BOOKS AND WRITERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19508, 11 December 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND WRITERS.

It is surely one of the cruellest ironies life that striking success in one line should sometimes bring with it a sense •of frustration and disappointment. Such •KM!! the unhappy experience of the novelist, Rider Haggard, who longed to become a successful lawyer, but as his posthumous autobiography, " The Days of JJy Life" tells us, found that "the. British solicitor and indeed the British client cannot be induced to put confidence in anyone who'' has become a well-known author. It was indeed in order to make money, while studying for the bar, that he wrote his first novel, " Dawn." This met with little success, but having read " Treasure Island," he dashed off in six weeks, " King Solomon's Mines" (which was accepted by Cassells after several publishers had refused it), and laid the foundation of his fortune.

Yet with' the strain of melancholy to which allusion has been made, Rider Haggard confesses that at the bottom of his heart he shares some of the British contempt for 'story-writing. " I wearied of fiction, and longed for the life of action to which I had been bred." And notwithstanding the intensely practical nature of his interest which included agriculture, afforestation and coast erosion, it is a poet and a devotee who penned the curious epilogue (dated April 1913 —thirteen years before his death): "So ends the chronicle of Henry Rider Haggard—a lover of the kindly race of men, a lover of children, a lover of his friends (and no hater of his enemies), a lover of flowers, a lover of the land and of all creatures that dwell theron, but most of all, perhaps, a lover of his. country. . Thus, then, poor sinner though I am, trustfully as a wearied child that, at the coming of night, creeps to its mother's knee, " do I commit my spirit to the comfort of these Everlasting Arms that were and are its support through all the fears of earth."

Some good stories are contained in *' Secret and Confidential; the Experiences of a Military Attache," by Briga-dier-General Waters. Many of them dealt with Russia in the " nineties," when the Tsar's entourage were notable for the strength and the length of their potation. A guest had to drain his glass every time he reponded to a toast, and as there was often sixty guests to be toasted, the visitor would be lucky to escape with only five bottles of champagne and brandy under his. belt."

When the Scots Greys were entertained by the Tsar in 1895, Colonel Welby, who was in command, began to empty only a portion of the contents of his glass, and said he did not wish to drink anything more. The Grand Duke Nicholas, who was not fond of the English, retorted. " I insist.' " Yx>ur Imperial Highness," replied Welby, "we are not here to get drunk, but to receive hospitality." This bold reply so infuriated the Grand Dnl<;e that his hand flew to his sword, and it is impossible to say what might have happened had not General Waters, with great presence of mind, knocked over a huge glasn candelabra, and. by this diversion saved the situation.

" John Company/" by Sir William Foster (Bodley Head), traces the long history of the famous East India Company, and shows how, far from seeking political power, those \vho established it were cautious busines men,with little zest for adventure. Their independence is shown by the attitude they adopted toward both James L and Charles I. when these exalted personages wished to participate in the Company's enterprises and profits. To James they remarked diplomatically, " They cannot conceive how >' with his honqur it may be done, the condition of parnershipp. in trade beeing a thing too farr under the dignity and majestie of a King,"

The story 3 of the Company, says an English reviewer, is that of a body of sober, stubborn, rather narrow-minded, decidedly shrewd men, driven usually by ■events in a disintegrating Mogul Empire dn' India, sometimes by their representatives in that country, into adventure from which they themselves shrank. The expansion of what they tried to keep an ordinary humdrum business into a military organisation is not unlike the expansion of the British Empire itself.

The gibe that Oxford has had twentyJour Professors of Poetry and never produced a poet,- while Cambridge, without a single professor, has produced twenty-four poets, once led to the retort that at any xate no Oxford man had ever been guilty of such lines as appeared in a Cambridge prize poem of the early seventies upon the illness of the Prince of Wales. They ran as follows:

Then from the bed the electrio message , came, He is not better, he ia much the same. Bad as this is, however, it is matched by a. verse in a Newgate (Oxford), prize poem on Nebuchadnezzar.

The wicked monarch thus turned out to gras3, Beside the restive ox and patient ass, •Spake 5.3 he champed the unaccustomed

food, This may bo wholesome, but it's not good." The honours wolikl thus appear to be 'equal.

E. V. Lucas, in a recent issue of the Sunday Times, mentions the new American association entitled " The Book-a-.Month Club," which is doing so much for literature across the Atlantic. The subscribers pledge themselves to buy through•out theii period of membership, one new book a month, this book being chosen for them by a committee of five or ten eminent men of letters. There are already seventeen thousand members' of the association, "and, needlesss to say, it has the •support of both authors and publishers. •Mr. Lucas is of opinion that the success of a similar movement in England would be doubtful, as English people are not prepared to take advice, and to read to ■order.