BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 12167, 11 April 1904, Page 2

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

♦The Proud Prince.’ By Justin Huntly M'Carthy. London: G. Bell and Sons. Dunedin: R. J. Stark and Co.

P.educing popular plays to book form is recoining as frequent as adapting popular bonks to the stage. Neither is commendnll ’. No one who has read and enjoyed a good book has ever bean satisfied with its stage presentation, and few, wo imagine, v. ho have witnessed ‘ The Sign of the Cross,’ ‘ Sweet Nell,’ or ‘ The Proud Prince ’ want to read these plays as novels. Those, at least, that- we have read are must unsatisfactory, being neither one thing tor the other. They, are not dramas, and they are not good specimens of literary work. They smell of the footlights and machinist and carpenter. They are patchy, artificial, incomplete, and, from our standpoint, worthless. The runt and the cant, the inflated rhetoric, and the hysterical declamation which, when life, motion, costume, scenery, music, paint, and powder form the background, are accepted as tolerable, utterly fail to move even the normally fastidious when put into so many sheets of cold prose and bound in book form ‘ Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ amid her cows and pastures, as her creator depicted her, lives appealingly in the memory. Tess, painted and powdered and immaculately clothed, surrounded by stage straw and yards of daubed canvas, is a ghastly aaiar chrcnism that no self-respecting person ought to or could tolerate. And this opinion, we submit, holds true in the majority of cases, even when the original author so far forgets his ideal or succumbs to the tempting offer of the theatrical manager, and with malice aforethought drags his hero and heroine out of that niche in which imagination, has enshrined them ’to strut and fume in the glare and dust of the theatre, Mr M'Carthy’s ‘The Proud Prince’ was,- we believe, a successful play in New Tork, and the author, either in gratitude or friendship, dedicates the novel to the gentleman who played the leading character. That character is the King Robert of Sicily of our childhood days and Longfellow’s poem; the proud, wicked tyrant whose crimes were a byword among his distressed people and who eventually brought upon himself the wrath of Heaven. He was changed, so the story runs, from the strong, healthy, handsome sensualist and despot into a drivelling, weakling fool, his throne during his period of transformation being occupied by the Archangel Michael. The piece, as a stage picture, would reward the audience with many dramatic thrills. There are several climaxes which, under the admirable stage management of Mr Charles Frohroan, the autocrat of the British and American playhouse, should send the curtain down to thunders of applause. Doubtless, Dunedin -■ ill some day have the pleasure of adding : s quota, and, incidentally, showing what : poor opinion it has of those whose ju-Jg. Ip cut dislikes plays as books. Mr M'Cariay is a man of culture and imagination, ; : "I he writes succinctly and entertainingly. : cro is perhaps a tendency to affectation .•■nd a fondness for alliteration in his style—-i-.g-. “she served ham a sweeping salutation, in which her lithe body seemed to swoon at his feet in complete surrender. Then, straightening, she swerved and called to her women.” The tone of the book, however, is most open to harsh criticism. Whilst balancing the pure-souled, Christian heroine and her strictly correct sentiments against the insolently frank vice of king, court, and people, Mr 51‘Carthy has, consciously or unconsciously, fallen into the distinctly reprehensible plan of dwelling in detail upon and clothing in luxurious terms the splendors and joy? of all who are worshippers at the shrine of Venus Callipyge. It was said of Suetonius that he painted the vices of the Csisars in such terms that the effect Upon public morals was infinitely worse than if he had never exposed them. And this saying came into our mind in reading Mr M'Carthy’s novelised drama. We may b? wrong, but it occurs to us that others have raised the like objection.

‘The Lady of the Island.’ By Guy Boofchby. London: G. 801 l and Sons. Dunedin : R. J. Stark and Co.

