BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 19788, 11 February 1928, Page 14

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

A LITERARY CORNER

nearly all higher educational work, is an appeal to the memory of a person in order that that person may recollect something which he or she has forgotten. “ Prose is unable to deal with extremes of speed. It cannot portray slow movement; and beyond a certain wave-length, as it were, it cannot portray a swift one. But the slow movement of a line of lino verse is far slower than a snail’s progress; and the quick movement of a very quick line of verso is as quick as lightning. Prose cannot deal with these things without falling into boredom on the one hand or hysteria on the other.”

VERSES

BIRTHDAYS. My friend has a birthday; And what can I say To young Betty Blake With her wonderful cake And seven pink candles there?— One candle for every year. “ How many candles shall 1 see On yours?” asked Betty Blake of me “Sixty!” I cried, excited by it— Steady, old heart! Lie quiet! —W. H. Davirs, in the ‘Observer.’

IN TOWN. Wo came from the hills where the hot winds blow And the yellow tussocks wave, From the long, bright plain where the titris grow, From the land of the sun, and the frost, and snow, Where the hearts are strong and bravo. We had kept the lines in the winter time On the wing of the poisoning gang. From rock to rock in the mountain climb, When the frosts were keen and the air like wine, And the shingle faces rang. When the speargrass lire was burning bright, We had sat in the magic ring— When the knives were swift and the hearts were light, With a thousand skins to dean at night, And one had a song to sing.

We’re in town, and we met in the noisy street, And the old strong days came back— The wind in the tussocks waving sweet, The mountain ridge, and the plain at our feet, And the winding rocky track.

The bustling town, with its pink and green, And its hoardings of red and blue, To our open eyes was poor and mean As we thought of the long, bright days that iiad been In the old fair world wo knew.

The church spires climb to the dreary sky, And the bolls ring peace from Heaven; But the joy of God’s rich fields that lie Wide to the winds and the wild bird's cry May never again be given. Yet here in the clasp of a friendly hand That wrought with me side by side, T feel the thrill of the mountain land. The life of toil that was strong and grand, Old Memory’s rich hood tide. David M‘Ket; Weight.

TflK OLD THINGS. Mist over a. far sea, And lields purple and green; And ’bis there surely that. I would be With the old things seen, With the old things I remember, And the old things T forget, By the turf lire of December Or the Juno hedges wot. There’s a tree my mother’s father a With his own hand set; There’s a well I’d drink at rather Than all streams met; There’s an old gate swinging In a low, grey wall—• And, och, for thrushes singing When the apple blossoms fall! Light over a far sea; And there Sleive Donard looks With more thoughts to bring to me Than all brown books, Than brown books with gold bands And pages yellow old; For the blue mountain understands All a heart can hold. ’Tis far away and far to keep. And winding is the road, And T have fifty fields to reap With white com sowed; But the old things that were very fair, And the old things I forget, And a woman’s head with soft, grey hair Are living with me yet. David M‘Kek Weight,

MEW HOVELS

WODEHOUSE'S MR MULLINER Our humorous Iricud, P. G. Wodehouso, has been at it again. This time ho asks us to “Meet Mr Mulliner,” and, the introduction effected, wo lind that gentleman highly amusing and entertaining, For once Mr Wodehouse has put aside the “Archie” and “ Bertie ” type of character, utilising instead for his cheery, irresponsible nonsense members of the Mulliner family, one of whom is a “ bulbsqueezer ” (or photographer), another a manufacturer of face cream and similar concoctions, a third a poet, and so on. Aud tho Mr Mulliner whom we meet at the “Anglers’ Best” tells with gusto—and with due regard to the license allowed those who frequent the Anglers’ Rest—mf episodes in the lives of those engaging relatives of his. Indeed, the whole nine episodes are “fisherman’s yarns,” so far as their incredibility is concerned, though the fish which arc introduced are merely queer fish in human form. The book is, of course, full of fun and laughter. You snigger at nephew George’s adventure in tho train with a female who, mistaking his singing exercises (indulged in tor purposes of curing himself of a terrible stammer) for the babblings of a lunatic, pulled the communication cord, and started a hue and cry after tho fleeing songster; you chuckle at nephew Augustine, a pale, timid curate until he discovered the wonderful properties possessed by Mullincr’s “ buck-u-uppo ” ; you laugh at the story of Uncle William, who had a, fiancee restored to him by the San Francisco earthquake. And so you go on, laughing, to the end. And it’s good to laugh these times. ‘ Meet Mr Mulliner’ is a “green label” book, and our copy is from the publishers, Herbert Jenkins, Ltd.

