LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 140, 14 June 1924, Page 17

LITERARY NOTES

Received :—"Random Rhymes," by Jamas-'H. Elliott, from Whitcombe^ and lombs, Auckland; "The Lion's Share," by Arnold Bennett, and "Tyrrel of the Cow Country," by R. Ames Bennett, irom Uissell and Company through Norman Aitken, Wellington. :

Lafcadio Hearn's first employer in New Orleans is still living. Colonel John W. Fairfax, a veteran of the Confederate Army, and a newspaper man of the sixties and 'seventies, writes in "Creole Sketches," a collection of Hearn's early newspaper articles: "I remember Hearn very well indeed. You see, that eye of his was the, only-thing you could see at first—enormous, protruding. After you got used to that eye you saw that his other features were very good, and his face refined."

One day in Venice, says Raymond Blathwayt m "The Tapestry of Life," Mrs. Elinor Glyn held a group of people breathless while she told how that day in St. Mark's she had seen the ghosts of the She declaimed :—"I caught a vision of old Shylock on the Rialto; I heard the pleading voice of Portia; Savonarola's great voice' thundered in my ears; I. could see Giordano Bruno burning at the stake." Suddenly a solid, stolid British voice asked, "What hotel did you stay at?"

The State schools of New South 'Wales are to raise £1000 in aid of the Henry Lawson., Memorial. The Teachers' Federation has , been moved by the Henry Lawson Memorial Committee, of which Mr. Ifould (public librarian) is the most active member, and has arranged to issue to the children a booklet containing a Lawson poem set to music, a reproduction, of the Longstaff portrait, articles by the Director of Education and others. —The 18th of June will be a Henry Lawson day in the schools.

Henry James once wrote to "Willjam Dean Howel.ls: "The novelist is a "particular window absolutely and of worth so far as he is1 one: and it's because you open so well and are hung so close over the street that I could hang out of it all day long." In his new book, "Howells, James, Bryant, and other Essays," Professor William Lyon Phelps deals with the windows of both fiction and-poetry, and points out the special beauties of each view. The "other essays" are devoted to Thoreau, Lowell, and Whitman.

Mr. Haldane, in his daring "Daedalus," stating the case against science, and considering whether there is any likelihood of stopping the progress cf scientific research, remarks: "It is after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now. In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be practically impossible, and I am inclined to suspect that Mr. Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this state of things. The late M! Joseph Reinaeh, an able and .not wholly illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it."

Commenting on John Fleming Wilson's volume of sea stories, "Somewhere at Sea," lately, John H. Swain says: "It 13 very rare indeed tfiat good sea tales are written by real seamen. Landlubbers manage to' write a lot of surprisingly good ones, but sailor-folk write many surprisingly bad ones,' usually malting a sort of technical dissertation rather .than a romance. Once in a great while someone like Conrad or Wilson, who knows his ship from fo'castle to bridge, has also the literary gift, or the power to itell a story in simple and moving form, together with that flame of imagination that sees in 'that old devil, the sea,' something more than the mere element in which he plies his trade. I suppose that Wilson never wrote a story that expressed what he felt to his entire satisfaction ; but he did to the satisfaction of thousands of gratified readers."