LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2668, 3 May 1905, Page 70

LITERARY NOTES.

—Jf standard works (says the Westminster Gazette) are not accessible to the general reader on limited means the fault dos not lie at the door of the publishers. Their spring lists this year ai*e full of good things whose price brings them within tho reach of all. To be able to get surh a woik as Gibbon's "Decline and Fail.*' with the notes of Professor Bury, in seven volumes at a shilling apiece is a bit of luck that does not come every day. Then, too — to confine attention to historical works — we are to have Maeaulay in, thr«e vc lurries, and Justin M'Carthy's "Q'-ieen Anne," "Tha Four Georges and Wiliia,m IV," and "History of Our Own Times," in something like six volumes, all at 2s eacr(, in the attractive forn of the "St. Martin's" Library.'" It almost seems as if the publishers were spoiling their readeis!

— The Messrs MacLehose. having completed their worthy and well-endowed edition of Hakluyt's Voyages, Have now entered on a similar service to the universal company of travellers and scholars. By their reprint of the quaint and erudite "History of the World in Se<i Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others," which the energetic old English divine compiled, they have renewed their hold, says the Pall Mall Gazette, upon our bounden admiration. The series is to be completed in 20 volumes, with a more sumptuous edition containing the text on hand-made paper and proofs on Japanese paper of the wealth of curious old maps and engravings. The work has never been reprinted since the edition of 1625. It will remain, along with the Hakluyt of Messrs MaoLehose, a living possession for English literature, and one that upholds our national claim to eminence as lovers of travel and discovery. Purchas was one of the few men who have made the earth smaller and better than he found it, and Messrs MacLehose have perpetuated his work in a singularly handsome, welcome, and memorable form.

— There are many books of which, long before he can read them, a boy should be told, for convention 1 is always the lower shelf of a boy's library. A wise father will tell his son about Spenser, Chaucer, Bacon, Darwin, Coleridge, Landor, and Frederick Myers long before the boy is able to trace for himself the intellectual movement represented in the works of these sublime minds. Gradually ' and pleasantly the boy who is to grow into a great patriot should be^hiade familiar with the moving spirit of intellectual progress, and acquainted with the true object of all creation — increase of knowledge, increase of reverence, increase of spirituality. In this fashion > we shall rear a race of intellectual men * who will accomplish far more for n ankind than was ever accomplished for themselves by all the pirates, highwaymen, prizefighters, and cutthroats who molested the peace of the world in the days of darkness. — Harold Begbie. —Mr T. Fisher Unwin is publishing in his Colonial Library a first novel by an Australian writer, Miss Constance Clyde. Tho book is entitled "A Pagan's Love," and deals with Australian city life from a new and realistic point of view. So far novelists have given us the Australian bushman, the x\ustralian swagsman, and the like ; but this is an attempt to depict the Australian woman a.s a national type, and to show both her strength and hei weakness. The siory opens in New Zeaiand, where, through a curious combination of circumstances, the heroine is erroneously thought to be desperately in love with the local minister. She flies to Sydney, and her vicissitudes in the proletariat world form part of the book. There is "a strong 1 love interest throughout the novel, and while tragedy is not absent, there is humour in its delineation of colonial life, and the book is specially interesting as revealingi the freer lange of thought and action which characterises the younger nation.

—It is announced that Robert Blair's poem, " The Grave," with William Blake's illustrations, is to be 'added to Messrs Routledge's "Photogravure Series," and one cannot help wondering whether there is a sufficiently large public interested in either Blair or Blake to take up two reissues of 6ueh a work. The poem had at one time igreat popularity ; it was issued over and over again in s variety of forms, often bound up with Gray's much more remarkable " Elegy in a Country Churchyard," but nowadays it probably owes its being republished to the fact that Blake designed a series of illustrations to accompany it. An issue of " The Grave " with those illustrations was made quite recently in Messrs Methuen's " Illustrated Pocket Library of Plain and Coloured Books."

"The Grave" was originally published in in 1743, and it was In 1808 thai the edition was issued "with etchings by Louis Sehiavonetti from the original inventions of William Blake.'' Perhaps some publisher might find it worth while to produce a new edition of Young's " Night Thoughts " with Blake's illustrations (1797). It should be more welcome than a duplicated reissue of "The Grave." — Dublin Penny Journal.