’A BIRD OF STRANGE PLUMAGE’

in ‘A Bird of Strange Plumage’ Mrs Victor Rickard has written quite an exciting story of crime and love, ending in a highly dramatic manner. Sir Ulick Lawson is head and front of the notorious Baccarat Club, and one unsatisfactory feature of the story is that ho alono of the criminal members of that institution who are brought to the notice of the reader escapes. In .some other respects, too, the story is unconvincing. Why, for instance, should it ho necessary for Sir Ulick to plot the marriage of Violet Tempest, to one of the members in order to recover £50,00D which the girl’s brother (also a Baccarat member) had left to her when he shot himself, or, when this plot failed, to biro her away to a lonely castle,- when it is perfectly obvious to the reader that sho would not touch a penny of the money when she knew whence it came? However, there is no lack of thrill in the yarn, which is sufficiently gripping to keep one’s attention to the very end. Our copy is from the publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd.

• A CERTAIN DR THORNDYKE*

_ That popular writer oi' detective fiction, it. Austin Freeman, has published another well-written story, entitled ‘ A Certain Dr Thorndyke.’ He takes his readers at the outset of the story into the tropics, his hero landing one moonlight night at the village of Adaflia in the Bight of Beirin. This Englishman is the mystery man of the book, and something of a super-man, as such heroes must be. But his adventures in. the out-of-the-way spot are good to read about, for he is a manly chap, and nothing comes much amiss to him. The second part of the book takes tlie reader back to England, telling him of tho crime which led up to our Englishman’s disappearance. What this crime was and how tho mystery was solved by Dr Thorndyke by means of samples of dust from floors and desks is best left to bo found out by tho # numberless lovers of this class of fiction who wall be eager to secure a copy of the hook. Suffice it to say that the story is splendidly constructed, and that tho solving of the mystery keeps the reader interested to the very end. Our copy is from the publishers, Messrs Hoddor and Stoughton.

NOTES

Mr John Buchan declares that “a boy who found Shakespeare dull ought to be in a homo for defectives.” Mr James Stephens, the Irish novelist, is to make London his permanent home. Hitherto he has spent his time between Dublin, Paris—and Wembley. Mr Patrick Mac Gill has taken a chalet near Geneva. He and his wife and their twins are going to spend the next two years there. An interesting meeting of the old and now orders took place not long ago when Miss Alice Longfellow, one of the three daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, paid a visit to Mussolini in Rome. She then presented ‘ II Duce ’ with a copy of her father’s translation of Dante’s ‘ Divina Coinmedia,’ a work that aroused enthusiasm at Harvard in the 'eighties and gave a great impulse to the study of Dante in the United States. This Miss Alice Longfellow is mentioned in ‘ The Children’s Hour ’ along with her sisters: — Grave Alice, and laughing Allogra, And Edith with golden hair.

US KIPLING'S ACCOMPLISHMENT

Reviewing the new “ inclusive ” edition of Mr Kipling’s verse, Mr J. C. Squire, in the ‘Observer,’ pays one of the highest tributes to the author when he speaks of “ that clutch at breast and throat that ho can more surely and frequently give than any other modern poet.” Mr Squires continues : Ho is most like other poets when ho is at his best. The emotional sincerity, which is more than intellectual sincerity, inspires him to simple speech and traditional movement, to the common vocabulary, and the putting away of tricks and artifices. Ho is a groat poet, and has been an honest, and fearless through all his wars. He may surely he allowed his inferior work, as 'Wordsworth is, of whom it was written ; Two voices are there, one is of the sea ... And one is of an old half-witted sheep. Though there is a difference. It is possible to like bad Wordsworth, as 1 do; but I can’t think anybody tikes bad Kipling. “Here is this groat mass of verse, yet, quantitatively looked at, it is the mere by-product of a prolific prosewriter who has written scores of books, oven the most casual of which has a kind of sincerity, and viyidly_ reflects his personality. . . . Eliminate all the doggerel from his books, all the more offensive and extravagant polemic, all tho ephemeral, and what an immense amount will be left. The cornucopia is not yet exhausted. At this moment he is writing a scries of articles on Brazil in the ‘Morning Post,’ which must arouse the envy of any man who has ever attempted descriptive journalism; though some of the verses prefixed to them show that he is as willing as ever to concoct jingle when he isn’t inspired to write poetry. _ It may bo very annoying in great writers that they will not conform to an ideal type; and Mr Kipling has dismayed his admirers more often than most. But now that the controversies of his most rancorous partisanship are over, _ now that his voice is seldom heard in public, and his seclusion is only occasionally broken by a story or some travel sketches, critics would do well to read his work again, looking particularly for the best of it and not jumping at every possible chance of showing how unfair, cheap, and barrel-organish he can sometimes he in verso, nnr| how vciy uneven is the quality of his prose.

