LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 61, 15 March 1924, Page 17

LITERARY NOTES

Air. Ernest Smith, a well-known London. journalist, tells of an early newspaper experience at Portsmouth, in his book, "Fields of Adventure" :—

I was sent to describe some boxing bouts.in which Jem Mace, the champion, was taking on anybody of the Navy who thought he could stand up against,him for three'rounds. The next morning I was in the reporters' room waiting, for the.day's work to be given out when the editor sent for me.

"'I see you did Jem Mace- lastnight,' he said. 'There are, some men downstairs who have come about the report. You had better see them.' "Apparently they had been invited to'i come up, because there was 'if "lot of noise on the. dark, cranky old' staircase. The editor bethought himself that his leading article needed revision, ..■■ and .bolted over the,, bridge. I'to ifoe^prifcting-i room. ■ ■ ' ' ■. '■:' ■■ "..

.'Three of, the toughest-looking customers imaginable tramped in. /Are you the bloke what wrote about' Jem Mace?' ' „■.■"

■■ "I l , c°nfessed> fearing the next minute would be my last. ' . "'Give us yerhand,' said the spokesman, quite kindly like. .'Jem's '.very pleased with what you wrote,' and* you ever gets into trouble,. young . man, swl S n-b« vT gOod> (h«e "all: threa « £! t£ e! r,fis, t?)> 'you let us know, an; nobody sha'n't 'it you.' »:■■•■', '■ Mr. Smith, by the way, is a . little man. ' *

SienWrcz, the Polish author of yuo Vadis,' gamed very little from his popular work. Poor and a refugee in London, he told Mr. Ernest Smith, the veteran London journalist, that he <*ot nothing out of the film version of the book—'not a centime," he said. Mr bmith continues: "Sienkiewicz then told me that, owing to copyright law not applying to Poland, he had been robbed of book, play and cinema rights. 'I ™™' he. add r e<l, 'that as many as 3,000,000 copies of my story have been sold- in translation, but I never received a halfpenny on these except from one honest American firm, which sent me a dratt for some amount, telling me they had done so well out of the work, that up uy I I was entit'ed to something, although they were under no legal lwoility to pay me anything.' " Sfr lan Hamilton's "Friends of England is a selection of the author's leci" r?f- ■l n one of these, devoted to the United States, the author enumerates with unusual frankness the many occasions, on which the British Government has given way to the Americans : "With perfect temper one British Cabinet after another, has licked the hand that twisted the lions-tail. / 'For-60'years, • solid .whenever Uncle Sam said 'Git!' we have -gitted,. „ Still he bears no malice, and he is an enthusiast for Roosevelt- "I have ridden.neck and neck with him; j hell-for-leather we galloped through eight miles of forest and streams. This white man was born to be in a White House,, to. b.e a--jolly companion, a good friend. Of all the letters I got when I came home from the Dardanelles his was the most warm-hearted and the most understanding, for the touch of that rou-h----wdmg. colonel could be lighter than that of any woman."; But he goes on to tell us that it was Roosevelt who, early in the war, when "test ships" were being sent from the United States to Germany laden with munitions, explained frankly to a young Englishmanf more than once that if they were stopped by the British it would mean .war between ri. BM tw° countrief='"A cable went home light there and the test ships were stopped in the Altantic by the French! mere was no war, not even words." «£ lI- Al" thur "Weigall relates in his book, Tutankhamen and Other Essays," that he foretold' Lord Carnarvon's death sue weeks before the event, though Lord Carnarvon was then in excellent health This is the story, which, no doubt will greatly impress, superstitious people:— The wind suddenly got up as the party went down the steps, and it blew the hot white dust about, sending it up into the air in angry little scurries. One might almost have thought it to be connected in some way with the spirit of the dead Pharaoh, petulant and alarmed at beintr disturbed, or perhaps annoyed at the jokes and laughter of the resurrection men. who had abandoned their silence and had become jocular as they went into the sepulchre. A number of cane chairs had been taken down into the first bare room, so that the party could watch while the sealed wall was "broken down; and Lord Carnarvon, perhaps somewhat overwrought by the excitement ot the moment, made the jesting remark that they were going to give a' concert down there in the sepulchre. His words, though of little moment, distressed me, for I was absorbed, m it were is ms

own thoughts, which were anything but jocular, and I turned to the man next me and said, "If he goes down in that spirit I give him six weeks to live." I do not know why I said it; it was one of those curious prophetic utterances which seem to issue, without definite intention, from the sub-conscious brain; but in six weeks' time, when Lord Carnarvon was on his death-bed, the man to whom I had addressed the words reminded me of them.

_ Writing of battles, Mr. Rudyard Kiphng says in his "Land and Sea Tales," just published, that it is usually difficult to get details of fighting :—I know that in nine cases out of ten, if you want a coherent account of what happened in action you had better ask the chaplain or the Roman Catholic priest of a battalion. I have, met perhaps a dozen or so of V.G.s, and in every case they explained that they did the first thin°that came to their hand without worry" ing' about alternatives. One man headed a charge into a mass of Afghans. . . . and cut down five of them. All he said was, "Well, they were there and wouldn t co away. What was a man to do? Write 'em a note and ask em to shift?' Another man, a doctor, who wot the Cross by doing the old, splendid thing that never grows stalerescued a wounded man under fire—meresaid "I didn't want any unauthorised conferences—or amputations—while I was medical officer in charge. 'Tisn't etiquette."

The propaganda- committee of the Ross Research Institute, London, has issued a pamphlet "describing a proposal to found the Ronald Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases. To this Mr. John Masefield has written a preface, in which he says :—

Sir Ronald Ross discovered the part played by the mosquito in conveying the malarial parasite, and instantly the whole vast mystery of tropical disease was made clear. Little remained but to "find the carrier"*? of the germ of each disease. It is not too much to say that Sir Ronald Ross cut the Panama Canal and made a third of the world habitable. Not long ago I visited three cities, each terrible in the past for its yellow fever record. I was in them in the summer, in months when in the old days hundreds would have been dying in every ward, and other thousands shivering with ague! Sir Ronald Koss had made those cities each as peaceful and as healthful as Bath or Hampstead. Tin's is the greatest thing done in our time by one man. The nation which produced that man should crpwn. his deed with a living power to make his work not a memory, but a lifting up-of life throughout the world

Karl Capek, author of the much discussed fantasy, "R. v. R." and "The Insect Play," is barely over thirty, albeit one of the most popular dramatists m Europe. A native of the new nation of Czecho-Slovakia, and of its very old capital, Prague, Capek is in the peculiar position of writing in a practically unknown tongue and of being steeped in the medieval atmosphere of his city The young dramatist is much interested m the development of the Bohemian languageas a literary medium—he is also engaged in the production of the plays at the National Theatre at Prague, a work that he considers very much more onerous than writing. He is not at all interested in politics though his triple English admiration is Shaw, .Wells, and Chesterton. ...His , latest playis.said to ha very like Shaw's "Back to Methusaleh " though Capek had not read the latter when writing his weird Prague fairy tale. Fairy tales,, he admitSj . are the only things really to enlist his enthusiasm.