LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 129, 3 June 1922, Page 15

LITERARY NOTES

Keceived : From E. Cobden-Sander-sou:' "The Shepherd and Other Poems" 'by Edmund Blunden. From Stanley Paul and Co., "Chattels," by Hamilton Drummond. From D'Appleton and Co., "The Poor Little Eich Boy," by Eleanor Gates.

T. Fisher Uriwin Ltd. will shortly publish "The Conquest of the, New Zealand Alps" by Mr. Samuel turner, F. R.G.S., of Wellington. Mr. Turner is'an intrepid alpinist, and the scenes of his conquests include the Andes and the Altai mountains of Siberia. He climbed the little known but exceedingly difficult Tuteko in the vicinity of Milford Sound, but the achievement of which he is naturally most proud is the climbing of Mount Cctok alone.

Of* this feat Mr. Turner will be found to have writen in his new book :— "When one is alone on a long ice-slope its top does not seem to get any nearer. This is what makes even the,-most determined parties turn back. .. / My reason repeatedly told me I had no right to be climbing in such bad conditions; but, like the second ascent of Mount Aspiring and my first climb of Mount Sefton (in a gale) it was death or conquest; so/ the summit had to come nearer. I crossed the face, selected, a good snowledge to get across the bergschund on the slope leading towards Mount Dampier, and slowly plodded my way up to the summit, . where I appeared, so my witnesses said, in very quick time after getting through with the step-cutting. . . I planted my flag about six inches from the edge of the Tasman face, so that when the prevailing ■■. north-west wind blew it could be seen from the hut, and in this I was successful. Standing up and stamping the snow around I felt that .by that act I had conquered Mount Cook alone; if the mountain made me feel cautious and livable to move about freely, the proud feeling of conquest could not have: survived."

It is tho opinion of The Times reviewer in the Literary Supplement that Major F. Wait^'s "The New Zealander3 at Gallipoli" presents " the clearest and most vivid pictures of the Dardanelles campaign as it affected the fighting soldier that has yet appeared. It strikes us as an account that might have been written at the time for the benefit of relatives at home by a StafJ. officer in the complete confidence of his General, and yet in daily touch with the hardships and general life of the troops. We have only one complaint, and that is, the author very rarely names any of the brave men whose de. dhsee vbgkqj xzfi brave men whose deeds he recounts, ox- ; cept those who were killed; he certainly maintains the reputation of the New Zealand units for not 'advertising.' . . .

Throughout the book runs like a motif the writer's warning to his readers of the cost and danger of unpreparedness; now that the Empire has t several declared enemies thirsting for revenge, which is more clearly seen by our fellow-country-men of the Antipodes than by us who are nearer', it is all the more necessary we should take this to heart,"

Mr. Joseph Conrad, who recently celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday, once wrote: "My task, which. I am toying to- achieve is, by the power of the- written word, to make you hear, to^make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see that and no more, and it is everything.. If I succeed, you shall find them, according to your deserts, encouragement^ consolation, fear, charm, all you demand, and perhaps also.that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

In Mr. G. B. Burgin's " More Memoirs and Some Travels," Mr. Kipling has a chapter all to himself, with a description of his appearance, his clothes, and his manner, and examples of how he corrects his manuscript. We welcome most the tale of the "gifted lady" who recited " The Ab3ent-Minded Beggar" on a public platform. In order to give more reality to the poem, she had her three little boys wit|i her, and impressively placed her hand on the head of oach child when she came to the line, "Duke's son, cook's son, son of a belted Earl." Instead of the expected-applause, there sounded an indignant voice from the gallery, " Then you ought to be jolly well ashamed of/yourself, mum."

Colonel John Hay, the author of "Jim Bludsoe," when American Ambassador in London, told many humorous stories about: Abraham Lincoln. There was, in particular, a story about him getting out of bed one night in the middle of the American "Civil War to tell Hay, who was his private secretary, a funny story that would not keep. Possibly that story may be in a book which is announced by Harpers, under the title of " What Made Lincoln Laugh." It is by a (veteran American, Dr. Conwell, who, in his young days, was brought into touch with the great President. The stories of Artemus Ward were then all the go, and Lincoln rejoiced in them. ,

