BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 20374, 4 January 1930, Page 15

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

' VERSES SAY THAT ME LOVED OLD SHIPS Say that he loved old ships; write nothing more Upon the stone above his resting And they C who read will know ho loved the roar ■ ■ ■ , Of breakers white as starlight, shadow lace Of purple twilights on a quiet sea ; First ridge of daybreaks in a-.waiting sky, The wings of gulls that beat eternally And haunt old harbours' With their, silver cry. ~ Speak softly now; his heart has earned its rest, . This heart that knew each alien, star hy name, Knew passion of the waves against his ■ breast . "When clouds swept down the sea and lightning’s flame Tore skies asunder. with • swift finger tips. ARTrite nothing more; say that he loved old ships. • —Daniel Whitehead Hicky, in ‘Harper’s Magazine.’ |' LAVENDER Gay cottage gardens glad, Comely, unkempt, and mad, Jumbled, Jolly, and quaint; Nooks where some old man dozes; Currants and beans and roses Mingled without restraint; A wicket that long lacks paint— Here grows lavendqr,. hero breathes, England. Sprawling for elbdw room,. ’ • Spearing straight .spikes of bloom, Clean, wayward, and tough; ■ Sweet and tall and slender, True, enduring, and.-tender; ; Buoyant and bold and bluff, Simplest, loveliest ■ stuff— • _ Thus grows lavender in England, England. , . , , -r-Wi!fred Fair, in ‘Punch.’

OLD FRIENDS AND PHRASES : " ■: j, . TWCIHG PROVERBS TO THEIR SOOHGES ; 'I"- ’’ '*■ '• There is a story that may. not be familiar to every reader (one writes both hopefully and apologetically) of, an old lady who, being taken ..to see * Hamlet ’ for the first time, expressed her approval of the play, but added that ft was *' so full of quotations. ’ The same criticism might be applied to the ordinary speech of ninety-nine men out of 'every hundred. As M. Jour‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomroe,’ 'suddenly . discovered ft-thSH? he had been talking prose all his life without, knowing it, so we, in the same condition of blissful ignorance, go on quoting; and quoting. ‘ In ‘English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases,’ Mr G. L. Apperson has traced to their source many thousands of familiar proverbs-and expressions. A careful perusal of the book will reveal some interesting fads. Most of ns, for instance, have remarked at sortie time of 1 other 'that “accidents will happen,” but probably few know that the phrase first c>-' -made. its. appearance in, *• play of -J George Golman,. dated 1763. Here is i the original- passage: “ Accidents will happen. No less than seven brought into our infirmary yesterday.” . The phrase ‘‘hungry as a hunter” is first found in one of the letters of Charles. Lamb,. It has long since passed into current use., “ Brown as, a (berry ” dell rives from Chaucer. “ His palfrey was as brown as a herye ” is a line in the prologue to ‘The Canterbury. .Tales,’ £■ “Marriages are' made in heaven” may. .be found in a slightly extended form in Painter's ‘ Palace of Pleasure,’ ' , 1567: “ True it is •; that" ■ marriage* ■be don in heaven and performed in earth ”;‘while for the original of “ a , hair of ! the dog that bit yon ” you ■ , must consult the ‘ Proverbs ’ of Hey- ' wood,' published ip 1546: “ I pray time Tea t me and my felow have A hear© of the dog that bote us last night—-And bitten were wc both to the braihe aright.?’ The. phrase “ a fool’s paradise ” 'occurs im The Fasten Letters: “ Biit I wold not bo in a folis paradyoe”; and . “ haying an eye to the main chance ” is founded on a sentence in. Lyly’s ,* Eupheus,’. 1380: “Always have an eye .to the rnayne, what soever thou - art-chanced at the, buy.” “ Put no more; so many© yrpns in the fyre at ones,” a phrase which is ; to he found in a letter from Sir W. Paget; to the Earl of Somerset, is obviously the original of the familiar saying about; having too many irons in Ihe fire, and.i “to keep something for a rainy day ” can be traced to Breton’s “ Wise men say keepe somewhat till a rayny day,” Philip Stubbes, too, in his ‘ Anatomy of Abuses,” 1583.. remarks: “Is it not. good to lay up somewhat against a rainy day?” Mr Apjierson’s ’book is a mine of curious knowledge, and will appeal alike to the etymological student and ih® general reader. ■ THE PWCE or THE SATIRIST The satirist holds , a place : halfway - between the preacher and the wit. lie ’ - has 1 the! purpose of the first and uses the weapons of the second. He must • both hate.and love (writes Air Humbert Wolfe, in ‘ Notes on English Verse . Satire’). For what impels him to . write is not Jess the hatred of wrong 1 and injustice than 1 a lov© of tho • ght i and just. So mdch he shares with the prophet. But he seeks to affect th© minds jof men, not by the. congruitxes ... of ; virtue, but by the incongruities of vice, and fn ‘that he partakes of the wit. For as laughter dispels care b.y showing that as one thing is. so all may be, absurd so it attacks wicjied- . ness by robbing it of its pretensions. Let; wrong be purely serious, ana Don Quixote with lantern jaws wi. find it impregnable as the, windmill. But let Fafstaff ride at it, and he will ' lead home captive a dozen giants in Lincoln green. This much then is cer tain, that the satirist shakes the foundations of the Kingdom of Hell by showing it to b© a kingdom of nonsense. ; He will allow nothing to lie .Mriojis : except, the;, right.; and that' will ■ ‘ ‘ always be able to afford a smile.