— Before succeeding as a novelist. Mr Stanley Weyman, it is related in the GranJ Magazine, failed as a barrister. Mr Weyman was called to the Bar in 1881, and practised for ten years He never earned more than £300 per annum, and some years his fees did not amount to £20. For one thing, he was never able to acquire the tedent ©f ggefich. Pq one occasion £is

nervous sensitiveness aroused the anger of the judge, who probably mistook it for stupidity, with the result that Mr Weyman retired from lhe court quite ill. After this incident Mr Weyman retired from the profession, abandoning his youthful ambition to become Recorder of Ludlow, the historio little town in Shropshire where he was born just on 50 years ago. A year or two later Mr Weyman was -in the smoking room of the New University Club ruminating' sadly on his failure, when he happened to pick up Baird's "History of the Huguenots." Turning over its pages, the idea suddenly struck him v.hat a good novel might be made out of the subject. Having nothing better to do, .Mr Weyman turned over the idea in his mind, read various other volumes relating to the same historical period, and, after an immense amount of labour, writing and rewriting, produced "The House of the Wolf." The story was brought out, and altogether Mr Weyman received about £200 for the copyright — a success which was quite sufficient to induce him to persevere in his new vocation, with the brilliant results shown in "A Gentleman of France-" and "Under the Red Robe."

The vexed question of American copyright, receives further publicity in a quaint and characteristic article by Mark Twain in the February Lumber of the North American Review. \tith obvious sincerity and typical naivete, the veteran humourist puts the case in the form of a dialogue between himsejf and an aEcnymous protagonist, who has (naturally) iruch the worst of the argument. According to Mark Twain, five or six thousand bcoks are copyrighted annually in the United States; of these, ten a year at the outside survive the 4-2-year copyright limit. '"Each year ten venerable copyrights fall in, and the bread of ten persons is taken from them by the Government. This microscopic petty larceny is all that is accomplished . . . a distinct reversal of the law of the survival of the fittest. It is the assassination of the fittest." This is very pretty pleading, and, allowing for the necessary Transatlantic inflation of the x eternal verities, it sufficiently accentuates-the unfairness of the situation. But Mark Twain has a remedy. It is this : "That during the forty-second year of the copyright limit, tho owner of the copyright shall be obliged to issue an edition of the book at these following rates, to wit : 250 for each hundred thousand words, -ir less, of its contents, and keep said edition on sale always thereafter, year after year, indefinitely. if in any year he shall fail to keep such edition on sale duriig a space of three months, the copyright shall then perish" — which is very optimistic and Utopian and desirable and impossible and altogether Mark Twainish. The argument put forth is sufficiently specious to lur£ the unwary into belief; but it seems, on careful consideration, to lack a solid business, commercial, financial basis, and it seems scarcely feasible in its present presentment.

—^Watts-Dunton : How Critics Differ. —

Not many years ago Mr Joseph Jacobs was one of the most familiar figures in London literary circles. He was a special friend of the late Mr Norman Maccoll, of the Athenaeum, and contributed many important articles to that paper, some of which, havejaeen collected in book form. Mr Jacobs is now in New York, engaged upon tbe great Jewish Encyclopedia, but he has nofc altogether deserted the old, familiar paths, and he has written an article on the recent biography of Theodore Watts-Dunton by Mr James Douglass

Mr Douglas maintains that Mr Watts. Dunton is greatest as a "poet, next greatest as a novelist, while his criticism, though very important, is subordinate to his other aehevements. Mr Jacobs, on the other hand, is of opinion that Mr Watts-Dunton is not a great poet. "He is somewhat mannered, he is at times reminiscent, and above all, he has rarely the individual note. There is scarcely a line of his of which one could say, 'Watts-Dunton and WattsDunton alone had written thus and so.' "

Nor will Mr Jacobs consent to put "Aylwin" in the first rank. "Here, again, no one can deny the very high qualities of this romance, but equally, if one is to remain true to one's literary conscience, one has to recognise an incoherent plot, a want of action of the characters and on the characters that bars it from a place among the highest." Mr Jacobs thinks that the novel will take rank by the side of "Contarini Fleming," the nearest analogue to it in the language. But when he comes to Mr Watts-Dunton. in his capacity as critic, there is no need? to make any reservations. In Mr Jacobs's view, his is the greatest critical intelligencei that has been devoted mainly to the investigation of the laws of literary art in the English language. — Robertson Nicol, in the Sketch.

— A writer in Household Words states that the English omnibus only dates back to the early part of last century. It was on July I*, 1829, that a strange, new vehicle with 22 roofed-in seats and three horses, running abreast, appeared in the streets of our metropolis. It started from an inn known as the "Yorkshire Stingo." Paddington, and 1 , amidst the jeers of the hackney coachmen, proceeded to the bank. The fare charged was Is for the whole journey, or 6d for a lesser distance. This, our first omnibus, was called, after its maker, a. "Shillibeer."