BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 18051, 19 August 1922, Page 10

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

VERSES. BY THE CANAL tN FLANDERS. By the canal in Flanders I watched a barge's prow - Creep slowly past the poplar trees; and there J made a vow That when those wars are over and I am home at last, However much I travel I shall not travel fast. Horses and cars and yachts and planes: I’ve no more use for such; For in three years of war’s alarms I’ve hurried far too much; And now I dream, of something sure, silent and slow and large; So when the, war is over—why, I mean to , buy a barge. « ■» *; « I’ll moor my craft beside your lawn; so up and make good cheer I Pluck me your greenest salads! Draw me your coolest beer! For I intend to lunch with you and talk an hour or more Of how wo used to hustle in the good old days of war. —Norman Davey, in ‘Punch.’ TO CAPTAIN FRYATT. Trampled but red’ is the last of the embers, Red the last cloud of a sun that has set; What of your sleeping though Flanders remembers, What of your waking, if England forget? Why should, you share in, the hearts that ‘ we harden, In the shame of onr nature that see it and live? How more than the godly the greedy can pardon, How well and l ’how quickly the hungry forgive? Ah, well, if the soil of the stranger had wrapped you, While the lords that you served and the friends that you 'knew Hawk in the marts of the tyrants that trapped you, Tout in the shops of the butchers that slew, Why should you wake for a realm that is rotten, Stuffed with their bribes and as dead to their debts? Sleep and forget us, as we have forgotten ; For Fkndera remembers and England forgets. —G. K. Chesterton in the ‘ New Witness.’ REVOLT AGAINST GRAMMARIANS.

The English Association has been discussing grammar, and there is talk of putting our present grammar books on the fire. Professor Allen Mawer has asked the impressive .and: by no means premature question, “Are w© going to tie English down to a system of grammar which does not recognise to the full the fundamental facts of its structure?” Hitherto it has been well understood that schoolboys and schoolgirls have loathed grammar. , There is now an outburst of evidence that their .teachers loathe it, too, if only because, in the last resort, they know that they tTo not understand It. They regard it as a system of attaching “strange labels to familiar tilings.” That phrase summarises the grammarsickness which tends more and more to become visible. What wo call the grammar of the English language is a hybrid, portentous, and repulsive hurly-burly of many grammars. Its nomenclature alone is sufficient condemnation. We want an entirely different, and more human and reasonable, method of ordering the greatest of all modern languages, and a method which, if ever we get it, will answer somewhat to St. Paul’s triumphant sigh, “ With a great price I purchased' this freedom.” . As, it is, we can hardly see the road for the sign-posts. And the grammatical Vesuvius is laboring. For myself, I am devoted to grammar, if grammar means the correct transference of a thought into the words which clearly express that thought. But I do not recognise the grammarian as a law-giver. Ho is only a registrar, and, like many types of registrar, he tends to be musty and mysterious. Convict me of a grammatical error, and I hate myself. But the iron that enters the soul is not the grammatical rule, it is one’s recognition of a false sequence or correspondence in one’s own thought. Yet there are thousands of intelligent readers who demand chapter and verse from that inflated Decalogue of ■the language which every practised writer has forgotten and never by any chance consults. Some timid writers are terrorised and bewildered by vague memories of this inchoate code. The' ‘Morning Post,’ discussing the matter in a leading article wittily entitled ‘The Grammarian’s Funeral,’ gives an example. Tim readers of an English technical—a non-literals'— journal have recently discussed the question whether “Let him” is correct, or whether the phrase should be “Let he.” “Let he depart!” And then the editor, taking a hand, .perplexes both parties by quoting Kingsley’s well-known album poem, in which ho wrote : “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. ’ He asks: “What do our correspondents think of that?” If “him," why not “whom”? “Be good, sweet maid, and let whom will be clever.” The ‘Morning Post ’ writer remarks that so long