A collection of eleven short stories and twelve illustrations constitute the above. The former are written in Mr Boothby's custom-ary style, but possess the redeeming feature that they are too brief to become so utterly inane as the majority of his longer products. Mystery, crime, and adventure in all lands and seas, from the Pacific to Cairo, and the Australian bush to Cornwall, blended with the usual impossible heroes and villains and superlative heroines and ladies with a past, are the main ingredients; and though nothing is told that is remembered five minutes after the reading, the matter and manner are equal to the average newspaper story; while, to his credit, be it said, the author steers thousands of leagues clear of anything calculated to bring the blush of modesty to the cheeks of our parents. And in these days this is high praise.

‘ Stella Fregelius.’ By Rider Haggard. Longmans and Co., London.

Tliis novel reveals Mr Haggard in a new vein, and one for which, indeed, he “feels iij ho awes some apology to his readers,” ;.s the prefatory note puts it. The story, as the author explains, is in no sense a roniznco of the character that his readers d-iubtlosa expec f from him. Here is no si irring tale of wildest Africa, no record of adventures in the bowels of the earth, and

no lu t of gold or of blood. Mr Haggard’s bold imagination takes, a still more daring tiight. His theme is nothing less than the tremendous problem of a conflict (to quote his own words) between “ a departed and a present personality, of which the battleground is a bereaved human heart, and the prize its complete possession.” It is not difficult to see that Mr Haggard has put his whole heart into this work. It breathes sincerity in every page, and one feels that the author is deeply interested in the problem he has raised, and in the gifted creature ho has chosen for a heroine. A wealth of physical and intellectual charm is lavished by Mr Haggard upon Stella Fregelius. “It was a fine face,” he tells us, “ and beautiful in its way. Dark eyes, very large and perfect, whereof the pupils seemed to expand and contract in answer to every impulse of the thoughts within. Above the eyes, long curving fashes and de-licately-pencilled, arched eyebrows, and above thfm again a forehead low and broad. The chin rounded; the lips full, rich, and sensitive; the complexion of a clear and beautiful pallor; the ears tiny; the hands delicate; the figure slim, of medium height, and alive with grace; the general effect most uncommon, and, without being lovely, breathing a curious power and personality.” Besides being a beauty, Stella is a musical genius; she has a voice of glorious quality and power, and beneath her bow her violin speaks like a hying thing. She has charm, refinement, cuTure, wonderful courage, and an indomitable will. Apparently she is Mr Haggard’s ideal woman; certainly she is not real. Xno dash oj mysticism revealed in Stella’s character at the outset hardly prepares us for tho amazing discovery that she could summon a departed spirit back to earth, and we are afraid that, with all his skill and strenuous sincerity, Mr Rider Haggard fails to render this tremendous proposition convincing. The story somehow does not “grip. Instead of Stella’s brilliant gifts lending an air of reality to the miracle, the effect is merely to make the fair heroine herself seem utterly unreal. In due course Stella makes a romantic exit from the world, and her heart-broken lover, a mystic like herself, and also a brilliant man of science, mortifies his flesh and controls his spirit until he too acquires this weird, unwn power over the invisible, and gazes v.'i;!i a fearful joy upon the spirit of his, a pnted Stella, Truth to tell, however, tlie human element in the story is of more interest, than the supernatural. Morris Monk, the scientist in question, falls hi love with tho mysterious Stella after he has become engaged to his cousin Mary, and in the absence of tho latter. The situation is interesting, and promises to become more so. However, by the time Morris’s fiancee returns Stella has lost her life by drowning, and the practical Mary does not consider that Morris’s avowed love for the departed need prevent him keeping his promise and marrying herself, and so she marries him. Having thus summarily solved the comjJnatuau, the authgt / jnoceeda to develop

the mystical side of his romance. He regards the death of Stella as the real beginning, whereas it is really the close of whatever human interest the tale possesses. In what follows Morris is to all intents and purposes a madman, and his visions are nothing more than the wild delusions of a disordered brain. Mr Haggard has certainly aimed high, but one is forced to the conclusion that Stella Frcgelius, despite many admirable touches, falls short- of the mark.

