BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16493, 7 March 1914, Page 8

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

THE STORY OF A NOVEL. “ OUT OF LONELINESS AND TEARS.” The story, of a novel is told in the London “Daily News” by Miss Margaret Peterson, whose tale, “The Lure of . the Little Drum,” won a prize offered by a London firm of publishers. The revelation of the forces that made for literary expression in her case is interesting. “I attended the other evening a conversazione given by the Authors’ Society, and sat in an unobtrusive corner, watching with hated breath and admiring eyes the many celebrities gathered together,” writes .Miss •Peterson. “lam a. very humble member of their baud, hut one thing more than anything else struck me about the majority of them. They had nearly all of them, got excessively sad laces, intense, perhaps, would he a better word to describe them by, and here I allude more in particular to the women. They gave me the impression, one arid all of them, of having come through deep waters, of having lost—perhaps they never possessed—that intangible gift known as the joy of life. Tlie thought was borne in on me. as I watched, and it’ is probably true of women at least, that so long as you are perfectly happy there is no crying need within your soul to express yourself in any sort of way, unless love can be described as expressing yourself, and it is not out of great happiness that great authors or authoresses are made. “ Something like twenty-three years of ray life , were spent in just being riotously happy. Of course there were clouds in the skv—what sky is without them?—hut the predominating note was happiness, and the days were a succession of finding amusements and living up to them to the top of one’s 'bent. I did very little writing in those days, 1 do not think 1 ever even wanted to write, but I was always a voracious reader. That was why when, four years ago. I found myself on my own in London with the prospect of having to work for my living in front of me, T instinctively turned to an ambition for literature. I had an idea that something that gave such pleasure to others must in its turn give pleasure to oneself; and that idea is undoubtedly true, only the first steps'in a literary career, unaided by advice or experience. aro rough and at times deprossingly steep. Working for one’s living in London is no light task to those, properly fitted out lor the conflict. I came into it woefully unprepared. Mv first interview with a registry office dampened my hones of success in any profession once and for all. This was my application-sheet, when filled in with all the advantages I could muster:—

Name, Miss Peterson. Education —At home, passed no examination. Piano—No. French—Very little. Other languages—None. TypingNo. Shorthand—No. No experience of any sort. Bond of children, kind, good-tempered and will-

“My heart shrank .at the prospect of being a companion, and quite rashly 1 decided that 1 would learn shorthand and typewriting and get on the staff of a paper. It isn’t easy to learn anything in the way of a foreign language.like shorthand when you are somewhat past your teens. I did, however, master that, with the aid of the London County Council night schools. Getting on tho staff of a paper was a far more impassable harrier, and in that direction l am still without success. How T haunted Fleet. Street .with the somewhat absurd idea that if I could only persuade an editor or some such ma.u to see me he would at least give'me a chance! But I think what affected me more than anything else, and what remains as the most unpleasant memory, was tho loneliness of those days. I inhabited a small room on the top of a lodginghouse in Earl’s Court, one room, in which the bed acted as a dining-table in the day time, and with a window, which only allowed me a glimpse of sky when I knelt down and pee.i.ed out.'

