IN THE LIBRARY

Northern Advocate, 19 June 1926, Page 9

IN THE LIBRARY

NOVELISTS WITH A SECOND STRING.

It is astonishing how much good poetry has been written by famous novelists of our day. Leaving out such obvious examples of triumphant expression in both verse and prose as Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, there still remain many more instances than can be dealt with, here of poets who are writers of fiction successful in every sense of the word (says Roy Cumberland in “T.P.’s Weekly”). Eliminating ever so many verse-cum-proso writers, we will consider only such novelists as have collected their verse in book form.

In Miss Macaulay’s “Three Days” and “The Two Blind Countries” is some beautiful work, charged with an atmosphere of dream and mystical perception, voiced in a subtle music; work very different from her satirical novels:

Lost souls, they say, from Michael's ■gate Turn back in suchwise. Forgetful of the ecstasy Of the strange, steep skies, Down poppied paths to the silent lands They slope, with blind eyes.

John Buchan, as might be expected, is bilingual, and some of his best poetry is in the Scots vernacular. But here ho is in one of the English pieces, the “Soldier of Fortune,” in “Poems, Scots and English”:—

I have loved all good things, song and wine, The hearth’s red glow in the even, the gladsome face of a friend, The guns and snows of the hill land, the sting of the winter’s brine. Dawn and noon and the twilight, day and the daylight’s end, I have ridden the old path, ridden it fierce and strong. By camp and city and moorland and the grey face of the sea. Wrath abides on my forehead but at my heart a song. The ancient wayfaring ballad, the royal of the free. Not nearly enough people know Mr Eden Philpott’s poetry in volumes like “Pixie’s Plot,” “Cherry Stones,” and “As the Wind Blows.” His delightful play of fancy against an imaginative background is shown in this stanza from the last-named volume: —

When red sun fox steals down the sky, And darkness dims "the heavens - high, There leap again upon his tracks The eager, starry, hunting packs, They glitter, glitter, gold and green, i With sparks of frosty fire between. And Dian bright as day. While in the gloaming, far below, Brown owl doth shout “Hi Tally He! Sun fox hath gone away!” HOUSE OF METHUEN. FOUNDER’S INTERESTING ; MEMOIR. ■ A book of interest to the literary curious is the privately printed memoirs of the founder of the wellknown firm of Methuen. The man who left life a year since as Sir Algernon Methuen, Baronet (writes Alfred Algernon Ollivant, in an exchange), entered it some seventy years earlier in humbler guise. Ne Stedman, his fa- , ther, made a fortune by the manufacture of a simple, necessary article of commerce, and he was able to send his .son and heir to Oxford. On coming down from his University young Algernon, a man of some parts not a few ambitions, established a preparatory school, and took to writing little educational books for his own pupils, and, indeed, for any who would buy them. These little books proved profitable, and the young author-peda-gogue came to the conclusion that it was better to publish books than to write them. So he abandoned his pen and his pupils, and set up a publishing house in Bury Street, taking over the publication of his own books.

He took for the title of his firm the aristocratic name of Methuen. The first novel he published was by Edna Lyall.. Then came Marie Corelli with the series of great works no gentleman’s library could be without in the nineties, and no servants’ hall twenty years later. In. those days of giants Miss Correlli and Hall • Caine wrote desperately against each other for the position of Super Best Seller. Their first editions ran to the 100,000. In time the lady left her publisher, lost her public—a just doom, no doubt—and died. Sir Hall Caine, on the other hand, like the soul of John Brown, goes marching on. Young Stedman and Miss Corelli between them seem‘to have established the house of Methuen as a great novel publishing firm. Then Mr E. V. Lucas joined as reader the house of which he is now the head. The developing firm published s‘Barrackroom Ballads” and all the subsequent poetry of Eudyard Kipling. Mr Stedman was going from strength to strength; so much so that he now assumed himself the style of Methuen, and built a lordly pleasure house at Haslcmere. Fortune favours the brave. About this time, by a happy and not unhelpful coincidence, the Boer War came along, and Lord Methuen, the head of the* noble house whose title had been appropriated by the young publisher, play-

(By the Bookman.)

