LITERARY NOTES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCIX, Issue 11541, 30 March 1898, Page 3

LITERARY NOTES.

[Correspondent “Canterbury Times.”] LONDON, Jan. 28. The demand for Sarah Grand’s “ Beth Book ” should be largely increased by the refusal of the Northampton Free Library to admit it to their shelves. Mr Stead’s “ Modern Maid,” Miss Etheline Morris, committed suicide last week by throwing herself from the window of her flat. She was only twentyfour, but had twice suffered from attacks of brain fever, and it was the combined effect of overwork and influenza that led to her death. Of French origin, she married at seventeen and almost immediately separated from her husband under sad circumstances. Coming to London, she had a hard struggle for existence until Mr Stead took her up and introduced, her to journalism. Her best known work was the record of the life of “ Charlie Wilson,” the woman painter in man’s garb. The tale of her trials and temptations in “ Modern. Babylon ” she related in a novel “ A Modern Maid,” which Mr Stead was about to publish, when he discovered her parentage, and was dissuaded from making the story of her life public. The manuscript is still extant, and may yet see the light. : Two thousand copies of Mrs Bishops “Korea’’were sold by the day following publication, an very largely due to the increased interest in the East. Dr Welldon, the head-master of Harrow, mentioned to an interviewer of the Academy that he gave the Harrow boys Mr Fitcbett’s “Deeds that Won the Empire” as the holiday task, and that they would be examined in it on their return to school.

There is a flood of cheap literature in Fleet Street. The hawkers are selling for a penny each “Vanity Fair” complete, with the original illustrations, “ Sense and Sensibility,” “The House with Seven Gables,” and several other well-known works.

A posthumous paper of Du Maimer’s on “Social Political Satire” is to appear in the forthcoming numbers of Harper’s, It has many reminiscences of Leech and Keene, and is well illustrated. Of the numerous biographies of the past fortnight the three principal are those of living men —the Prince of Wales, Mr Gladstone and Joseph Arch. The Prince’s life is by an anonymous author, who is announced precisely in one paper and denied even more precisely in another to be Miss Marie Belloc (Mrs Lowndes), formerly one of Mr Stead’s staff on the Review of Reviews, For those who like to know what the Prince eats and drinks and smokes, how he shoots and works, and travels incognito, and such facts as that “in his half-century of existence his Royal Highness must have been prayed for aloud, in Anglican churches alone, at least a hundred million times! ”, this is the sort of book they will like. It does not profess to be more than a complete and somewhat bald record oi the Prince’s rather uninteresting existence. The usual stories of the Prince’s courtesy and bonhomie are scattered through it. This one shows what, according to London tradition, Mr Harry Trott should have done with his famous cigar;— “ On one occasion, when attending a big fire, his Royal Highness asked a reporter for some details, which were instantly given. At the conclusion of the conversation, the Prince offered his informant a cigar, which the latter immediately wrapped up in a page of his note-book, and placed in bis pocket. ‘ Don’t you smoke ?’ asked the Prince. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the reporter, ‘but I am not likely ever to get another cigar from the Prince of Wales.’ The Prince laughed, and once more producing his cigar-case said, ‘You had better have another one, this time to smoke.’ ”

The best of the anecdotes dates back to the time of the war between Denmark and Prussia, when, of course, the sympathies of the Princess of Wales were all in favour of her native land. It was said that a Royal visitor at Windsor at this time asked Princess Beatrice what she would like for a present. The Princess stood in doubt, and begged the Princess of Wales to advise her. The result of a whispered conversation between the two was that the little Princess declared aloud that she would Tike to have Bismarck’s head on a charger. Mr Justin M’Carthy’s “ Story of Gladstone’s Life ” is an eminently readable one. Mr M’Carthy is in thorough sympathy with his subject, and a hero-worshipper, but yet he has the power—possessed by so few who write of their own times —of standing, as it were, on one side and recording the impressions of an onlooker unmoved by any bias or partisanship. As a fellow-worker of Mr Gladstone and a considerable factor in the conversion of the Grand Old Man to Home Rule for Ireland, Mr M’Carthy is able to sketch the character of his hero very largely from personal knowledge, and to bring strong evidence against the popular idea that Mr Gladstone changed his faith on the questions of free trade, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the enlargement of the suffrage, and Home Rule, to gain votes. Both these lives lose force from having been written during the life of the men they describe. Not so thafcof l Joseph Arch (Hutchinson

