LONDON LITERARY GOSSIP.

New Zealand Times, Volume LVI, Issue 2273, 1 August 1894, Page 4

LONDON LITERARY GOSSIP.

From Our Own Correspondent. London, June 8. The regular student of the magazines will find nothing that is new in the slim volume which Mr Kipling (more the vogue than ever) has christened “ The Jungle Book. ‘ It simply contains the seven stories which in the last five months the yonng Anglo Indian has contributed to St. Nicholas, To-day, the Pall Mall Magazine, and the National Re-

view. The best are unquestionably the tliree which deal with the adventures of the mauoup Mowgli in the jungle, “ Mowgli’s Brothers," " Tiger Tiger ” and “ Kaas Hunting." I condider them the perfection of the uu-to-d.'.te fairy tale—a little iEsop and Kingsley, with a suggestion here aud there ot Hans’Andersen and Frank Buckland, the whole strengthened and vivified by the author’s vigorous style and individuality. Young aud old will read them with equal pleasure. “ Kikki-Tikki Tati" and “Toornai of the Elephants ’’ are more emphatically childrens’ stories, and will rank with “ Wee Willie Winkie ” and “My Lord the King" as amongst Kipling’s most successful efforts in this direction. On the other hand “ The White Seal ’’ and “ Servants of the King ’’ strike me as decidedly second rate. The book as a whole is delightful, stories, illustrations, and verses amalgamating perfectly. The verses act ns epilogues to the tales, and are new, never having seen light before. The best are the White Seal’s <• Lament of Lugannon," and the song of the Bandar Log or Monkey Parliament. Mr Lewis Hind, the editor of the Pall Mall Budget has arranged with Mr Kipling for six more “Jungle Stories,” which are to be published in the first instance in that journal. For the serial rights of those Mr Astor pays £l2 10s per thousand words or about £IOO apiece. The first, which is called “ How Fear Came to the Jungle," will appear in the initial number of the enlarged series of the Budget on Juno 7th, and cost £lO5. Through the courtesy of Mr Hind I have been permitted to read it, and as these notes will not see light till long after the Pall Mall Budget of Juno 7th has dazzled poor humanity, I can tell you a little thereof. “ How Fear Came to the Jungle ” commences with a description of a terrible drought in Kukh. All the streams dry up aud food of every kind is so scarce that man an 1 bcakt are alike well nigh starving. At last things get so bad that only in one place in the whole forest can a trickle of water .be obtained. Then old Kha, the elephant king of the jungle, proclaims a water-truce which enables all the animals to meet and water together without fear of one another. Whilst it lasts the deer are safe alike from Baloo the bear, Bagheera the Panther, aud even from Shire Khan the Tiger j and Kaa the serpent and the Bandar-Log meet together quite amicably, One night during this truce Mowgli and and his jungle friends are having a long drink in company, when Shore Khan the tiger arrives and presently is discovered to have disgraced himself and the jungle by killing a man. The elephant king orders him to his lair in a voice of thunder. Mowgli asks why it is such a sin to kill a man. This leads old Kha to tell the wonderful legend of how fear came to the jungle through the first of the tigers meeting man. I must not spoil your pleasure by saying more. The tale cannot he reckoned one of the author's best, but like all the jungle stories betrays a sumptuous imagiuation. I much regret to say J. M. Barrie lies very ill at Kirriemuir with inflammation ot the lungs. His people telegraphed us on Thursday that he was out of danger but that was ali. A terrible misfortune has befallen poor young Hichard Le Gallienne whose wife died on Sunday last of typhoid fever after only ten days illness. They had been married barely two years, and it is not too much to say Le Gallienne idolised her. One of the sweetest of the "Cor Cordium" series in “English Poems” is the introduction "To My Wife Mildred,” which commences

