1908, Page 12

LITERARY NOTES.

. The " Book Monthly an interesting article on .-Books that have never been written," whorein :tho writor . observes:-— W° ,havo been thinking of .Georm Merechih oil his eightieth bjrthday, and so thniic of that novel which he contemplated under the title of 'The Journalist.' Was his friend John Morloy not .to/be' i:'figure in it? And did Mr. Morloy himself not mean to write a monograph on : Chatham' in. the Twelve English Statesmen SerieSK " l''inally> Mr. '.Erederio-Harrispn took ; ovehthis task WuTinado the series complete. "For many years Mr. Arthur Balfour was announced for a book on John,. Stuart Mill in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics. Here also the call of public affairs intervened, and the announcement died a natiiral death. Mr. W. E. Henley was to have done a Dickens volume for Blackwood's Modern Writers, .'and 4 John. Oliver Hobbes'. a volume 1 on James Anthony Froude—commissions unfulfilled."

M. Paul Gaultier (says the "Pall Mall Gazette ") has written an article ,on " How to' Read Novels," which may remind the hardoned critic of his own infant efforts to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs. Some readers, we are told, will read any-, thing, and care neither for observation, nor .psychology, nor sentiment, nor the way of putting things that M. Gaultier calls art. Only plot appeals to them, and for them the cloak-and-sword romances of Alfred.de Vigny and Alexandre Dumas. Yet why do the stories of these last-named never tire, while comparatively few people care nowadays for the equally involved " intrigues " of Ponson da Terrail and of Eugene Sue ? According to M. Gaultier, : it is the seasoning as does it, , or, in other words, the indefinable and saving quality called style, which makes one return over and over again to the same class of books, while the other, when once used, is,tossed aside and forgotten. Hence style is above all-things to be cultivated by the author of novels with a purpose. Has not, Voltaire's " Candide" done more for the spread of the pessimistic philosophy than all thd volumes of Schopenhauer? To which truism we may add that one reads not only what one likes, but what one can. Now everyone can assimilate without indigestion the pithy sentences and the limpid style of Voltaire. But who, save our, own War Minister in the intervals of his efforts for tho destruction of the British Army, cares to grapple with the long-winded dissertations of Schopenhauer? 1 The Library Association, at tlieir Glasgow meeting last year, gave their benison to a scheme,' put forward on behalf of the National Home Beading Union, for the production of a periodical designed -to assist readers to follow particular lines in their reading. As the outcome of the scheme there lias been published the first number of " 'i'ho Reader's Review/' a monthly guide to books aud reading, at the price of one penny. The first number certainly gives promise (says the " Scotsman ") of extremely.useful successors, for hero we have short courses of reading in no fewer than five lines, set forth in extremely readablo little articles by men entitled to speak on tho subjects they have undertaken. _ Thus Sir John Cockburn tells of Australian writers; Mr \V.. E. A. Oxon tells of " Whittier, Poet and Reformer," and the books that were written by or relato to him; Mr. Frank Bullon, from " the somewhat grim solitude of a Glasgow hotel smoking-room," discusses " The Literature of the Sea " ; Mr. Turner, Savilian' Professor of Astronomy in tho University of Oxford,, gumes would-be students to "Books About Astronomy"; and Mr. Thomas Seocombe writes about " Books and Bookmen." There an other similar articles and oven literary competitions, but those, art not of the character to attract limorickers.