“ So it was that out of loneliness and tsars came mv first book. Writing it lifted me clean out of myself', 1 forgot everything in the joy of evolving the plot, working it out to its' conclusion, drawing the threads of my story together, planning it as a whole. I lived with my characters, talked to. thorn—l was so desperately keen on talking to someone in those lonely days—dreamt of them, planned for them. Mo editor ha.s Doo.i kind to that book, but to me it is .ho apple of my eye, my one owe. lamb. I used to foe! almost personally affronted. when it came hack v) r.;o returned through the post, or was .handed across tbo counter to mo. by ft mildly scornful clerk. 1 felt toward it something of what a - shipwrecked sailor must fee! towards the ra.lt he is laboriously putting together, and which is to save him front the luvy of the waves. It opened a way of escape to me. a little tiny chink of light in a sky which had of late been so ovorpoweringly black. And I was so ab-sur-dlv hone fill- about it; all tup hopes of my.heart centred themselves upon "ottino' that book accepted and published .” , . , But the second hook won a pi .vie <u 200 guinoas and gave its author a footing in the literary world. A BRITON IN GERMANY. THE TRIUMPH OF MERIT. . Lord Redesdale has a very interestmg paper in the ‘‘ Edinburgh llevicw on a remarkable Englishman, little known in Britain, who has made a oreat reputation lor himself in literary Germany, for he has interpreted to Germany three of her most brilliant aons —Wagner. Kant and Goethe. “ Few men have achieved a literary success equal to that of Houston St-cw-art Chamberlain,” writes liord Redesdale. “ and Englishmen may well be proud of a fellow-countryman who is recognised in Germany as one of the most brilliant writers and profound thinkers of the day."’ “ When Tie published the first edition of his first book, ' Das Drama Richard Wagners,’ the German language, as he subsequently conlcssed, Yins' not fullv familiar to him. The book at first fell flat, but it possessed merits so great that it gradually burst the bonds of prejudice, and has now gone through several editions. Germany recognised it as a most masterly piece of criticism, throwing an altogether new light upon works which are perhaps ‘caviare to the general.’ To listen to one of the great tone-poems, after having gone through tho preparation afforded by Chamberlain’s book, is a revelation even to those who have listened to Wagner twenty times before. It opens up inner and mystic meanings before unsuspected. "With the publication of the Life of Wagner Chamberlain’s reputation as a German man cf letters was secured: there was no longer any need to make excuses on the score of linguistic insufficiency. His next task was a far more serious undertaking. In the ‘ Gnmdlagen des neunzelinton Jalirhunderts’ (‘The Foundation of tile Nineteenth Century ’) lie attacked the Doctors.of Philosophy, and,tho Doctors of Divinity, tlic Scribes and Pharisees of modern times: he ran a tilt against myths . which have been promoted into faiths. “The book at once arrested attention; it was bought and read with aridity; it ajoneaved A*»t in JS99. a ad

since then nearly a hundred thousand copies have been sold in spite of its heavy cost. . Only last year the stereotyped plntes were worn out, and the author was bemoaning the weariness of having ,to correct tlie proofs over again—surely a rare sorrow for a writer to have to undergo !” LITERARY NOTES. “ It, may interest Mr G. K. Chesterton to learn that the amazing fecundity of some few popular novelists is,” says a writer in tlie London "Daily Express,” “accounted for by ‘ghosts.’ Writers of fiction which has no claim to style or individuality, but which none the less sells like hot cakes, arc so sought after by certain publishers that sonic of them, in order to meet the demand,-are driven to employ wliat arc called ‘ghosts,’ or ‘ hacks,’ to help them to turn out their work. The way some of these ‘literary assistants’ imitate the alleged authors’ mode of expression is remarkable. lam told that these assistants are adequately paid. The stories are not works of art, and few can claim to he literature. The work is pleasant, for tho writers are their own masters, inasmuch as they can work when and where they choose, they have no office expenses, and they are sure of their money.” “ What generally passes for literature amongst reviewers and the Mudieminded is as noisy, as uninspired, and as far from the eternal verities as the traffic of London,” says the “ Daily Herald.” “ One of the healthy and blessed results of a social revolution would ho the sending of our brigades of unchosen book-makers to suitable trades and avocations. They might be made to develop a sense of social ser; vice; in pure literature they are impossible. On the other hand, why tlie democratic movement, despite its sheer contact with reality and its vision, is giving us so very little literature and thought is something of a puzzle. There is potential poetry in Socialism at its best, and a vital trade unionism would he linked with ideas, enthusiasm and the graces of life. Yet nowadays the combined elements, it appears, are unequal even to a picturesque Labour festival, to say nothing of intellectual creativeness.”

“ Wo have heard much, during lecent months, of the menace cf vice in our communities. There is aim l her menace,” says Professor Hugo Munstorbenv in the “International,” “ which is just ns dangerous and perhaps even more so because more subtle and undefined. It is tho menace of * the intellectual underworld.’ ■” Professor Munsterberg refers to half-baked thinkers and charlatans who threaten our inner culture and our spiritual life.

“ The vice of the social underworld,” he observes, “ gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sexual life: the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and. fo,r truth. Tho fact that we cannot lx? entirely successful ought to he no argument for any leniency with the intellectual perversities and the infectious diseases, the germs of which are disseminated in our world of honest culture by the inhabitants of the cultural underworld.”