‘The Interloper.’ By Mrs Arthur Jacobs. Heinemann and Co., London,

Mrs Jacobs’s first novel, ‘The Sheepstealers,’ showed powers of imagination and knowledge of character that another production of her pen was looked forward to with more than usual interest. It proves to be a capital romance of the East Coast of Scotland, in the days of the Third George, and tells the story of a charming girt who, in the absence of her lover, engages herself to a man quite unworthy of her, for reasons that the readers must discover for themselves. In mercy ■to the general reader, however, Mrs Jacobs has made her people talk plain English, instead of the Court Scotch that they should speak, but the atmosphere of the land and period is admirably realised. The chief characters m the book are delightfully portrayed, but one s admiration goes out largely to Granny Stirk, the “ Queen of the Cadgers,” who is one of the most realistic and finest women that has been encountered in the realm of fiction for’many a long day. She is, indeed, the true heroine of the story. In brief. ‘ The Interloper ’ is a capital novel from start to finish ; it is written throughout in a brisk and easy style, and has pone of those saharas of verbiage that are the blight of so many novels of the hour.

Mr Alfred Austin, who, as everyone knows, or at least is supposed to know, is the Poet Laureate, in the course of an address at the Royal Institution on ‘The Growing Dislike to the Higher Kinds of Poetry,’ said, among other things, that for descriptive and lyrical poetry, provided it were of sufficient brevity, there was perhaps as much taste and as much liking as ever, but from the dramatic and reflective poems, unless they were of the most modest dimensions, most readers nowadays turned away with repugnance. Men and women of a former generation seized upon a new poem, no matter what its length, cherished it, read the whole of it, admitted it to their affections, and learned many of its passages by heart. Their descendants had totally different tastes. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Byron, and even Shakespeare himself, would be read and tolerated to-day, but what constituted their real superiority—namely, imaginative thought and imaginative actign— especially repugnant. He' heard and saw quotations, though nearly always the same quotations, from lesser poets, but rarely did he see quotations from or reference to the higher poetry of the really great masters. What had caused this change? It had been caused mainly, it seemed to him, by the creation and universal dissemination of another form of romantic literature more congenial to the average mind. Kovels, proseromances, had ousted long poems from popular affection. To describe men and women as-they were to the delectation of men and women as they were was apparently at present one of the chief tasks of the novelist. But assuredly that was not the task of the poet. His enduring vocation was, while thoroughly knowing men and women, to describe them and transfigure them into what they might he, or into what he would have them to be. Was it not true that, as a rule, women were more interested in love and in the affections generally than in those mighty issues that from time to time aroused mankind and inspired the greater poets in their great works? Another reason why the really higher poetry had fallen into disfavor was that during the last twenty or thirty years they bad been asked to accept as great poetry what he must continue to think, and must be allowed to continue to affirm, was not only not great poetry, but was not poetry at all. If they turned to the stage they found audience's determined not to have literature, and poetic literature especially, inflicted on them. .Sumptuous scenery and the lightest music were demanded, and that demand was most persistent from the stalls. The main thought, the solo anxiety, the burning controversy of the hour was not whether we were growing less intellectual, less spiritual, less wisely but whether we were growing less rich and less materially prosperous. Materia] prosperity was the Ideal, and wealth was the very divinity of the age. Nor was this degrading) conception of the meaning, the issues, and the purposes ol life by any means confined to this country. It was universal, and he did not think he should be exaggerating were be to say that material prosperity was the cosmopolitan creed, the cosmopolitan religion of the time. That was an appalling thing to say, but it it were true it should be iterated and reiterated from the housetops until it sank into the ears and touched the hearts of those who cherished it. Such was our danger, such our peril. Where were they to look for rescue or remedy? They required to be transported to the companionship of the higher poetry of the masculine poets, to the society of the indulgent Chaucer, the chivalrous Spenser, and the majestic Milton, of Byron in his large moralising, of Wordsworth in his more poetic moods, and most of all to Shakespeare, the highest and wisest of them all.