A LITERARY CORNER

MODERN AUTHORS HIG PRICES FOR MSS. Two sad-faced men sat at a baizecovered table in the galleries of Messrs Sotheby , and Co. and winked and nodded away the afternoon—-and many hundreds of pounds, says an English paper. - It was the third day of a sale of literary and medieval manuscripts, autographed letters, >and valuable printed books. A deadly silence, broken only by the monotonous chanting of the young auctioneer,' reigned in the oak-panelled room. His eyes darted round the room and, the bidding quickly rose. Experts glared at one another, dropped out as the bidding weift on apace, until the two sad-faced men had . the battleground to’ themselves, and with rapid signals to the auctioneer mounted* on the platform desk they continued the battle. The end came when one of them dropped out. Three first edition copies of Galsworthy’s books fetched nearly £2OO. • A manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most general favourite of; the t Sherlock Holmes stories reached £245. It was , ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” and was described as being “ neatly written, with very few corrections, in his early hand.”; An unknown autographed Tennyson poem— ‘ Mad Tom ’ —was sold for £195, and a Rudyard Kipling letter for £92. Forty pounds was paid for an unpublished autographed poem written by George Bernard Shaw for the. stage jubilee of Miss ■ Ellen Terry. It consisted of sixteen lines, and was written* on' the famous Adelphi terraco notepaper. The first verso read : Oh, Ellen, was it kipd of Fate To make your youth so thrifty That you are young at fifty-eight Whilst we are old at fifty. A remarkable series of postcards and typewritten letters with the G.B.S. signature were sold for 30s upwards.

HAROLD BEGBIE Although he turned bis bapd to almost every form of literature at one time or another, the lato Mr Harold Begbie was essentially a propagandist (says ‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). Any form of social injustice, religious intolerance, or political hypocrisy stirred his indignation and aroused his prodigious activity to a pitch which was conimonei. two centuries ago than it is to day. There was a moral purpose in all he did, and in producing nearly fifty books ii. thirty years he may be said to have worn himself out for his princij.les. During the Boer. War his Verses, ‘The Handyman ’ became widely popular, but it was in 1905, when ‘ Master Workers ’ was published, that he made liis_ reputation. _ This book.; consisted of:'intimate studies of eminent men of the day; and they were so well done that some of their subjects, including Earl Grey, Lord Morley, Sir William Crookes, and Sir Oliver Lodge, gave Begbie their life-long friendship. Earl Grey, indeed sent for him years later, never having seen him in the interval, and asked him to write Iris biography. Later came the famous .sociological booksj ‘ Broken Earthenware ’ and ‘ln the Hands of the Potter,’ and after the war the >two-volumo life of General Booth, Begbie’s biggest work, a .memoir of Sir Ernest Shackloton, and a book on J. H, Taylor; the golfer. Then came ‘The Mirrors of Downing Street.’ written by “A Gentleman with a. Duster ’’—the precursor of several similar’ volumes,.of ironical studios of contemporary celebrities. Begbie himself never publicly admitted the authorship; but his responsibility was fairly generally known at the time of his death •