and Co.), which derives the greater part oil; its attraction from the fact that it is an. autobiography, told in rugged, homely language by the man who fought his way by sturdy independence from the tail oil the ploughshare to the House of Commons,. “It’s dogged as does it” was “Joe ” Arch's! motto, and the first half of his .bool: tells the plain tale of his rise, by steady, plodding perseverance, from a. crow-scarer to the champion hedge-cutter of England, and of the way in which he transformed Hodge, the downtrodden! serf of the soil, into a man again. The reviewers term the book “ egotistical,” To me that is its chief charm. Joseph , Arch: does not hide his light under a bushel; he glories in his own pluck and dogged determination, as he has a perfect right ,to do. His naive pride in his own strength andl steadiness, the way ho worsted the gentry,, his ability as trencherman, his custom to hit straight from the shoulder, “a good! honest, English, knockdown blow,” “the dignity of his character,” “his splendid ovation right down splendid ” whan “Joseph and his brethren licked the Tories! in a donkey-cart ” exhibit the man’s personality on every page. I like his downright outspoken fulminations against the landed gentry, the, landlord, the farmer, the “squarsons” or country parsons, who sat on the bench, who “ apportioned to the poor their lowljr places,” who tried to stamp out the labourers’ sick benefit fund, who administered the iniquitous game-laws with’unmerciful severity, who doled out with patronising charity coals and soup to the poor who would cringe and curtsey to them, and who suffered those who showed the slightest spark of independence to starve. You may still meet with a good many of this type, the tyrannising parochial despot, in what you would call “the back blocks” of Conservative England. Such gentry still retain the idea that the labourer had a placet ordained for him by God and ought to keep it. These words of Joe Arch are not a bit too strong to-day “ * Much, knowledge of the right sort is a dangerous thing for the poor ’ might hsve been the motto put up over the door of ..the village school in my day. The less booklearning the labourer’s lad got staffed into him, the better for him and the-safer for those above him, was what those in authority believed and acted up to. I dare say they made themselves think somehow or other—perhaps by not thinking—that they were doing their duty in that.state of life to which it had pleased God to call them, when they tried to numb his brain, as a preliminary to stunting his body later on, as stunt it they did, by forcing him to work like a beast of burden for a pittance. “These gentry did not want him to know, they did not want him to think; theyonly wanted him to work. To toil with the hand was what he was bom into the world for, and they took precious good care to see that he did it from his youth upwards. Of course he might learn his catechism; that, and things similar to it, was the right, proper and suitable knowledge for such as he, and he would be the more likely to stay contentedly in his placets the end of his working days.” Joe Arch’s refusal to “order Tiimarff lowly and reverently to all his betters,' 1 * his avowal that he is “ not one who strokes a man down the back because he is a gentleman,” his indignant question “ Wiry should the poor be forced to come up last of all to the table of the Lord ?” will arouse the ready sympathy of colonial readers. It is impossible to have a more vivid picture of the wrongs and sufferings of tne agricultural labourer than that painted so forcibly in the first seven chapters of the book. It is to the everlasting credit of this “Village Hampden," as the Countess of Warwick terms him in her preface, that be and his followers, with such provocation as might well have justified them in open revolt, should have kept within this four comers of the law in their movement for reform. Mr Arch would never suffer Hodge to become an Anarchist nor the professional agitator to interfere with this National Agricultural Labourers’ Union. To these facts his success was largely dusu The earlier part of the book aroused my interest and excited my indignation, but I confess to feeling bored and disappointed with the latter half, which is filled by the somewhat long-winded conventional speeches of Mr Arch. : The colonial working man has only to. read tho first chapters of the book to thank hia stars either that he emigrated to: tins colonies or that he was bom ina.lancl where there is no bobbing of curtseys and touching of hats to squire and parson.