LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 62, 10 September 1921, Page 15

LITERARY NOTES

Mr. W. Pemiber Reeves's history of New Zealand, "The Long White Cloud," which has been out of print for some* years, has been revised and brought up to date for a new_ edition which Messrs. Allen and Unwin have in preparation.

This terrible pioture from the early days of the Red Terror is in Mr. C. E. Bechofer's book, "In Denikin's Russia," just published:—"Less fortunate officers were dragged by the mob to the old naval offioere' mess at Sevastopol; there their heads were held on the top of the grand piano and the heavy lid slammed down- upon them. This the mob called 'cracking nuts.' " Mr. Beohofer says that the Russian peasantry finmly believe that the Tsar is safe in England, and that there will he no order in Russia until he returns.

Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the London Mercury, writing of Oscar Wilde, shows that in Ireland the Wildes were famous people. There is a horrible folk-story, the invention of some Connaught peasant, that tells how Sir William, Wilde took out the eyes of some man, who had come to consult him as an oculist, and kid them upon a plate, .intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes -were eaten by a cat. As a certain Mend of mine, remarks Mr. Yeats, who has made a prolonged study of the nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, "Oats love eyes." The Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles Leveir, dirty, untidy, dai'ing, and what Charles Lever, who loved more normal activities, might not have valued so -highly, very imaginative and learned. Lady Wilde received her friends with blinds drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed always, perhaps, though certainly amid much selfmockery, for some impossible splendour of character and circumstance.

Dr. Charles Clarke, tihe son of the first gublisher in Engk,nd oi "Uncle Tom's abin," in an article on what he terms the "Liber Miraibilis" in Chamibers's Journal, says that in England the sales still tiinount to 20,000 annually, and that on one 'day in the year in- which it was first published 60,000 copies were delivered to the trade.

"Society will not solve/the particular problems of industry which afflict it until it has, learned to see industry'itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that it must rearrange its scales of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not ( as the whole of life. It must persuade 'its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service-*'because the shuffle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organise its industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasised by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on."—R. S; Tawney, in The Acquisitive Society. Lord Northeliffe has written an introduction to the autobiography of Mr. Edward W. Bok, to be published shortly by Mr. Thornton Butterworth, in the course of which he describes the work as "the autobiography of our time." The interest of the story is understood to consist in the remarkable rise of its author from the humblest beginnings to the status of one of the most successful editors in the United States. At the age of six young Bok arrived in America from Holland, and left school before he was 13. He began life by selling iced water on the tramcars; he was a scavenger of wood and coal in the streets; he washed shop windows- for 2s a week; and yet by the time he was 17 he had established friendly relations with such well-known people as General Grant, President Hayes, Phillips Brooks. Oliver Wendell Holmes, H. W. Longfellow, R. W. Emerson, and Louisa M. Alcott. By his 30th birthday he was an influential editor, controlling a woman's magazine, ■which claimed to en joy. the largest circulation in the world. His life story is said to, abound in new anecdotes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Gladstone, Roosevelt, Jay Gould, Mr. Rudyard Kippling, and other celebrities.

Messrs. Putnam's announcements include "Mirrors of Washington," an anonymous series of character studies of men prominent in American public life, on the lines of "Mirrors of Downingstreet," and "Man, the Lord of Creation," a collection of' drawings by "Low," the Australian cartoonist.

Half-breeds are. not generally highly thought of, but Colonel St. Johnston, in "The Islanders of the Pacific" (Appleton : New York), does not believe that in the Polynesian case he is talking of any auch cross.' " A mixtm-e of Polynesian and European—be he Englishman, Frenchman, American—should prodbce a better stamp of man than a mixture of white' man and African negro or white man and Chinese." Why? ".Because the Polynesian and the European had m the remote ages of the past One common ancestry, a kinship of common blood; slight, it it, true, and dating from the days of sun worship in England, but still faintly discernible in certain little ways."

"To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws—that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm ' and unspoiled when the world praises him. '—Balzac

Mr. Clement Shorter, in Ilia literary letter in the Sphere, quotes the original texts of several frequently misquoted verses. They axe :— From "laicasto," by Richard) Lovelace :— , Yet this Inconstancy is auch As you, too, shall adore: I couldn't love thee (Deare) so much, ■Lov'd I not Honour more. From Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Philarete, by George Wither:— Shall I, wasting in Dispaire, Dye because a Womane faire? Or make pale my cheekes with, caw, "" Cause anothers Rosie are? Be shea fairer than the Day, -Or the Flo wry Meads in May; If .Shis be not so to me, . Wtoat cnre I how faire ghee be? From the "Fragmenta Aurea" of Sir John Suckling :— Why so pale and wan, fond Lover ? Pi-ethee why so paJe? Will, when looking well caul't move her, looking ill prevail ? Prethee why so pale? Finally, asks Mr. Shorter, who would expect to find in" a broadsheet of two pdgm only, called "An English Padlock," 1705, the wonderful lines of Prior, a* they were first given to the world ?— Be to her Virtues very kind, Be to her, Faults a little blind, 'but ending unexpectedly and unfamiliarly with a final Couplet— Let all her Waya be unoonfln'd1. And clap your Padlock on her mud;