HEW BOOKS 1 MAN AND THE UHiVERSEA In' these late days excavators are doing notable work with the spade, digging up and out the remains of buried ages and civilisations. The most ancient remainders of the apes are not without us, but within us—within the body and soul of man himself. Here a whole crowd of explorers are try to fossick out the wonders and mysteries of man’s mind and spirit. One of the most diligent, if not the most acute, of these investigators is Professor Hans Driesch, of. Leipzic. He has already several volumes to his credit. The present one, ‘Man and the Universe,’ is the'most recent. It is impossible within i our space to deal adequately with this book. It is a remarkably penetrating study of the problems of man and the universe. About the first third of the book, deals with the manner in which*man apprehends and cognises the universe. An ordinary person might think that an easy enough task. Let him read the. first sixty pages of this book, and he; will change his opinion. The next forty pages or so deal with, the nature of the universe under such heads as the non-living and the living, tho spiritual energy and its forms, the object of knowledge and how knowledge is acquired, death and the. “ Beyond,” etc. The last seventy pages discuss man as a member of the universe, in his knowing and willing, in his. willing and acting, in his sense of “ought” and the old nroblem of bow far, he is free or under the yoke of determinism, consciousness and the part which it plays in the world. For some not the least interestin'-; part 1 of the discussions of this hook will be that devoted to the question of man’s immortality. He argues that, the continuity of life is fundamental to moral consciousness and moral action. He makes no appeal to religious sanctions for it. If de,ith ends' all both for me and nltima|ely for the universe, as science indicates, then duty loses its meaning and sanction, and nothing remains but to get the most pleasure and power out of the universe as long as we can, for the universe exhibits no moral ends for which we should strive, or which it is ever to reach.

Professor Dnesch is a German, but there is an under-current of opposition to all those ideas and spirit that brought the recent tragedy on his country. His attitude towards war is that of the Quakers, “ who know neither arms nor enemies, and allow us to have a .glimpse of the fact that the whole of mankind can become a ‘Society of Friends.’ ” The value of this book lies,_ perhaps, riot so much in its thought as in thought provoking power. It cannot be read at the hop-kip-jump

fashion in which we skim the pages of a novel. Its analysis of such simplelooking words as I, miiv 1 thought, cognition, real, entity, etc., is very acute and searching. But, though the author is a German, the stylo is English at its best, lucid, imaginative, short, pithy, pointed sentences, etc. The book is for ordinary readers, and there is a helpful explanation of technical terms at the beginning of the book. Altogether it is a volume that will .well repay any careful reader. Our copy comes from George Allen and Unwin, London.

•THE MERIVALE MYSTERY’ A real thriller is ‘ The Merrivale Mystery,’ a story by Janies Corbett that keeps the r.eader guessing to, the very end in attempting to identify the perpetrator of a'number of crimes. A strange family ■ were the Merrivales of Merrivale Hall. They all lived in the great house, where the atmosphere was tense with hate; the members meeting only for meals in the dining room, in which cold and bitter silence was the invariable rule. The place housed enmity and strife and all uncharitableness, and when Sir Philip Merrivale was* found murdered it housed tragedy as well. The detectives who were called to unravel the mystery were bafiled, 'and their problem bebame greater .when the baronet’s brother was the victim of a second murder. Eventually the criminal is brought to book, the climax being a surprising one. An unusual feature is that the clever detective who was responsible for the solution of the problem falls in Jove with a member of the Merrivale family who was held in grave suspicion by the other, detectives, but who is proved to be entirely innocent. The publishers of this enthralling story are Messrs Herbert Jenkins,

HOTES A full-dress biography of_ Marshal Foch, written by General Sir George Aston in council with two other British officers who were attached to Focb’s staff, is ready for' the press. It. is announced in the ‘National Review ’ for November that J\lr L. J. Maxse, tho editor, is ill in a nursing home, and that Lady Milner will carry on the work of editing until further, notice.