“ Bear wife, there is no word in all my songs But unto thee belongs :” Mrs Le Gallienne was supposed to be getting better, in fact only two days before the catastrophe her husband came up to town and thaukfully told us she had turned the corner towards convalescence. The bad news was consequently unexpected, and a great shock to everyone, Le Gallienne has many friends. The oldest and most intimate went to him at once, He found the poor fellow prone on his darling’s corpse and utterly distraught. He got him away somehow. Fortunately the very severity with which the artistic temperament suffers makes it impossible the acute stage of misery can last long. In time let us hope poor Lo Gallienne will turn to his infant daughter and to his work for consolation. That he will bear “ the cross of sorrow ” like a true man none who have read his “ Religion of a Literary Man,” and his poems can doubt. Miss Beatrice Harraden, whose “ In Varying Moods” and cheap edition of “Ships That Pass in the Night,” head the Bookman’s lists of sales in London for May, wrote the latter in six months and never altered a word. “Bernardino" is the authoress herself. I met both Mrs Clairmont (“ George Bgerton ”) and Sarah Grand the other afternoon at an “At Home,” and liked neither. The former I thought looked a neurotic unwholesome creature, and displayed a queer prononce manner. ” What do yon do ? * was the rather insolent question I heard her put to a man to whom she bad that instant been introduced. “ Oh,” replied the victim calmly (for she'd dropped on the wrong fellow to be harried), “I wrote a little volume of stories called ‘ Keynotes.’ Do you happen to have seen it ?”

Mr Lewis Morris has been telling Mr Blathwayt or some such person that be thinks it unfair of Her Majesty not to fill up the Laureateship. “ The post costs nothing—the salary is infinitesimal—and yet the honour of the appointment forms and would always form a legitimate object of ambition and incentive to poets, and in these days if once allowed to drop it will never be revived. Meantime its absence influences criticism adversely.” Mr Morris regretted that Mr Swinburne had not been offered the appointment. “ Before him I think no poet has ever fathomed the mysterious melody and mystery of the sea.” Mention of Swinburne reminds me that in the quotations I sent you from •• Astrophel ” I am almost afraid “fhe Swimmer’s Dream ” was forgotten. This is one of the most melodious songs in the volume, and will delight even those to whom a swim in the briny scarcely suggests the following ecstacy : A purer passion, a lordlier leisure, A peace more happy than lives on land, Fulfils with pulse of diviner pleasure The dreaming head and the steering hand; I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow, The deep soft swell of the full broad billow, And close mine eyes for delight past measure, And wish the wheel of the world would stand.

Rider Haggard s new story for Pearson*s Weekly is callei “ The Heart of the World,” and Mrs Clifford's for the Illustrated News “ A Plash of Summer,” Mr S. R. Crockett is publishing in the St. James*.Budget a tale to bs untimately called “ Mad Sir Ughtred of the Hills/' and James Payn will commence in the Oornhill for July a new series of “ Literary Recollections,” which he christens “ Gleams of Memory : With, Some Reflection,”

When the American liner lets himself go there is no false delicacy about him. “Stead,” writes a Western scribe, “ no sooner set foot in virtuous sanctimonious London than he spewed his putrid bile on Chicago I” Mr George Newnes has resisted the temptation to become “Tit Bits, Bart.,” as the newspaper humourists had already begun to call him. On dii he told the Government Eretty plainly that instead of titular honours e wanted a subvention for the Westminster Gazette , and stated that unless the Liberal Party could see their way to this he was afraid he would have to sell the “green 'un.” The Celebrities at Home ” series in the World were the invention not of Mr Yates himself but of J, C. Parkinson and the late W. H.' Wills the dramatist. Tennyson—not in 1876 a lord nor so difficult to approach as he became later—was number one, and then came John Bright, Mr Gladstone, George Fordham and Henry Irving. The latter was Edmund’s sola contribution to the entire series, most of the earlier ones being the work of Wills, Parkinson, A. M. Broadley, and Christie Murray. Broadley. I imagine, did most and certaialy aid them best. Like “'Arry ’Ow” of the Strand Magazine he was strong on furniture. ' The little pamphlet Edmund Yates issued regarding his quarrell with Thackeray is now one of the rarest “ Thackerayana/' and recently fetched £4O at auction. London, June. 16.

