LITERATURE AND ART.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12419, 14 November 1903, Page 4 (Supplement)

LITERATURE AND ART.

The memoirs of the late M. de Blowitz have been published by Mr. Arnold.

Mr. Stanley Weyman's new novel, " The Long Night,"" is published by Messrs. Longmans. ',••:

"The Relentless City," a new novel by' Mr. E. F. Benson, was issued last month by Mr. William Heinemann.

In Messrs. Cassell's list of new volumes is " My Adventures in the Australian Goldfields," by W. Craig. It is a true story of the life of a pioneer in the Australian goldfields in the eartly 'fifties.

Mrs. Archibald Little has written a biography of Li Hung Chang. The work from such a' pen must be authoritative, and should prove of no little importance. The book will be issued by Messrs. Cassell.

Dr. Sven Hedin's new work, " Central Asia and Tibet," will bo published this month by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. The explorer describes in this book the several journeys he made in Central Asia during the years 1899, 1902, in the course of which he covered a distance of-6500 miles.

The personality of Robert Louis Stevenson is so strongly reflected in his works that it is difficult to take up one of his books without feeling oneself captivated by the,spell of a personal friendship. No writer has ever thrown more of himself into his works ; no one has illumined his surroundings more vividly with the rays of his individuality ; and it would be possible to arrange his essays in an order which would portray his inward and outward life from childhood to middleage.

The clever lady (says Dr. Robertson Nicoll, in the Sketch) who writes under the pseudonym " S. G. Tallentyre" has in the press '* The Life of Voltaire," in two large volumes. It is claimed that this is the only complete biography of Voltaire in English. Mr. F. Espinasse published the first volume of a biography many years ago. It is a useful and valuable book, but was never completed. "S. G. Tallentyre" is, I believe, the sister-in-law of Henry Seton Merriman, with whom she wrote "The Money Spinner and Character Notes."

If modern criticism does not accept the work of Ruskin as filial in all things, at least in one respect he must be acknowledged of supreme importance by all. It was he who made average cultivated English people realise as they had never realised before that art was a great serious intellectual and emotional reality, as great as literature or scholarship. If English people cannot be called artistic as a whole, at least they have learnt to treat art with respect; and it is mainly by the work of Ruskin that this has been brought about. —Spectator.

In the elaborate edition of Thackeray's works which Messrs. Macmillan are issuing under the editorial supervision of Mr. Lewis Melville, tho biographer of the novelist, .the volumes to be included will be a large, number of Thackeray's papers not hitherto published in an edition of the works. Thus the volume to be issued in December containing the Yellowplush Correspondence, etc., will include two " Jeames" papers, recently discovered in Punch, and also forty-six letters written by Thackeray, as Paris correspondent of the Constitutional and Public Ledger during the years 1836-57.

"The Art of the Stage" is the subject of the two learned volumes by Karl Mantzius, "A History of Theatric Art/' translated by Louis von Cass el, with an introduction by Mr. William Archer. The author of this work is an actor " who has won distinction in the field of serious scholarship." Mr. Archer reminds us that actors have been known to possess a considerable share of literary talent. Even " actor-managers" are " scholarly"—by the courtesy of journalism, as Mr. Archer -puts it. But rare indeed is the case of Dr. Karl Mantzius, who is as actor and scbjlar distinguished in both capacities.

Maxim Gorki, the Russian novelist, (having been asked by his publisher to write his own biography, sat down, took a pen and wrote as follows : —IB7B : I was apprenticed to a shoemaker. 1879 : I was apprenticed to a designer. 1880: Scullion on board a packet-boat. 1883 : I worked for a baker. 1884 : I became a porter. 18S5 : Baker. 1886: Chorister in a troupe of strolling opera-players. 1887 : I sold apples in the streets. 1888: I attempted to commit suicide. 1890 : Copyist in a lawyer's office. 1831: I crossed Russia on foot. 1892: I was a labourer in the workshops of a railway. In the same year I published my first story.

In other days young people were expected to have run up and down the whole gamut of spiritual experience by the time that they -were fifteen or thereabouts ; just as nowadays they ate expected to have fathomed the depths of human passion by the time that they are twenty-one. The literature of the day in both cases may be held responsible for the theory of the respective phases, and for much of the practice also. The morbid young person in the middle of last century read unhealthy books and relations between herself and God; the morbid young person of to-day reads unhealthy books and thinks unhealthy thoughts about the relations between herself and man.Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.

None of the reprints of famous books which now flood the market surpasses in excellence of production Newno's " Thin Paper Classics and the Thin Paper Reprints of Famous Novels." To the former has just been added, "The Novels, of Thomas Love Peacock," all in one volume, which, though extending to nearly a thousand pages, is less than an inch in thickness. The type, too, is large: there is an admirable frontispiece portrait of Peacock by Edmund J. Sullivan, and the general get-up of the volume is most attractive. We may note here that in the same series Messrs. Newnes are about to publish Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson/' and Hawthorne's "New England Romances." The " Reprints of Famous Novels now includes " Richard Savage," by Charles Whitehead, also with photogravure frontispiece and title-pago.

There is in literary criticism a tradition and habit of fairly good English—good workaday stuff, clear, terse, sinewy. In France and America that tradition has been handed to musical criticism. Musical criticism is as well written as literary criticism. In England the same thing cannot be said. Not only do our musical critics not know how to write, but they seem scarcely to know good writing when they see it. I sometimes wonder when reading some of their wasterpieces if they have read half a dozen books on other than musical subjects. How manv of them could sit down and give a just critical ,estimate of some past novelist, or essayist, or poet, an estimate showing a. true historic sense, an appreciation of the qualities of fine English, and a fairly wide knowledge of literature?— F. Runeiman, in the Saturday Review.

I A new literature is in process of develop- | ment. lon often hear (says a writer in the booKlovers Magazine) an intelligent man or woman say, "I always look in the back ot the magazine first." If you carefully seen: the reason for this you "will discover that in the pages and pages of advertising m the hack of the magazines is to be found not only much that is instructive but much that is interesting and suggestive in a purely literary way. The modern advertisement i's worth looking at, whether it is the sounding proclamation of some big corporation, with tacts and figures both weighty and impressive, or the light, eye-catching notice of some simple trade or contrivance. All forms of literary composition find place in the advertising pages—history, story, verse. Many advertisements measure up to the test of good literature. In truth, there is often an uncommon amount of character in them. A word here or a phrase there is often singularly vivid as "local colour," and behind many an advertisement it is pssible to see a vigorous personality. Nor are there lacking in this new literature qualities of humour, both intentional and unintentional, from the conscious auhorism and epigram to uncon scions fun, as :in the announcement which recently happened to come under the eye of the writer, that a certain article would be supplied to the purchaser painted "azure blue oi as you like."