LITERARY NOTES.

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 18, 20 July 1918, Page 11

LITERARY NOTES.

Novels make the main stream of new literature this fourth Spring of the Great War, reports the Daily Chronicle, London, They are of all sorts, as they aro meant for all sorts and conditions of people. Their mission is to entertain, to divert, to help the passing hours. When everything is said, that is a mission with » clear call." Tho writer of the summons to this "yearly meeten o' Darset men in Lo'non" * scored again. Ho writes : "My Zonnies, —How many o'eo d'know th' Vust Reg'ment o' Green Linnets hay' a-bin vighten since August, Nineteen Ilunderd an' Vourteen, wi'out zoo much as a tin whistle or Jew's harp among 'em to ha' a tuen on ? True, to be zure, they did start a cwcmb-an'-peaper band, but ader a, long spell o' glory at apleace call'd Up-th'-Liue, their 'air got zoo tailzied that th' prongs o' th' cwombs all broke off, an' liar a tuen mworo cou'd 'em play." In his Yearbook of the American Short Story for 1917, Mr. E. J. O'Brien denies that the American short story is at a low ebb, but the well-informed San Francisco Argonaut's comment is :—"We can hardly accept bis present volume as a proof of that contention, which is not to be sustained by the discovery of twenty fine pieces of fiction in the course of a year. Indeed, we are surprised that so much good work was ablo to find publishers at all, and we are very much of opinion that capacity, originality, and genius arc usually regarded as fatal obstacles to publication, and that artificiality, false sentiment, and unreality are not avoided, but are actually demanded by our magazines in. their search for what they are pleased to call fiction." - ' # Mr. J., A. Ferguson, the author of "Stealthy Terror," first came into notice as a playwright connected with the Scottish Repertory Theatre in Glasgow, where he won the admiration of "AE," tho Irish poet. The outbreak of war, and the consequent cessation of tho Scottish Thoat.ro's activities turned tho playwright, into a novelist, with what great success is testified by the popularity of his first novel, "Stealthy Terror," which lias gone into its fourth edition in England and second in America.