Dr Conan Doyle’s new novel, “ The Stark Munro Letters : as written to his friend and fellow student Herbert Swanborongb, during the years 1881-4,” will commence, in the August Idler. On dit the story contains a character as original and extraordinary as Sherlock Holmes, one Joe Cullingworth, a medical student. To the current Idler Conan Doyle contributes a rather pointless little story called “Sweethearts.” Mr Jerome’s magazine is falling of in quality every month. The other day I asked an intimate friend of his whether he thought To-day and the Idler paid really well. The reply was “ I can only you that I have never known Jerome K. Jerome take any step he was not fully, warranted in taking, and he has recently started a brougham and dog-cart.” I agreed the evidence was conclusive. The new Ruskin “ Verona and Other Lectures ” is due on June loth.. The old man has long passed the stage of editing these resurrections, and if he had been his own strong self would probably have declined to sanction their publication. But the Ruskinworshipper, Uke the Whistlerite, is utterly irrational, and any rubbish bearing “ the Masters *’ sign-manual becomes mysteriously “ distinctly precious.” Mr George Meredith's ** Lord Ormont and his “Aminta” will be published forthwith in 3 vols. by Chapman and HaU. For the right of publishing this work serially in the Pall Mall Magazine Mr Astor paid the record prico of £lO per thousand words. Mr Kipling, Mr Barrie, and Mr Zangwill have received more than this for short stories, but for a three-volume novel the rate ia unheard of. An Anglo-AustraJian friend of mine who had an article accepted by the Pall Mall Magazine several months ago recently called

on the editor to enquire when it was likely to appear. Sir Douglas Straight's answer took the form of a walk across the room to a huge chest of drawers. He opened one the size of an adult's coffin filled to the brim with manuscripts and photos neatly tied up and endorsed. “ Those;” he said ruefully, “ are all accepted. The fact is we were * Mugginses * to begin with, and nowhere in a mess. It will taVo years to work that lot, and naturally the stuff that goes stale will have to bo sacrificed.” „ Colonists affloted with “ink fever are strongly advised to practise on local editors and not to send their stories home.. You must male a name in the colonies before you can make one over here. People point to Kipling and thei two years only it took him to become world-famous. They altogether forget the fifteen years he worked amassing material in India, and ignore the tact that his name was a household word at Simla and Calcutta a long time before anyone know him in London.

“ Now tell me frankly, isn’t my story a good, deal, better than So*-and-So’s in Comhill. or- Temple Bar this month," saya the amateur inkspiller, “ if they insert that stuff I don’t see why my ‘ Tommyrot Tales,’ or that little thing I wrote about “ Sir George Grey ' shouldn't go down. Mr Mellow, who edits the Antipodean Anchorite, was most complimentary about the 1 Tommyrot Tales ’ andsaidthatloughttoplacethom in London." It is not the least use assuring a novice of this kind that without powerful influence behind him the “ Tommyrot Tales ’’ haven’t a 100 to 1 chance of seeing the light in London, and that oven if they did appear they would do him no good. Influence is the explanation of most of the rnbbish that y. a see in the magazines. To oblige a friend an editor will sometimes give a novice, a show, providing of course the fellow docsn t want to be paid. I never heard of a good man coming out in this way. One usually learns of such first through some obscure English of colonial periodical., Barrio attd Jerome began in the defunct Home Chimes, and Zangwill in the defunct Ariel. In its amended form the Pall Mall Budget is no longer a compondnm of the week’s news, but a high class cross betwixt magazine, illustrated paper and society weekly. Though it will gain subscribers at Horae it piay lose them abroad. The best sixpennorth for the latter is without doubt the C numbers bf the Daily Graphic which are now issiled every Friday neatly bound up in a red cover.