as such a correction can bo suggested, the hour for the grammarian’s funeral has not yet struck. Yet this is barely a matter of grammar. “ Let him ” follows one of the most familiar rules of grammar. But Kingsley’s line is seen to bo correct because it is obviously elliptical—the sense being “Let (him or her) who will, ho clever.” This is less a matter of grammar than of common sense. A DRAKE RELIC. The second-hand book seller is not tied down to paper and bindings (writes ‘ Jackdaw” in ‘John o’ Londons Weekly). Literature and history are often,, otherwise materialised. In the latest catalogue issued by Mr Albert Myers, the wellknown and learned bookseller of 00/tigli Holborn, London, W.C. 1, I find particubars of a notable rarity which, to the best of my belief, is to be found m only three collections. This is " The Silver Map ot Drake’s Vovage, 1577-1580.” I have now seen and handled this remarkable relic, of which, I understand, only four examples are known. Two. one being broken and battered, are in the British Museum, the third is owned by the Marquis of Milford Haven (Admiral of the Fleet Louis Alexander Mountbatten), and the fourth is now catalogued for sale by Mr Myers at the price of £750. This circular silver plate measures just a little under three inches in diameter. On one side the Western Hemisphere is represented, and on the other side the Eastern. Naturally, the latter is the better piece of mapping, the former the most interesting. The silver on which these; engravings were made is believed to have formed part of Drake’s spoils from the Spaniards. Tire date of-the issue is accepted as 1581, and ibe purpose was to commemorate the great voyage from which Drake 'returned, on board the Golden Hind in that year. The plate was probably produced for the occasion of his being knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of his ship on April 4, 1531. A dotted line against which ships in full sail and! several legends are placed) indicates the route followed) by Sir Francis Drake in his famous voyage round the world in 1577-1580. No fewer than 110 places are named, those in the Western Hemisphere including Virginea, Nova Albion'(ab Anglie 1680 inuenta), Oalifornea, Florida, • Mexico, Chili,, Brasilia, Cuba, (Terra Aujstralis [Nundum] Cognita, etc., etc, '■ ■ ■ - . A full "description and) cartographical account of this eilor document may bo found in ‘The Silver Map of the World, a Contemporary Medallion .commemorative of Drake’s Great Voyage, 1577-1580,’ by Miller Christy, published 1 by. Henry Stevens iu 1900,

A LITERARY CORNER.

THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE. ME MASEFIELD ON HELP FOE GENIUS. The Hawthornden Prize, given annually by Miss Alice Warrender for the.best bijok published during the year by a writer under forty years of ago, has been awarded by the Prize Committee to Mr Edmund Blunden for his book of verse ‘The Shepherd/ and was presented to him by Mr John Masefield recently. Mr Masefield, with whom, on the platform, were Miss Warrender, Mr Walter Do La Mare, Mr Laurence Binyon, Mr Edward Marsh, and Mr Robert Lynd, referred to the winner of the prize as “ a most gallant and modest writer, whose,work had given the speaker very groat pleasure. Mr Blunden had shown that ho had a naturalist’s sense of tho English countryside. Although Great Britain had been, and doubtless was still, wealthy, it had not, said Mr Masefield, given generously to letters. Perhaps in this it had done wisely, because tho country knew that, whether it endowed genius or did not, genius would express itself. Thanking Miss Warrender for her encouragement of the “divine arts” of poetry and literature, Mr Masefield said tho artist lived on admiration, hope, and love. Given these, he could face cheerfully all the hardships that genius had to face—first among them, at one time, the “ patron nowadays tho pawnshop. He was convinced that, were some great wave of encouragement for art to come to their islands, there would come a great wave of artistic effort, which would inspire even the most aged of artists to begin anew. Mr Walter De La Mare said lie did not believe that any of them realised how much could ho done in this world by the sheer use of imagination. He believed that they should turn away from tho idea, in art, of presenting things 1 simply as they were. There was a universe of the mind as well as a material universe, and it contained vast regions unexplored and great heights unconquered. THE AMERICAN BOOK INVASION. “ This question suggested itself when in the slackest weeks of the publishing year books of . American origin poured into this office for review,” says the ‘Saturday Review.’ “The same question is raised by a glance at tho bookshelves of any big popular circulating library; even a casual inspection will show that a quite considerable proportion of tho books, more especially of the novels, are of American origin— American non-fiction works are not nearly - so conspicuous a feature. “ The popularity in America of an American book does not necessarily lead the British publisher to decide to take it up. He knows, moreover, that even the sudden emergence into the best-seller class of an American hook in the United States does not at all mean that it will succeed, or at best have anything approaching a corresponding success, in Britain. It may be too exclusively American in its setting, outlook, and dialogue. “Sometimes the British publisher misjudges an American book’s possibilities/ Thus tho ‘Tarzan’ of Edgar Rice Burroughs was rejected at first by every London house, though later it and the scries of which it was the first have had an enormous success in tho British market. lor five years no London firm would take one of the 0. Henry books at any price; perhaps it was against them that they were books of short stories, which as a rule are not nearly so popular in Britain as in America, where in 1921 more than 100 books of short stories appeared, some of them attaining a circulation of 100,000 copies, “With respect to circulation, probably nob more than a dozen American novelists can bo. depended on for a sale of 3,000 copies or upwards, the sales of _ the rest failing into the 500 to 1,000 copies’ (fategory. But the tale in not a few instances is very different as regards the cheap editions, which range in price from 2a to 3s 6d like similarly priced British books. These editions are produced entirely in Britain, and constitute a very important part of British publishing. Taken under titles, books of American origin of this sort now on sale number several hundred. One leading British house has on its list about 450 cheap editions of British and American novels and short-story books, and of these nearly 150, or about onethird, are American. In the cheap editions shies of Americans are often very large, in some cases astounding. The ‘Limberlost’ series by Mrs Stratton-Porter runs into three million, and the ‘Tarzan ’ series cannot be far behind; the Zane Grey novels sell up to half a million each. Other examples of prodigious sales might be given. “ Cheap editions- pay handsomely only when they have a great circulation. Inquiry into circulation brought out the- fact that the bulk of these editions of American novels was sold not in tho United Kingdom itself, but principally in Australia. So much is this the case that the head of ono firm said that it would not be worth while publishing sudh books if British houses | were shut out from Australia, as they practically are from Canada, which, is looked on as part of the American market. But Australia is regarded as an integral part of the British market, and it is a big field; American novels of ‘open-air’ life, pioneering, romantic adventure, and ‘ red-blooded - love—‘the stuff of the books which sell most largely—are found to (bo specially attractive to its people, who, on the other hand, show little liking for analytical or psychological novels.” NOTES. Baroness Clifton of Leighton Bromswold, a peeress in her own right, is the woman correspondent of the ‘ Daily Mail.’ Baroness Clifton .succeeded her father, the seventeenth Baron Clifton, before she was a year old. Mr Macdonald Hastings, who has dramatised ‘lf Winter 'Comes,’ is also assisting in tho filming of Mr, Hutchinson’s novel, of which Mr Barry Pain has. written a parody called ‘lf Summer Don’t.’ A poet is also among the be.st-sellers. Mr Thomas Hardy’s ‘Late Lyrics and Earlier’ has already sold 5,000 copies. Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr Gosse have protested strongly against publication of the immature work of great writers which they themselves did not think fit to publish. Mr E. V. Lucas puts the other side of the case. “Is it not possible,” he writes, “that in this case Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr Gosso are wrong? The publication of tho boyish efforts of men of genius is not unfair to them, because renders are under no misapprehension; and it is interesting to watch the growth of mind and style. I think that the world is entitled to ‘Monmouth’ (Stevenson’s youthful play, whoso discovery gave rise to the argument), particularly as its author, in his maturity, still liked it.” Mr A. B. Walkley. in like maimer, writes; “ Let us read all Stovenshn, everything of his that wo can lay hands on, good, had, and indifferent, so that, wo may know the whole man and see him as he really was. How else can we accurately place him? Hop' else can we he ‘just’ to him?” Since the sorrow of her husband’s death, Mrs O. N. Williamson lias been ■travelling a good deal (says ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly’), arid the harvest , of this we shall duly see in novels. She is just back at her Bath homo after a very interesting visit to Vienna, where she met distinguished Austrian savants and writers. Earlier she stayed several weeks in tho Riviera, where she and her husband long had a house : famed for its charm, its refinement, and its hospitality. Most of last winter Mrs- Williamson spent in America, including a visit to Los Angeles, which she found not at all the wicked' city which a few 1 sensational events there have led 1 far-away folk to suppose -

A few weeks ago I happened to be writing about Dr Johnson’s relations with Mrs Thralo, and ono of my sentences ran : “It was from 'Dr Fitzpatrick that she learned, to her surprise, why Thralo had married her. He hud, the old man said, wooed several women, but all except she bad jibbed at living in this undistinguished neighborhood [the Borough, Southwark] in order that Thralo might bo near his malt and hops.” . At,once I received a letter from ai courteous and learned vicar suggesting, with tho jam of flattery, that Jove bad slept or Homer nodded, and that “she” should have been “her.” In this instance, being, forced back on grammar, I took the liberty ,of suggesting to my correspondent that it was not so much a matter of Jove Bleeping or of Homer nodding as of Mqlchkedek forgetting that my “except” was a conjunction, not a preposition. He lowered hia flag gracefully. Mrs Hemaus wrote: “The hoy stood on tho burning deck, Whouca all but ho had fled.” At least, I hope she did, though in “reciters” and places where_ they misquote you are likely to find it written “ whence all but him had fled.” The law, of course, is Uliab “but” is liere a disiunctivo conjunction, which I take to bo a contradiction in terms. And, the fact that one has to resort to such jargon is itself a sufficient condemnation of grammar as she is coded. —‘ John o* London s M cckly. Mr Maurico Hewlett on tho long novels of Do Morgan They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered us a comprehensive reading of life. . . . They road as tho most spontaneous things in tlie world, and Mr Stirling [his biographer] now says that they really ‘were so. De Morgan bad been harvesting for sixty-five years when he began. To mo his books seem to be the wisest of our time.” Many Whistler items were catalogued for the sale at of some of tho effects of Mr Algernon Graves, who was an carlv friend of Whistler. In one of the letters to Mr Graves (1882), Whistler speaks of “ tho safe return from America of my mother’s portrait,” and in another ho announces that he has raised the price of his Carlyle portrait/ from four hundred to a thousand guineas, so that “Ms real worth shall bo asserted by its price. In a letter dated from Cheyne walk, Chelsea, December 10, 1890, Whistler writes; “It is quite true that you and your father have been most amiable and courteous in all your relations with mo —and I take this occasion to again express my appreciation of your delicacy in dealing with mo. You have shown that you understand how an artist whoso work is without tho pale of gross popularity, and whoso purse is consequently not heavy with ill-gotten {/old, -may ho met with, oven great, patience.—and hereafter in history this shall not be forgotten.” Mr William Blobbing, who was for nearly thirty years on the staff of ‘ The Times’ as leader writer and as second) in command to Delano as editor, has just celebrated his ninety-first birthday. Mr Stabbing gave to a special correspondent of ‘ Tho Times ’ some of his reminiscences. Ho gave these two among tho “ genuine sensations” of his life: —“Ten o'clock in tho evening of June 10, 1870, hr the editor’s room at Printing House square, despatch for mo from Wilkie Collins: ‘Charles Dickens dead/ Eleven months later. A telegram at 3 o'clock in the morning of May 24, 1871, from Montmarto, three words: ‘Paris in flames.’ Tho London sky in tho grey dawn seemed to .glow a lurid red as I walked homewards.” One bears from the farm near Canterbury, where Mr Joseph Conrad lives, that ho means to include four tales in the now volume of short stories which lie promises us (says ‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). There will, besides tiro title story, ‘ The Rover,’ which concerns tho blockade of Toulon, be 1 The Warrior’s Soul,’ ‘ Prince Romaino.’ and ‘The Tale.’ Mr Conrad’s name and fame have been made chiefly by his novels, but Ills offerings of short stories have also helped to make them. His first collection of short stories, was ‘ Talcs of Unrest.’ issued after tho romance, 'An Outcast of tho Islands,’ had appeared. Earlier there was Mr Conrad's maiden effort, ‘Almayer’s Folly,’ which remains one of his best romances. An American edition of tho highly successful ‘Tiro Outline of Science’ has just been published, and a French edition is likely to follow. A Japanese edition is in preparation, and a Swedish edition has been arranged for. Lady Frazer has translated a section of her husband’s famous ‘Tire Golden Bough’ into French. Mr Philip Rosenbach, of the Eoscnhaih Company, Philadelphia and New York, who spent in two of tho three days’ sale of tho library of tho lato Baroness Burdett-Coutts between £22,000 and £53,0G0, said to a representative of tho ‘Daily, News’: “There is real romance in the search for beautiful books, and many collectors in America who are now famous began in a very small way. I have in mind the story of a copy of Gray’s ‘ Elegy ’ which I sold to a young lawyer. This lawyer, when a boy, wrote an essay on General Wolfe, and the copy of the ‘ Elegy ’ which I sold him was found in General Wolfe’s pocket at the battle of Quebec. Tho lawyer never thought ho would be able to possess a Boqk belonging to his hero, but, having como into means, ho was only too glad to buy tho copy from mo for £I,OOO, and this book he made the basis of a valuable collection.”

n BOOKS. ‘As It Was In Eden.’ By Henry Farmer. Forwarded by Whitcombe and Tombs, Lid. A 1 mystery novel built on stereotyped lines, but with a certain amount of skill which, if the reader perseveres through the first half-dozen chapters, ensures sustained interest to tho end. Cherry Daymer, an ex-actress, and “ono of those women who are unhappy if they bo not a harmony from stockings to camisole,” has 'married a good, average, sensible man, but is not content, and so flirts her idle time away until she imagines she has found her affinity. “By tho time this reaches you I shall have left for Paris with tho man I love ” —this and a Jot more like at; stuff that one has skipped through on so many occasions. Shortly, however, the mystery develops, and from that on the plot thickens. On the night Cherry disappears a man is shot, and evidence points to her as having committed tho murder. Tho supposed death of Cherry; the subsequent discovery, pea 1 medium of the kinema screen, that she is still alive; tho many complications wrought <!y her reappearance; these aro tho more or less exciting events which lure tho reader on to an entirely satisfactory ending. Tho story is ono that may be easily and quickly read, and it can be commended to those Vim enjoy tire orthodox mystery yarn. ‘The Invisible Pickpocket/ By James M'Govan. Forwarded by tho publishers, Messrs Herbert Jenkins, Ltd., London. This hook consists of a number of stories culled from tho records of a city detective, and will bo appreciated by lovers of that class of fiction which deals with the unravelling of mysteries, It has been pointed out that some writers of detective fiction treat the criminals of their stories rather as heroes than as villains. Mr M'Govan, however, cannot bo accused of any failing in that respect. Tho criminals he deals with cannot by any stretch of tho imagination bo regarded with anything akin to admiration. The claim of the publishers “that James M'Govan is no inddstrulatiible magazine detective, bitt a man of flesh and blood, who deals with not super criminals, but those who are as human as he is,” is quite justified. Some of the mysteries tho detective is called upon to unravel are'quite trifling, but axe none tho less full of excitement. Humor is supplied by the experiences of M'Govanb assistant, M‘Sweeny, who makes many amusing_ blunders. Tiro 'hook makes very interesting reading, and is .written very straightforwardly.