About two years ago Mme. Yvette Guilbert published a book of reminiscences entitled ‘ La Vedette, or the Music Hall Star.’ The work met with considerable success, for it was piquant, well written, and interesting. In due course a German publisher secured from M. Simonis Empis, the French publisher, the right to translate and reproduce the work in Germany. But the success of the book was considerably injured there by an article in which Dr Max Kordau changed Mme. Guilbert with having merely put her name to the work of an anonymous author. The publisher accordingly brought an action against the French linn for breach of contract, etc. 'The case was concluded to-day. Mme. Guilbert admitted that she had had not one, but two helpers; nor did she deny that a M. Byl had received £144 for his contributions. Nevertheless, the First Chamber gave judgment in favor of the French publisher. It held that ft had not been clearly established that Mme. Yvette Guilbert was not the author of the book. The documents produced by the plaintiff showed that others had helped m the production, but that their role was secondary, and of little importance. To us it seems that Dr Nordau has the ..best ot the argument even though the lady has the best of the law. Addressing the Dante Society, London, on a recent occasion, Mr Maurice Hcmlett treated of the great Italian from the standpoint of a traveller. He said; To the Divine Comedy nothing human was alien, so many were the interests, human as well us divine, therein concentrated. Of books for the traveller in Italy there were certainly enough. He knew a man who never took anything else with him to Italy but Lessing’s Laokoon. In Shelley’s pockets there were only found Keats and Sophocles—no bad choice. The wise, however, would like to be disencumbered, as far as possible, so as to realise the essence of what they saw in Pisa, Verona, and other cities associated with Dante by personal observation and reflection. It was the singular quality of Italy—never at one or at rest—that the mark of each successive age was indelibly impressed on every town. From Dante to Metastasio all the great human forms were seen in kaleidoscopic but perplexing succession. But it had been web said that if all Italy were destroyed its quintessence would lie preserved in the Divine Comedy. The poem was ultimately one of North Italian travel. Dante was perforce a traveller, and a perfect traveller —the master guide to Italy The poem inspired, illuminated, and afterwards recalled travel, so vivid and penetrating was his record. The tilings observed elucidated the things imagined. Every emotion of the hopeful or weary wanderer waa expressed in Dante’s verse. The Odyssey alone wan, as a _ travel poem, comparable to the Divine Comedy. Childe Harold was the diary of a rhetorician, and the Excursion might well bo. termed the Excursus. In Tuscany every town and almost every village was, as Dante showed, still the nation it had been in the past. The true j3.oets were the mteenreters of the

people, and Dante, like Leopardi and our own Burns, looked upon the rivers and the hills as not only landmarks, but as almost human. The ballad-monger was, in truth, always to be discerned in Dante, though transfigured. In this quality Dante was like Francis of Assisi in. his “ our brother the water,” and to this in a conscious way there was a return to Leopardi. The stork on the housetop was shown in extraordinary realism, as was the gesture of the blind beggar at Pisa.. The local memory was often touched by a phrase or a subtly modulated collocation of words. In tins quality of presentative imagination, wherein no detail was omitted—this second sight, as it were—Dante was supreme, and was only approached in a passage or two of Boccaccio. Thus the Florence and the Siena of Dante's day were brought before us as though they lay before our eyes. There was no better book for the traveller in its quality of romantic apprehension than Dante.

Corley Hall Farm, which figures so largely in ‘ Adam Bede,’ as the residence of the immortal Mrs Poyser and Hetty Sorrel, is to be sold at auction. It stands on the main road between Nuneaton and Corley. Altoceth r 1,859 new works of fiction appeared in 1903—an increase of about 100, or two new novels per week, over 1902. The next highest number of new books (says the Printing Record ’) is 687, embracing miscellaneous literature and pamphlets, and next come 650 “ educational ” works and 639 of theology. The literary barometer shows that “ theology and educational, politics and commerce are up in number; arts and science and law are down; history and biography, voyages and travels about the same; medicine, year books, belles-lettres, and poetry and the drama slightly up.”