■ The costumes worn in the recently-, produced stage version of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles 5 are copied from Hubert, Herkomer’s original illustrations, when Hardy’s story first appeared. - M.' Paul Souday, who has died in Paris at the age of fifty-nine, was said to .bo the greatest French critic of his time. His outstanding quality was his ability to recognise new talent. One of his “ discoveries ” r was the poet, Paul Valery. One of the books in Dr Bosenhach’s famous library is the dedication copy of. ‘ Moby Dick,’ presented by Hermann Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom th© book was dedicated. The copy was once the property of John Drinkwater, who sold it to Dr Rosenbach.

Twenty-two leading authorities,' including such diverse writers as Archbishop William Temple, Professor Gilbert Murray, Sir Frederick Kenyon, and Dr James Moffat, have contributed to ‘ The History of Christianity in the Light of Modern Knowledge.’ The work is a critical survey of the growth of Christianity from, its beginning to the end of the World War.

Hugo Wast, the Argentine novelist,, lives in the Argentine Mountains just out. of Cordoba. Mr Wast has just delivered to Longmans, Green and Co. the • manuscript of his new novel, ‘Strength of Lovers,’ which will be the first of his Works to receive simultaneous publication in Spanish and English. Miss Katherine Mayo has just announced that she will, never write anything more about India. So 4 After Mother India,’ by Captain Harry H. Field, is of added importance. Capr tain Field has been secretary to Miss' Mayo all through the deluge ul discussion which followed the publication of her book. Miss Mayo said the. first true word about India; Captain Field, it is declared, says the last. ■

It is eighteen months since the Earl of Balfour, now in his eighty-second year, began writing the memoirs of his long and distinguished career. Tho work has been interrupted by illhealth ; but Lord Balfour now employs a good deal of his time in the task. Half a century has elapsed since the appearance of his first published work, ‘ A Defence of Philosophic Doubt,’ and the memoirs, extracts from which will appear before book publication in two leading daily newspapers in London, will be of great interest and value.

The death is announced of Mr Walter Jerrold, one of a family remarkable in the annals of literature and the theatre. His great-grandfather was Samuel Jerrold, actor and manager; his grandfather was Douglas William Jerrold, dramatist, author, and newspaper editor, and the author of tho once-famous * Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures ’; his father was William Blanchard Jerrold, journalist and author. Walter Jerrold wrote many books, including a “ life ” of his grandfather. His daughter, Miss ianthe Jerrold, is a novelist, author of 1 Uncle Sabine,’ and recently ‘The Studio Crime.' Mrs (Clara) Jerrold, wife of Walter Jerrold, - has many volumes to her credit, and in the writing of a few books collaborated with her husband.

Commenting upon the announcement that Sheila. Kaye-Smith and her husband (the Rev. T. Penrose Fry) had been received into the Roman Catholic communion, the London . ‘ Daily Express ’ says: “Miss Kaye-Smith follows the lead of many writers whose temperaments and achievements show an interesting variety. The. Hon. Maurice Baring, one of the best living stylists, joined the Roman Church in 1909. In 1922 there was considerable comment when’Mr G. K. Chesterton was announced as a- convert. Father Ronald Knox, whoso writings have won him a large public, became a Roman Catholic in 1917. Father Knox was previously president of the Oxford Union, and devofed much time to theological study. During the war Mr Compton Mackenzie, whose novel ‘Sinister Street \ was one of the great succeses of the time, also was received as a convert.”-