LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 150, 26 June 1915, Page 20

LITERARY NOTES

Mp. P. W. Wilson, in his book, "The Unmaking of Europe" (Nisbet, 3s 6d net), has prepared a lucid statement of those five terrible months which ended 1914, and spent themselves in "The Unmaking of Europe." "Europe," he says, "win never cease from war until she finds something better to do. That better business is neither trade nor philosophy, nor even art, though it may include all these. It is in one word, Sacrifice ; the modem equivalent of that adventuious altruism which made of St. Francis, St. Elizabeth, of Florence Nightingale, John Howard, David Livingstone, an inspiration to the world. The coinage of goodness must outshine the courage of a battle. The alternative to Nietzsche and Bemhardi is not Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith. It is a Wesley, a Luther, a Savonarola, a, Tolstoi." "The death is announced of Mile. Adele Hugo, the last of the children of the great French poet, at the age of eighty-five years. Her death took place in her country house at Suresnes, where she had lived quietly for a long time past." says the Paris correspondent of The Times. "I am not a bit aristocratic," confesses Mr. H. C 4. Wells in a preface to a Russian edition of his works, which is quoted by the current "Book Monthly." He was "born in that queer, indefinite class that wo call in England the middle class," and does not know any of his ancestors beyond his grandparents, "and about them I do not know vepy much, because 1 am the youngest son of my father and mother, and they were dead before 1 was born." •'&oci§l Evils and Tku 1 Keffl§42." J?x

Leo Tolstoy (Methuen, Is), is a selection from the writings of the great Russian novelist. The editor, Helen Matheson, says: — "These essays are ruthless in exposition, but tihey show how each man and each woman of the community is parbly responsible for existing conditions, and can help to remedy them. As Tolstoy says, by their silence and their noninterference people become aiders and abettors and participators in all evils." The essays cover the subjects of land, labour, government, religion, war, and the sexes.

Gogol's "Dead Souls" has just betn issued in English. " ' Dead Souls,' is the national prose-epic of Southern Russia,*' writes the Glasgow Herald. " It« characters are well-known types, as familiar to Russians as Tom Jonee, Uncle Toby, Mr. Pecksniff, are to us. Within the compass of an average-sized novel Gogol has stowed away an epitomo of Russian life as it appeared to the intelligent Russian of hie day. As the reader flits with Tchichikoff in the ewift ' bird-troika ' from village to village, from town to town, he sees spread out before him the wonderful panorama, of Russia and of Russian life. Nearly* century ha« come and gone, but this wonderful book, with its kindly humour, its generous expaaisiveness, it« shrewd characterisations, its raptures, and its enthusiasms, is still an invaluable help to the understanding of the great Empire of the East."