ENGLISH LITERATURE IH GERMANY

German taste, since the uar, has turned away from French literature in favor of Anglo-Saxon. This assertion G made and defended by Lion I‘euchtwanger, tho brilliant German dramatist and novelist whose ‘Jew Suss’ has been a literary sensation. He asserts in the London ‘ Daily Mail ’ that three times as many Anglo-Saxon books as French are now displayed tor sale in German bookstores, and that on a chosen evening in seventeen German theatres which may be called serious two Shakespearean plays were given, also two by Shaw, two by other English authors, and one by an American. Germany, we find claimed again, “plays Shakespeare more often in a month than tho rest of the world plays hint in a. year.” He continues: — “If you argue that the question is not one of the number of readers but of tho intensity of the influence, even then you can not deny the enormous sway of Anglo-Saxon literature over Germans. , .. , ~, “ Really modern British literature was to some extent discovered by Germans only since the war. True, belore that, through the work of Trebitsch, and through the creative knowledge and gift of interpretation of Kerr, G. B. Shaw had already become thoroughly acclimatised here; and Oscar Wilde before the war was more read in Germany than in his native land. But nearly'all the rest of modern English literature had. no existence for us, and of the Americans at most Mark Twain, Poe, and Whitman had become familiar to ns. All the rest were dead. “ A whole series of internal and external circumstances worked together to introduce the giant stream of living Anglo-Saxon literature. Kipling, hitherto badly introduced, was_ roedited in an effective complete edition and had a very great influence on our writers.

“Stevenson, of whom only three or four volumes had hitherto been translated, appeared as soon as the copyright expired in a notable translation of the whole of his works, and was read and studied practically as a classic. “ Galsworthy, circulated untiringly by a most sympathetic publisher, can be found in the library ot almost every German middle-class house, and curiously is regarded by an important group of onr youngest school as a sort of standard-bearer.’ Complete editions of Conrad and D. H. Lawrence appeared. Very good books by Chesterton were enthusiastically received by the connoisseurs. “Bennett’s novels, cheaply and tastefully published, were widely read. Somerset Maugham, whose plays had long been familiar to us, became a very notable influence through his novel, ‘The Moon and Sixpence.’ The Americans, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passes, more recently Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis above all, were read by the general public and seriously received by the critics. And English sensational successes, such as that of ‘The Constant Nymph,’ both in the book and play versions, have been repeated in Germany.”

A POET OH POETS

Mr Janies Stephens, the poet, in an address to the English Association at Manchester University on ‘ The Speaking of Verse,’ reports the ‘ Manchester Guardian,’ said; — “In most poems there is an intellectual content, an emotional content, and a third content for which we have no name—what Keats meant when he said; ‘ Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’ That unheard melody, which perhaps the voice cannot carry, is recognised, even in bad speaking, by the inner ear as being there, and it is that unheard rhythm which is the poetry in a poem._ The least valuable part of a poem is the intellectual statement which it makes; the next in value is the emotional content; but both of these in a piece of pure poetry can be utterly disregarded and nothing listened for by the listener but this thing which alone is poetry. It seldom comes into a poem except in that third class which I have called song. “ Every artistic conversation is between equals. A person gets from anj other person exactly as much as he or she is natively competent to understand, and no more. You can only tell a person what that person knows, lind nearly all artistic work, and