LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 19, 23 January 1926, Page 17

LITERARY NOTES

"D.S.M." deals trenchantly with "The Urieollected Work by Aubrey Beardsley.'' This eminent art critic stigmatised the book as ah example of the "ghoulish activity of the collection scavenger." The "nursery scribblings" and "rubbisy. scraps" included in it were, he declared, -no better than those that deface a thousand schoolbooks. "They reveal nothing, illustrate nothing, are sheer dead-ends, and their publication an affront to a dead artist.

It is hard for a natural history writer to get a hearing, as witness the neglect from which' Hudson so long suffered. When a natural history writer does get his head up, however, a large, steady recognition is practically certain. Fabre, the. French naturalist, is a striking illustration of this, for his books are now much sought by English readers. Two more of them have been translated for publication by Fisher Unwin, •"Our Dumb Friends" and. "Farm Friends and Foes." One book mostly concerns this domesticated animals, like fowls, ducks, and dogs, but it also' deals with parasites. The other, in the form of a conversation between an uncle and his nephews, deals with the animals useful to agriculture and the vermin hurtful to it.

' 'Is There a New School of Humour T" is the subject discussed by Thornw LMassoh in the "International Book Review." This is how Mr. "Masson sizes the situation up: The truth is that, so far as we are concerned, the main Btream of our national humour moves i'llong about as. it has moved, but new currents flow into, it;'it takes on new atmospheres. Thus, since the war, three strains are distinctly visible, classified roughly under the three R's of Realism, Revolution, and Revolt; the revolt against self-consciousness, of which Americans have hitherto been so generally accused (which in it« passion for eelf-expression quite possibly makes us "cookoo") the intellectual revolution due to the turnover psychoanalysis has given. , . .