LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 103, 28 October 1922, Page 17

LITERARY NOTES

Received : "The Truth About Vignolles," by Albert Kuross, from Duckworth ancl Co., London. "The Great Quest," by Charles Bonrdman Hawes, from William Heinemaiin, London.

The late Alexander Teixeira de Muttos was. excelled by few as a translator of foreign novels into English—always preserving the spirit of the work translated. His life, written by Stephen M'Keiina, the novelist, hus just been published. It .shows how De Miittpa loved his religion

with devotion —its .support and comfort in the days of pain and weakness are frequently apparent in the letters—but, he wrote, "I save my temper by not discussing religion except with Catholics, or politics, except with Liberals, There's room for discussion in the nuances; there's too much room for it with those who call my black white." And here is his general principle concerning the work in which he was a master. ■ He wrote: "A translator's first duty is not to translate. His first duty is to lov e God, honour the King, and hate the Germans. His next duty is to produce a version corresponding as near as. may be with what an English original writer, if he were writing that particular book, would set down. His last duty is to translate every, blessed wbrd of the original." Alexander Teixeira de Mattos recognised to the full other important duties to life—those of preaching the whole gospel of cheerfulness, of spreading the knowledge of some of the world's best literature, of looking for the best in every man who had the good fortune of his acquaintance.

Mr. Lloyd George has written a poem in Welsh for an eisteddfod. The chorus, comments the London "Star," is

Children of Cambria, light is near at hand, Morning breaks at last, and dawn is o'er the land,

-It sounds very like • saying a thing three times over, and so making it true. The title of the poem is "^Vales is One."

"For Love of The King," by Oscar Wilde is a newly-discovered work, written with all Wild's enjoyment in words and sense of colour, and is a fantastio play of Burmese life. Peacocks and elephants, dancing girls, and royal and splendid umbrellas contribute to the spectacle. Messi's. Methuen and Co. are issuing the work in a limited edition.

Mr. A. B. Cooper, writing to "John 0' London's Weekly," makes light of a correspondent's 5000-word story at a sitting as a literary speed-trial or endurance test. "Many men who make a daily practice of dictation will beat it between 10.30 and lunch," he adds. "1 have done it myself pretty frequently, and there are fiction writers much more speedy—quicker off the mark and speedier to the tape—than I can claim to be. My own individual 'record' was a short 40,000-word novel, dictated in four 'spasms,' the total time taken being eighteen hours. Probably the quickest worker of reoent years was Charles Garvice, and, prior to his time, Guy Boothby."

Mr. J, Middleton Murry, the literary editor of the "Nation" an "Athenaeum," has just published a book on "The Problem of Style." A neviewer_ in the "Nation" says of this/:—"We must first announce our conviction that Mr. Murry's book is one of the most Illuminating critical discussions of literature that have been written since Matthew Arnold. It ia fully comparable, for the present reviewer at any rate, with Arnold's "Essay in Criticism" of itß helpfulness; this is, in its power to subtilise tha reader's perceptions, to refine his sensibility, and to bestow coherence upon his ordinarily scattered judgments. ■" 'A true style,' he says, 'is a completely adequate expression in language of a writer's mode of feeling.' Most of the book is concerned to give this definition s a meaning." Mr. Slurry is the husband of "Katherine Mansfield," who is a daughter of Mr. Harold Boauohaimp, Wellington, and herself a writer of unusual and -brilliant short stories.

A happy and accurately descriptive phrase o! Mr. Philip Guedalla in his recent work on "The Second Empire" and Napoleon 111. is to the effect that the Empire was set to music by Offenbach, -"a -tall, lean-faced man with drooping whiskers and perpetual pincanez, who had come out of a synagogue choir at Cologne."

Mr. Nigel Playfair ha* commissioned Mr. John Diinkwater to write a light romantio opera around events in the life of .Robert Bums. To accompany his libretto Mr. Frederic Austin, who arranged and added to the music of "The Beggar's Opera/ is to compose the operatic acore. In this he will introduce many of the old Scottish air«. Mr. Playfair hopes to present the opera in London some time during the spring of 1923,