LITERATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 81

LITERATURE.

BOOK NOTICES. " An Imperial Adventure," by Iver M'lver. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. (Illustrated. 3s 6d, 2s 6d.) This is a powerful story of South Africa slightly anterior to the disastrous Boer War,, •when 'the prestige of Britain as a nation of men, " broken to war," and "neither children nor slaves," was still a power in the land, ant the iame of Cecil Rhodes, the great Empire-builder, whom the natives caJled "He-who-eats-a-country-for-his-hreakfast," was still great enough to bring to his side a goodly company of strong men to aid in the erection of a grea.t Empire, whose dominant note was to be justice and peace: its apparent failure being due to the incontrovertible fact of evolution—the men's ideals were before their time. At that period there was a strange spirit abroad in the land : "A restlessness, a restlessness everywhere. Every >nie of our young men, a,y, we ourselves, feel the oppression at our throat. The wind blows, like that light, light wind just before the sun rises. Not an Afrikander but feels it. Who can explain the reason, who; can resist the call? It is not the English boy who is stirring the people U P- • • • That Voice, I cannot understand! it. What is it? It speaks throughout our Africa. The animal® hear it and obey. There is no resisting it, either for animals or men, when it calls. Look at the springboks. The little animals go on month after month, content with the veld as they know it, and then suddenly, a whole herd of them, they are off like mad things for the sea. Will they make any mistake in direction? No. Will anything turn the timid beasts asidie? No, nothing. Why? Why? ... It is the Spirit moving on the face of the waters—on the face of Africa. Who oan stay it?" In obedience to this*spirit the expedition was formed which is called in Mr MTver's title page "An Imperial Adventure." It included Englishmen and Boers, Afrikanders and men of many nations ; and the object was to obtain possession of and ultimately colonise the rich tableland of Mashonaland, known to be rich in grass and believed to be rich in gold—the original Ophir of King Solomon 'and the abode of the Queen of Sheba, the remnants of whose palaces may still be seen in South Africa, and were then fabled to exist in dazzling splendour, hidden in some far-off kloof of that mysterious land. This golden treasure was the chief attraction in the eyes' of the English adventurers : but the green pastures, watered by perennial streams, was what attracted the Boer. "Gold." he cried—"what do I care for gold? The veld is there, and the water to make it green, and the grass for the cattle of the Lord. Cam my herd eat gold or drink gold? . . . It is a land flowing with milk and honey. Such plains! so broad and wide—every one of our young men could build a farm there and never see the smoke of his neighbour's chimneys." So—some for gold, some for land, but most of them in the spirit of pure adventure, the pioneers start on their trek, some hundred and eighty men, with stores, provisions, and arms, and " a miniature army of mounted police, five hundred strong," to protect them. They expected to encounter wild country, wild beasts, and wilder . men, and they took their lives hi their hands with a laugh and a jest. Adventurers, drawn from, all parts of the world, "like hawks to their prey": men who had battled with the red man on the wild plains of Dakota, men who had made revolutions their trade in South America, men who had thirsted across Australian deserts and toiled in the gold mines there. The English aristocracy gave of its younger sons, " of' insufficient experience, and sometimes of insufficient brains, but strong in the pluck that will face hardship unabashed and in the instinct of loyalty imparted by the unique educational institutions of Great Britain." This is the material from whioh Mr M'lver's story is woven, and the result is of rare excellence ana. union of breathless adventure with passionate toil, telling of the winning of land and of men.; the toiling through hideous swamps and crocodile-haunted streams; meeting danger from malaria, lions, and other wild beasts, and the menace of the constant nearness of still wilder men. Some part® of the story, where the noblest of the white men are confronted with the noblest of the black, remind one of Rider Haggard at his best, and breathe his faith in the inherent brotherhood of all races. The characters are of the always attractive pioneer types—men who "never go back," who hold their lives lightly with the indomitable, courage which always succeeds in the end, though the time be delayed until the far future when earth has forgotten and only the great ones remember. But what of that, so long as victory comes in the end? "Is it not worth while?" Tt is always the same, the cry of the restless heart always seeking, and finding its measure of happiness in the search. A story of life at its. outposts, of fiction and fact subtly woven together, one illuminating the other with that sense of reality which has been the charm of the story-teller in all ages ; the response to the double cry, "Tell me a story, but let it be a true one." Here, then, we have the . substratum of _ undoubted truth embodying the great ideal of Imperial expansion, with a delicate superstructure of exuberant poetical fancy, telling of the girl who ran away from home and joined the Mashonaland pioneers, spurred! to adventure by the same restlessness which drives the springbok to the sea and the swallow to the south ; of Jim .Sugden, the typical adventurer, curious admixture of dauntless courage, stainless honour; reckless effrontery, drunken folly, lust of power, and that curious something, which cannot be defined, but which draws the hearts of wild men and animals, tender women and children just as surely as that of strong men, and makes of its possessor the born

leader, the ideal pioneer, the master of men. Many other characters come and go in these pages—born Afrikanders, strenuous colonists, sturdy Boers, uncompromising vortrekkers, unfledged English boys, insolent Americans, credulous Kaffirs, warlike Zulus, black men with white hearts and white men with" black hearts. All these form a kaleidoscopic scene of ever-changing interest; butt Sannie and her lover occupy the first place, and twine themselves round the heart of the reader, &o that ever the great Imperialist who could eat a country for his breakfast occupies only a secondary place in the little drama of love and adventure and final success: for love is ever young, and! it is an undoubted truth " that all the world loves a lover."

