LITERARY GOSSIP

New Zealand Mail, 29 January 1902, Page 23

LITERARY GOSSIP

0 Lovers of pets and especially of cats will enjoy Miss Margaret Benson’s “The Soul of a Cat,” (Heinemann) a series of character sketches of animals, mostly cats and dogs, illustrated by photographs and drawings by Henrietta Ron-, ner. Miss Benson considers that we take account only of those qualities of animals which have some practical bearing on human life, instead of studying the '‘pivot of animal qualities,” the force of personality and individuality. Miss Benson looks ah; life from tho point of view of the rcit and dog and as her powers of observation are as developed as her love for her pets, presents us with a series of animal studies which are crisply written and full of sympathy and quaint humour and in which tho personalities of her pets are strongly differentiated. The cat, she tells us, has the artistic tempera-, ment, and aesthetic sensibilities and is a dreamer and a dramatist “whose drama is a drama of the twilight when the earth refreshed gives up her secret, subtle scents. It is not to be played in broad daylight; it is a mystery play of things half revealed, subtley transformed, hardly understood, secretly suggestive.” Miss Benson’s comparison of the natures of the cat and dog judged from the scope of their lives will lead many to revise the old maxim “the cat is selfish and false, the dog is affectionate and faithful.” There is something to be said for her suggestion that while we think we have domesticated the ait, possibly “the cat thinks it has tamed us. It induces us to give it board and lodging and it surely thinks look, up to it-with admiration and affection —as we do.” Sometimes Miss Benson looks at her pets from the human standpoint and sees in the peacock a pessimist and in the parrot a reincarnated cynic whose punishment for disbelief in the reality of the higher emotions is to have these emotions but to. be able to express them only in broad farce. The book should be a good Christmas gift for lover of animals young or old, but will probably appeal most strongly to adults.

When on the cover of a boys’ book you see a picture of two small lads shooting two huge crocodiles you know ■what to expect. The expected conies to pass in “Out oil the Llanos,” the author of which, Achilles Daunt, should really change his nam.e to Achilles Undaunted. Walter and Jack Wynton, owing to agricultural depression,* leave their ancestral home and settle in the wilds of Colombia. The boys are two of the deadliest shots that ever drew a bead in fiction and their “bag” of jaguars, pumas, crocodiles, snakes and other small fowl would make Mr Grogan’s mouth water. The unerring accuracy with which the young hunters touch the spot every time becomes slightly monotonous and Jacks miss of a mycteria, the only one recorded in the book, comes as a welcome break. There are some thrilling escapes, but the boys come out on top every time. lam surprised that the censor of the publishers, the society for promoting Christian Knowledge, should have passed a sentence so subversive of the morals of youth as the following: “Their father had died in comparative .poverty, and the suddenness of his death had prevented him from making such arrangements for the succession of his estate as would have protected his heir from the undue pressure of the estate duty.”

A capital book for girls is “Robin” by Raymond Jacberns. It is a study of an impulsive, imaginative girl, full of feverish energy and ambition, who makes every grievance in the daily papers her own and burns to redress every wrong, undo every muddle, and rectify every misunderstanding that comes to her notioe. She is an orphan and the unimaginative cousins with whom she lives hardly understand her. She longs to _ teach two rampant but amusing twins and when she does she finds that with all her high aims and good intentions she cannot understand them l : ke her maiden aunt, Miss Prissy, a charming, sympathetic character. She tries to encourage a crippled friend to concern himself in outside interests and only upsets her; she makes a farmer’s daughter discontented with the village and when the girl runs off to Londonrushes round frenetically to get some one to do something. But she is true grit and thoroughly loveable and when

A.unt Prissy has an attack of fever and almost loses her sight, Robin realises that duty for her lies not in some vague indeterminate sphere of ambition but m burying herself in a quiet home and devoting lierself to the care of two old people. In short, Robin, as- her cousins find out in the end, is a “regular brick.”

Some high-spirited and natural children, who act and talk like real youngsters and not like those excessively virtuous prigs whom the Erewhonians would send to a De-formatory, are -ent to an old manor house on the death of their grandfather to await their father’s ax-rival from India. Exploring the library they find a sliding panel which opens into a secret room. In the room is the “Whispering Chair,” which gives the story its name. The old man’s face carved on the back of the chair tells the cliildren by the glimmer of the firelight some fairy tales, of which that of the Prince and the Rose Bush is the fairiest. Personally I should have preferred to hear more of the children and less of the fairies, hut the tales may suit the juvenile taste.

Mr Hail Caine is writing an article on the Pope and Rome as he saw both while staying in the Eternal City. It will appear in “Household Words,” which the novelist’s soil is going to edit.

Some new authors arrive with such a hilarious confidence, such a blithe i% nocence, that it is always interesting to hear about them. One* has just sent to a well-known publisher a letter something like this:—“l am told that it is usual, on the eve of the appearance of a book, to entertain all the London reviewers to a dinner. Will you kindly tell me what this would cost, where the dinner should be held, and who, in your opinion, should be invited ? Of course, the thing ought to be done handsomely.” It is amusing—and true.

Mrs Fawcett’s biography of Sir William Molesworth will be issued by Messrs Macmillan in a few days. She mentions that her late husband first entered the political arena as an independent Radical candidate for Southwark, the seat which Sir William Molesworth had held earlier. This was in October 1860, and Fawcett, was both young and unknown, was beaten, only, however, to go forward elsewhere. Mrs Fawcett classes Sir William Molesworth among the publicists who won for England the enduring good will and sympathy of her Colonies. She adds that Lord Durham and Charles Buller did a like service in Parliament, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Stuart Mill outside Parliament.

Mr Murray is bringing out a shilling edition of Darwin’s great book, “The Giigin of Species.” As is known, copyright in the first edition of it is about to expire. The work was published oil November 24, 1859, and Darwin himfiTTTi las told us from what it sprang:— When oil board H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that •country. These facts . . . seemed to throw some light on the origin of species.” In September 1858 Darwin strongly advised by Lyell and Hooker’ set to work to prepare a volume on the whole “transmutation of species.” It was somewhat interrupted by ill-health and short visits, for rest, to a hydropathic establishment at Moor Park.

But, indeed, much of the material was already written down, as Darwin mentions in the following snatch from his autobiography:—“l abstracted the MS., begun on a much larger scale in 1850, and completed the volume on the same reduced scale. It cost me thirteen months and ten days’ hard labour.” His book was a summary of all he had written on the origin of species, and in some ways it was expanded later’. Yet it was always a very long book, and the physioal labour of writing it must have been great. It was an immediate success: “The first edition of 1,250 copies was sold on the day of publication, and the second edition of 8,000 copies soon afterwards.” Now it nay be read in most languages.

“You do not care much I see about Church history,” Dr. Mandell Creighton once wrote to a pupil, “but it is a most important part of all history.” We learn this from a preface which Mrs Creighton contributes to a volume of the Bishop’s charges and addresses nowbeing published by Messrs Longmans. Another keen glimpse of him and his ■way. of thinking is obtained from jhe following passages which occur in a let-, ter written in 1899:—“Wo must fall into line on a liberal interpretation of the Anglican system ; this must be by reference to its principles, not to its letter. This is the aim which lam steadily pursuing without, I .trust, undue haste or pressure or pedantry.” To make clear the teaching of the Church of/En gland-—that, says Mrs Creighton, was the aim of his teaohing, public and private*