BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 100, 22 January 1927, Page 27

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

(By

"LIBER.")

Give a man a pipe he can smolce. Give a man a book he. can. read. .find his home is bright with a calm delight Though the room be poor indeed. _ —Jaiiies Thomson.

LIBER S NOTE BOOK

Old Bernard Ouaritch, the famous London bookseller, was the publisher of the first editions of Fitzgerald's translation, or adaptation, of Omar Khayyam’s ‘‘Rubaiyat.” As most of us know, the poet altered many of the quatrains in the later editions. Just recently, Mrs. Quariteh Wedtnore, the eldest daughter of the great Oookseller, has published the correspondence between Fitz Gerald and her father. Gradually, but surely, the poet reduced the "purely Eastern colour of the first version. More particularly was this noticeable in a stanza which was specially praised by Swinburne and Rossetti, who, buying the first edition when it was lying in the •Id. box outside Quaritch’s shop, were so enthusiastic abdut its qualities that they created quite a craze for the “Rubiayyat” among the intellectuals of their day. In the first edition the Stanza ran as follows :—•

Awake! for Mornins in the Bow! of Night, .Has flung the stone that put the Stars to Flight; And. Io! the Hunter cf the East has

caught The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

When Fitz Gerald westernised the quatrian in his second version, the stanza read as follows:— Wake! for the Suu behind you Eastern Height, Hus chased the Session of the Stars from Night; And to the field of Heaven ascending.

strikes The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

The old recluse of Woodbridge was not even contented then, for in the fourth and final version we read; Wake! for the Sun who scattered into flight The Stars before him from the Field of Night. Drives Night, along with them from Heuv’n, and strikes The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light. The fourth, I may say, is the version adopted by the editor of the Macmillan edition, which is the one more commonly used, but many of us will prefer the lines as “Old Fitz.,” as Thackeray called his friend—he bad been at Cambridge with him—first wrote them. By the way, if you would like to possess a nice clean copy of the first edition, for which Swinburne and Rossetti gave the not excessive sum ot id., you would have some difficulty in getting hold of one, save at a high ransom. A few months ago, a copy sold at the Anderson Galleries, New York, for over £11)0.

Apropos of her books of reminiscences, a good many stories have found their way into print concerning Lady Asquith. The latest appears in some memories contributed by Lady Augusta Fane to -‘Chit-Chat.” “After Margot married she was selling some of her horses, and I asked her the iiame ot a useful looking hunter she was riding, to which she replied “I call him Henrv; he is so sate’ 1 think I may have told it before, but a varn goes that, after slating Lord Balfour rather severely in her book, Lady Asquith—l suppose 1 ought to call her the Countess of Oxford, now—met nun strolling down Piccadilly one fine afternoon.’ Sticking him up, the authoress hoped “You were not annoved at what I said about you in niy book. Fixing his monocle firmly m Ins eve, Balfour looked down upon the lady and calmly said: “Ah, ye». what, book

Besides Zane Grey, two other Amencan writers have been visiting New Zealand. One, Mr. Governcur Morns, has written several excellent novels, mostlv dealing with hie in New Orleans.’ The other is Mr. Percival Landen who has been responsible for some clever detective stories, a. genre ot literature in which our American friends have scarcely been able to approac 1 English standards.

Mr John Galsworthy, whose "Forsyte Saga” is destined, I think, to become recognised as one of the classics . ol modern English fiction, has been visiting Cape ’l’own, He is credited with the intention of seeking out some quiet spot where he may complete the third novel of the second Forsyte sequence., Manv readers of Mr. Galsworthy s novels possibly do not know that the author, now so celebrated, visited New Zealand when he was a -young man. Some years ago I had the pleasure of receiving a lei ter from him in which he stated that he had “the pleasantest memories of my visit to your islamls-a long time'ago now.” It was probably at, this time that he voyaged to the southern seas in a vessel bound for Adelaide, and commanded bv none other than the late Joseph Conrad, who showed his passenger the manuscript of his first novel, "Almayer’s Folly.” Mr. Galsworthy’s last story left Michael Mont on .th c point of making a world trip. Perhaps - (who' knows?) some South African local colour will be present in the third volume of the new scries of the “Forsyte Saga.” I wish he would bring Michael to New Zealand and ' incorporate some of his own impressions of our country as he may see it after so many years.

A week or two ago in a review of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s latest novel, "Lord Raingo,” I stated that in London I heard several names mentioned of gentlemen who were said to have posed, unconsciously, of course, for leading figures in the story. I sec that an Australian journal has drawn t.side the veil of anonymity in certain cases, so I may as well state that the Prime Minister of the novel, Andy Clyth, has been identified as Mr. Lloyd George, that the voluble Tom Hogarth is Mr. Winston Churchill, that Lord Ockeleford is Lord Curzon, and the loquacious, afiec-dote-telling Labour Minister, Sid Jenkins, is none other than Mr. Will Crooks. Lord Raingo himself is said to have had Lord Rhonda as_ liis Oliginal. Those who possess copies of the novel may doubtless care to pvt the names given here on one "f the fly leaves of Ihe volume. Personally, I don’t like the roman a clef, the novel ■which has its keys. But this style of fiction has latterly been much in vogue.

Jane Austen is not a writer for everybody. She is too quiet in her delicate satire for many readers of the present time who like their fiction to be highly flavoured, and who fail to appreciate thc fine shades of humour which characterise “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and others of those charming stories of life in the carlv days of the past centurv. But “the fair and witty Jane,” as the late Andrew Lang styled her, has always had a select and discerning baud of faithful admirers, and of late years there has been a decided revival of interest in her delicate work. Last year the Oxford Press published a very charming edition of her novels which were illustrated with reproductions of old prints showing the costumes of the time. The edition was rather highly priced—a guinea a volume, I think, was the cost—but now this same edition has, I notice, been reissued in a handsome new binding at the moderate price of seven shillings a volume,

the only difference being that the coloured plates in some of the volumes are now issued as half-tones. All the erudite and vastly interesting notes of, the editor, Mr. Chapman, are retained. Uns is par excellence the best edition of Miss Austen’s novels that has yet been published. I would add it myself to my modest little library, but I already possess the verv pretty Adelphi edition published by Martin Seeker a couple of years ago. Some of the foremost men in England have avowed their great delight in the Jane Austen novels. Lord Oxford —Mr. Asquith that was—is, T believe, a staunch admirer of her work, and his fine literary taste has never been questioned.

Talking about Oxford Press editions, I see there has recently been published “The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse,” uniform with the wellknown “Oxford Book of English Verse” which was compiled for the Press by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who is Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Eighteenth century- poetry lias been much underrated for a long time, but many fine things were written during that age, and it will be good to have a well-selected anthologv of this period in English verse. T hope to refer to the new collection in some future issue.