LITERARY NOTES

Mr Baring has composed; a correspondence between Clytemnestra and Helen, between Goneril and Regan, and other famous characters of literature, and he calls the book, which will be published by Messrs Constable, "Dead Letters." "Claudius Clear," who has been visiting Bordighera, tells in the British Weekly that the house built for George Maodonald thsre, and so long occupied by the novelist, is now turned into a hotel. "All over the world," we read, "there are men and women who remember the quiet and restful addresses and lectures George Macdonold used to deliver in that house." Th© movement in Aberdeen for a statue to Byron in the grounds of the Grammai School there is at last within sight of accomplishment. It originated several years ago with Mr H. F. Morland Simpson, rector of the school, whose desire was to perpetuate the name of the distinguished poet in connection with the seminary which he attended when ,it was situated in another part of the city. The sum required it £IOOO, and of this £B4O has been subscribed. It is hoped that the sculptor will have finished' the life-size bronze figure in about three years. Miss Henrietta Keddie. whose pseudonym, "Sarah Tytler," was for many years familial in the magazines and through her books, having just entered her eightyfourth yeair, has some claim to be regarded as the doyenne of women writers. Fifty years ago her first book appeared) —it was entitled "Nut-brown Maids"—and her last work, ' 'The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle," was published in 1907. It is a rather noteworthy circumstance that the subject and leading chairacterre of every one of the books of "Sarah Tytler," who is spending the evening days of - a busy life near Bristol, belong to the writer's sex. Messrs Jack announce "The British Bird Book.." The object of the work is_ to bring together from every source, foreign and native, all the available information of any value on the habits of British birds, especially such as have been accumulated during the last quarter of a century, that ;'*. since the issue of the- last important British work on the subject, the revised edition of YarreH. The "British Bird Book" will appeal alike to the general reader and the expert. It will contain 200 coloured drawings of birds and egg's done by the best artists of the day. The first of the 12 sections which, will complete the work will, it is hoped, be ready for issue in April. Harriet Martineau worked and wrote in her day for many causes, some of them labelled with very hard names. But she is best remembered now by younger readers as the author who wrote the tales which she grouped under the title of "The Playfellow." Chief among these—there wero four of thfim in all—was her modern child's saga of the Norwegian sea and mountain side, "Feats on the Fjord," which has just appeared in Everyman's Library. The volume includes, too, "Meirdhim," the first and best of the cycle of tales which she had undertaken in order to further the reform of the hard laws weighing on the land—Forest and Game-law Tales. In the two series of stories and in "Deerbrook," her novel of English country life, we have her at her best as a tale-teller. who have a competent knowledge of English and French that the average French prose of to-day is artistically better than average English iproee; moreoveir, that there are far more masters of style among the French than there are among us. The French themselves would attribute this far less to their superiority in genius than to the more intelligent and careful teaching of their native language which their schools afford. —Athense um. To have given to the world three volumes of reminiscences when over 90 years of age is something of a tour de force. Mr John Bigelow, who* has just published these interesting recollections of a busy life, was acquainted with many of the eminent ones who mad© history in Europe in the middle of last osntury. Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, the Emperor Napoleon, the Empress Eugenie, Palmerston, Gladstone. John Bright, and a host of others, are referred to in his volumes. Mr Bigelow is now in his ninety-third year, and is one of the few living diplomatists who were at the Court of France in the brilliant days of the Second Empire. He returned to America in 1867, and held many prominent positions before his retirement from public life. Mr Bigelow and. Jus wife dined with Thackeray, and he gave a not very flattering account of the affair. "The company consisted 1 entirely of strangers, exclusive of his family. Among them were Mrs Charles Dickens, Dr Quinn, the earliest homoeopathic physician, as he claimed to be; Mrs Caulfield, a ve'ry prettv and unaffected woman, whom I was permitted to take down to dinner; Sir Henry Havelock, son of the famous defender of Mr OMphant, the eccentric though gifted husband olf an eccentric wife; and some half dozen others whoso names I did not learn. .. Thackeray, at whose side I was seated, was suffering with chills and fever. He drank a. great deal, as it seemed to me, and garnished his food with red periper and curry to excess, for the purpose, as he said, of staving l off' or drawing off the chills. He sucosridoc! in bringing on • a profuse perspiration about 11 o'clock; at the same time he said he was tipsy, and talked a little to verify his diag/nosis." Few people have realised the ferocity with which the war of Don Carlos against his niece, Queen Christina, for the crown of Spain was conducted. In his recent book, "A Queen at Bay," Mr Edward d'Aiivergine describes as follows the methods of the most trusted of the Oarlist generals. Cabrera:—"When Cabrera had slaughtered