!cd a romantic part in it. He comj niandod the Guards’ Brigade, always I since the days of “Ouida,” beloved by itho novel-reading public, and fought with immense gallantry a series of progressively unsuccessful battles, finally getting himself wounded and captured amid the loud applause of a much-moved British public, who were honestly convinced that the hero of the Modder River published “Barabbas,” etc., when he ,» could spare the time from dying for his country. They rushed in tearful multitudes to buy Methuen’s novels, and it was surely the least they could do to show their gratitude to a great man who had, it was true, lost a good many battles for them, but he had got a bullet in the leg in so doing, and proved himself a good fellow and a charming English gentleman. And they were entirely unaware that Mr Methuen (ne Stcdman), who cherished ardent Liberal principles, was a convinced pro-Boer, who even published under his initials a little pamphlet enunciating the faith that was in him. literary notes. Charles Lamb onee said that the greatest pleasure in life was to do good in secret and be found out by accident. * * * * Mrs Jatnes Elroy Flecker," widow of the poet, has just, recovered from a serious illness. She lives quietly near Paris with her invalid mother. Mrs Flecker is a Greek, and was married to the poet in 1911. * «• » * Just before the war Christopher Morley, whose “Thunder on the Left” has just been jublished, went to an official of one of the big American publishing Arms and asked for a job. The official said he had no vacancies, advised Mr Morley to give up the idea, and went out on business. Returning a few hours later he found Mr Morley at.-a desk engaged preparing new plans for the business. Morley had succeeded in convincing the president of the company of his talents during tHe other’s absence.

Mr Julian Huxley, who is a brother of Mr Aldons Huxley, the novelist and poet, son of Mr Leonard Huxley, the editor of the “Cornhill, ” and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous biologist, is bringing out two new books. One will be entitled “Essays in Popular Science”; the other, a study of bird courtship. Mr Huxley, who is also Professor, of Zoology in the London University, is at present studying heredity, by examining the habits of a peculiar green shrimp, which lays 'no fewer than a million eggs per week.

Mr Eudyard Kipling and Mr Walter de la Mare contribute poems to a. pictured; book on St Andrews, by’ Mr Malcolm Patterson,

In new volumes for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series, Mr Harold Nicholson writes of Swinburne, Mr J. B. Priestly of George Meredith, Mr John Freeman of Herman Melville, and Mr John Bailey of Walt Whitman.

John Hays Hammond, the American mining engineer who accompanied Cecil Ehodes in the Jamieson rebellion in South Africa, is writing his reminiscences of those stirring days. It is likely that his version of the facts may lead to a great deal of controversy.

If Horace Walpole 'be the acknowledged Prince of English letter-writ-ers, it seems a little curious that he should only be accessible in a fifteen volume edition. Naturally, when Mrs Paget-Toynbec prepared this ’ great edition it superseded all the previous imperfect and # incomplete collections. But since it appeared, there has been no representative selection from the letters such as might be desired both by students of Walpole and by the general reader. Miss Dorothy Margaret Stuart, who has made a special study of Walpole and his circle, edits such a selection in a volume Which will shortly appear in the ‘ ‘ Harrap Library of Modern English."

The following were the best sellers in London at the end of April;—fiction; John Masefield ’s ■ “Odtaa" (Heinemann); Baroness Orczy's “The Celestial City ” (Hodder and Stoughton) ; Alice Perrin 's ‘ ‘-Rough Painsages” (Cassell); Fannie Hurst’s “Appassionata” (Cape). Miscellaneous: Joseph Conrad's ‘‘Last' Essays" Dent); H: L.. Mencken’s “Americana, 1925" (Hopkins on); Sven TTpdin’S “My Life as an Explorer" (Cassell); Y. Fitzroy’s “Courts ami Camps in India" (Methuen).

By the way, when you arc reading an American Wild West story, just sigh for a chance to get hold of “The Saga of Billy the Kid" by Walter Noble Burns, the life, story of a real bad man who was born in a New York slum and became a romantic and dangerous outlaw in New Mexico. Tie •lived twenty-one years and killed twenty-one men, VNot counting Indians and Mexicans."