In a review of Princess Bibesco's book, "Only Myself to Blame," the Saturday Review heads its article "Dirty Work. This book of Mr. Asquith's daughter is described as showing "a lack of reserve, a mode of handling things usually considered , intimate, that must disgust the least fastidious, a nastinoss of which well-conducted errand boys would be ashamed; an attitude of mind, in short, that it is jvjtremely difficult to characterise." The writer then deals with a certain type of book, of women writers thus: "Examine these pages, not from the standpoint of morality, which would lead us into : deeper inquiries than can bo handled here, but from that of ordinary taste, decorum, respect, and observance of those restraints which civilisation imposes if we are not to.return into anarchy. Marriage sensnalised and vulgarised is painted in its most sordid details ;' gyuaescologicsl details al -e Riven suitable alone for a midwifery textbook (Their Hearts1).; the ties between

mother and child are treated fro/n muddled notions of Freud's theories of sex, and the most sacred of relations defiled; even the children are not respected; the child Joanna (in 'The Open Door") at nine years old sees a man's 'hairy' ankles and has 'guilty thoughts.' . . .

Never in any age or country so far as we know has there been this situation of numberless dirty books written by women; never so rapid and intense a declension from so high an ideal. We believe the 'Emancipation' Movement of Women to be. largely responsible. Its exaggerated individualism is opposed to the great unifying principles of the finest civilisations and is one-sided and dehumanising."

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which ' ranks in England as highly as the Priz Goncourt in France, has been awarded D. H. Lawrence for. the best English novel of the year. The book is "The Lost Girl," which happens to be Lawrence's most popular novel in this country as well as in England. The j judge chosen to select the novel this year was the Professor, of Rhetoric and lish Literature in the University of Edinburgh, H. J. C. Grierson, himself known as,author of "The First Half of the Seventeenth Century" and other es-~ says in belles-lettres.

Sfary Roberts Rinehart, whose clever play, ''The Bat," has just been produced in Melbourne, is one of the most popular writers in America. She is a very charming person. Her son, Mr. Stanley E-ine-fcart, is ma-iTied to ihe daughter of Mr. ■Doran, the well-known American publisher, and is his partner. Although only just over forty, Mrs. Riuehart is a grandmother. ■ , •

Dickens'® understanding of England, said Professor Quiller-Couch, in a recent lecture at Cambridge, was hi many ways as deep as Shakespeare's, but it was all, or almost all, of the urban England, which in his day had already begun to kill the rural. A crowded world,, an ■urban world, largely a middle-class and lower-class London world—what else could they expect of a boyhood spent in poverty and in London but a world strangely empty of questioning, iiifeas, subtle 'nuances that haunted.. many thoughtful men's souls through this- pass of existence, "still clutching the inviolable shade" 1 Dickens had a hawk's eye for truth of morals. We never found him mocking a good or;, condoning an evil thins;. Sinners, real sinners, 'in Dickens had the very inferno of a time.

Mrs. Asqnith has had lots of offers to ■write about the visit which she is paying to America. She put them off, more.orless, saying she could .always keep a diary, but she could not always write in a set way. There is no doubt, however, that we shall, somehow, have her American impressions. Equally, there is no doubt that they will be interesting, for Margot Ka« the seeing eye, the penetrating mind, and, as a writer, she doesnot, to use a phrase once used by her friend. Mr. Arthur Balfour, "hesitate to shoot."

"The Promise of Air," by Algernon Blackwood, is a book of scientific vahie, It is prophetic of discoveries that/^vill bo- made in the etheric world. Mr. Bkckwood says: . . There's a new languaee > floating into the world from the air—a new ,way, a bird-way, of communicating. We shall share as the birds do. We shall all understand each other by gesture, thought, feeling! Instant understanding means a new sympathy; that, again, means a divine carelessness, based on a common trust and faith.

Lord' Riddell, when asfted to join in a symposium on books which tend to strengthen the mind and form character, half-humorously. made his selection as follows:—Anson on "Contracts" ; Pollock on "Torts"; the first sixty-three pages of Best on "Evidence"; Shakespeare's plays; an Anthology of English Verse. He justifies this quaint mixture thus: A man who had read and grasped these books wouliiknow: (1) How to judge evidence; (2) his right* and responsibilities in relation to Ms fellowcitizens; (3) from Shakespeare he would obtain a, knowledge of the -world and human nature, and in a sense history, and would develop his sense of honour; (4) the poets would tell him how to enjoy his life, how to admire nature, and how to bear his troubles.