upwards of 200 persons in cold blood the Cristino general hoped to check his ferocity by a severe act of retaliation. General Nogueras seized Cabrera's mother as a hostage for the alcaldes of Valdealgorza and Torreoilla, whom he had captured. Cabrera, preferring the gratification of his bloodlust to his mother's safety, shot the luckless functionaries, and the exasperated Cristino general shot their assassin's mother. Hereupon Cabrera shot 30 prisoners, including the wives of the four Cristino officers. At Rubielos he stripped his captives naked', ordered them to run for their lives, and then letting loose his cavalry upon them saw them cut down to a man. At Burjasot he celebrated his King's birthday by a banquet, and shot his prisoners in batches between the courses. His ferocity, observes one critic, seems to have endeared him not only to the devout Catholic, Don Carlos, but also to an opulent English lady of pronounced evangelical views, who, when Cabrera was driven at last out of Spain, and had become- the rage in heretic London, married him!"

There is a common error (says the Spectator in reviewing Philip W. Sergeant's "Cleopatra") that romance is a modern, or at any irate a mediaeval, invention,; that it is opposed in some way to the classics, and ie not found in the literatures of Greece and Rome. "The tale of Troy divine," both in itself and in its abidiin,? power, confutes this inanity, which must be incomprehensible to those who read their classics. And for those who only read about them, the introduction to Dr Frazer's -"Pausanias," or the opening of M. Clenienceau's "Grand Pan," to "take no other instances, night prove that Greece x&s steeped in enchantment, haunted by music and by magic, saturated through and through _ with fine romance; and not much less is jrue_ of Virgil's Italy. And other qualities besides romance may be found in these writings. When Helen comes "upon the wall to eeie" in the third. Iliad, when Priam talks with her and the Elders talk about her, when she reappears in the. Odyssey, when Aeneas mourns" Oaieta (Aen. VII. 1-36) and is entertained by Evander. the charm, the delicacy, the tender feeling, the chivalry, the melody of these pages have not ever been surpassed. Pedants and theorists may explain as they will, but they cannot explain away these, qualities, which are no monopoly, as we too often boast, either of modern civilisation or of- its current theologies. However, be all this as it may. three personages, above any others, stand out by universal consent as queens of romance : Helen. Cleopatra, Guinevere. Mr Sergeant describes the story of Cleopatra as "the most enthralling romance of antiquity" ; and he has aimed in. telling it at 'making heir "a® initeresting to the' general reader as some of the queens and empresses of more- recent times." In . this he could not fail, as it was done already by herself. -. .... ■ with Labour leaders in the Home Country to regard military service as servile and ig noble. Such is not the views of Mr Robt. Blatchford, of the Clarion, as he makes clear in the work just published by him, "My Life in the Army." He gives an inimitable description of the sergeant from the Guards who drilled him at his first recruits' drill, but makes it clearly understood that the sergeant was only .giving stage thunder. Here is the description: "Hei was a tall man, over six feet high, and of a spare and angular figure. His chest was so outrageously padded that it gave him . the appearance ■ of a pouter pigeon. He had high shoulders and long legs. He had a comic.face, with a red nose, bushy eyebrows, and a ru&'iy, bristly motistaehe. His expression, at once fierce and comic, reminded one irresistibly of a jack-in-the-box or Punch. In the deepest, harshest bass voice that ever spoke, and with his cheek bulged out by a quid of tobacco, this remarkable warrior at once began to address us. First of all he stalked up very close to the line and, glared down at vb as though be of drawing our teeth. Then he growled- in a sepulchral manner: 'You miser&bki-. devils; you miserable devils.' Having (paid over this compliment, he walked s\<wly backwards

' for some 20-yards, halted, gave his quid'a i wrench, and roared out: ' You—miserable . —devils.' And we all stood motionless, aad ' with an uncomfortable feeling' that we deserved the description thoroughly. 'Now,* sand the sergeant, putting his shoulder* back, and glancing his whimsical eye along ; the line, 'pay attention to me. You ara , raw recruits; raw and green. I'm here t<j dress you and drill you, and frizzle you and ! grill you, and pepper you and salt you fcill you're done to a turn, and by" whiskers I shall do it. Don't grin at me, that man with the muffin face. I'll soon sweat the smiieis off you. And look to your front, you poor, unsaved sinners, and learn .wisdom.' Here the sergeant made a rush at a 1 man near the flank and roared out, 'What's ■ your name?' —'Firwood, sir.'—'Don't "sir" ] me; call me sergeant. What's your fafcber?' j.'A tailor, sergeant.'—'A tailor! If he ! doesn't make better coats than soldiers he ought to be hanged for a botch. Go to 1 centre, Firwood, and grow, and trust God, j Firwood, and turn out your toes, you—j miserable —dev-il.' The sergeant stepped ! backwards again. 'Now.' he went on, 1 'when I say "Eyes front" look straight to, I your front, or as straight at you can, and ! forget your past sins and 'isten tc me. Ii shall make men of you. I shall be your father and your motheti and your Uncle ! Tom from Devizes, and you'll live to bfess me in the coming years—if I dlon'! nmrde»" you in the process. Eyes front.' "