LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 32, 6 August 1921, Page 15

LITERARY NOTES

Received: " The Gun Brand," by James B. Hendry; "Twenty-one Bridge Fallacies,", by Walter Bluet—both from Jarrold's.

" I shall lay down one specific by which you that read shall impartially determine who are, and are not, to be called good writers. In a word, the character of a good writer, wherever he is to be found, is this—viz., that he writes so as.to please and serve at the same time. . . .He represents truth with plainness,. virtue with praise; he even reprehends with a softness that carries the force of i a satire without the salt of it, and he insensibly screws himself into your ■ good opinion, that as his writings merit your regard, so they fail not to obtain it."—Daniel Defoe.

"It was a great, loss to Fleet-street when the old Booksellers Row was pulled down and the books went West,!" remarks Public Opinion. "We did not miss the publishers so much when they became fashionable and also went West. Some, however, are faithful to Paternoster Row." By, the way, Public Opinion appears to forget that Booksellers Row was west of Temple Bar,'not in Fleet-street.

Lord Grey advises everyone whose eyesight is threatened to learn Braille. He says he has read in Braille six volumes of Wells's " Outline of History."

" It is my sober conviction that the most, inspired,fiction, writers in America —the men with the most buoyant imaginations—are the regular correspondents to our standard agricultural journals," writes Irvin . Cobb, in "Abandoned farmers'."

Sir Walter Scott's favourite walking;tick has been presented by Lord Knuts?ord~to the Scottish Museum of Anti quaries, Edinburgh. It bears an inserted silver, plate with the inscription, " Sir Walter Scott, Abbotaford." Round it is still tied a faded siLk cord and tassel. . ■ ■

Family pride among the children was not long 4 in manifesting itself on the elevation of Dr. Benson from the Bishopric of Troro to Canterbury. Mr. E. P. Benson, the novelist, was then a.boy at Marlbotough. -

Ho writes ■ to-day: "How great a man my father has become was most pointedly brought home to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marlborough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, I could, then and. there, measure the altitude of his pinnacle by the fact thaf there appeared on the school notice-board next day an inscription to the effect that his Grace had asked that a whole holiday should ba given to the school in honour of hi» visit. He had just asked for it, so it appeared, and, in honour of his visit, it was granted. 'Can't you be confirmed a|;ain?' was the f ratifying comment of friends. ' I say, o be confirmed again!'" '-Mr. Benson's interest in antiquarian research at Chester and his. discovery of some important Roman tombstones produced 'letters of congratulation from Mommsen and an invitation from Gladstone. Of his visit to Gladstone, the author says:—" I got there during the morning, and was at once taken to see My. Gladstone. He was in his "study, sitting' at his 'political' table; the other table -was the table where he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, suggesting though not actually stating the image which flew into m-" inind'of his boiling 6v«r, co to speak, at the political table, that furnace of fierce contention and white-hot enthusiasm, and of putting himself to cool off from the controversy by the lonian Sea. He instantly plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain as if nothing else really mattered or ever/had mattered to him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had brought him."

, The odious Mrs. Norris, in Jane Austin's " Mansfield Park," was a skilled economist. She boasted of preventing a,boy of ten, who had come to the house on an «rrand, from being given his dinner in the servants' hall; she stipulated on there never boing a fire in the east room on Fanny Price's account; and, when the private tnVtricals were in preparation, she busied herself "superintending their various dresses''with economical expedient, for which nobody thanked her, and saving, with, delightful integrity, half a crown here and there to;the absent Sir Thomas." The green, baize curtain, however, was her greatest achievement. So carefully'did she superintend its making that sU was not only able to send back some dozens of rings but to effect "a saving, by her good management, of full three-quarters of a

According to Jacob Zeitlin, who writes in the New York Nation for 18th May about "Turgenev and His Heroes," the great Russian's, ethical solution of life was the same as that of Carlyle and George Eliot. The great error of man rs the search for personal happiness when life offers neither the right nor possibility of such happiness. The chief.goal of life, according to Tnrgenev, is ■ not happiness, but human dignity. In his finely-written article Mr. Zeitlin suras up Turgenev in this fashion:

"In the heart of Turgenev there lurks a cosmic sadness, born, it may bo, of the spirit that broods over the'vast

desolate steppes of his native land and shedding its melancholy light over his whole universe. Nature appears to him insensiblo, and the fate of man in the world evil. A thin partition separates him from despair or even pessimism. In moments of spiritual crisis this despair wells up from the depths with lyric intensity. He gives it body in some of his fantastic tales, where it is joined with those vague mystic longings for the unreachable which accentuate the earthly weakness and confinement of man. The hero of Phantoms is overcome with sadness and aversion as he views the whole terrestrial globe With its inhabitants; — transitory, impotent, crushed by want, by sorrows, by diseases, fettered to a clod of contemptible earth, carrying on an ■ amusing struggle with the unchangeable and the inevitable. It breaks out also under stress of personal disappointment, and it becomes poignantly articulate in the Prose Poems of his old age, in which the effort to sustain a courageous heart in the face of .an overwhelming sense of loneliness and disillusionment is pathetically weak. This melancholy sensibility gives the key to the novelist's ethical outlook."

A literary chronicler has drawn attention to the long periods over which some of the most popular of living British novelists hava been popular. It is thirty-four years since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first book, "A Study in Scarlet," appeared. He produced one or more books in every year up to 1900, and sines then there have been very few breaks in his annual output. Mr. H. G. Wells has been writing with amazing activity for twenty-six, years. Mr. Arnold Bennett's writings stretch over twenty-three years; his first novel, "A Man from the-North," was published in 1898. In this year, also, Mr." Phillips Oppenheim wrote his first story. iMr. G. B. Burgin, who has now, I believe, sixty novels to his credit, began in 1894. Mr. Conrad's first novel, "Alrr.ayer's Folly," appeared twenty-six years ago, but he waited long to be popular. Thomas Hardy's "Desperate Remedies" appeared just fifty years ago, and his last novel, 'ljude, the Obscure," twenty-six years ago. But probably, the longest working of our living novelists is Mr. J. E. Preston Muddock ("Dick Donovan"), who has very properly pointed out that his first novel was issued in three volumes in 1873 and his last only a few weeks ago, so that his actual career as a novelist has lasted forty-eight years.