LITERATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3214, 20 October 1915, Page 74

LITERATURE.

BOOK NOTICES. “ A Royal Marriage.” By Sydney G. Grier. London and Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons. (3s Gd, 2s 6d.) Mr S. 0. Grier’s delightful and dependable historical novels are well known to all lovers of modern English literature. Wo say “dependable” because in this particular many writers ruthlessly sacrifice fact to fiction, and under the garb cf historical pretension wilfully deceive their too-confiding readers. Mr Grier’s work, on the contrary, is reliable and painstaking. His facts may always be accepted on their face value, though, of course, the deductions from those facts as well as the by-play of the minor actors are in another category. The ‘‘Royal Marriage” was that between the Princess Louisa Frederica of Great Britain, and the Electoral Prince of Schwarzwaid-ilelzrar. The marriage took place iii the great Council Chamber of St. James’s Palace, and the seventeen-year-old bride departed with her husband to his German home. Now the Princess was passionately English, and had desired to take an English husband; and the Prince’s family—though not perhaps himself—were typically German, and, though only rulers of an .Electorate smaller than an English county, lived in great state and strictest etiquette. Their idea was to absorb and dominate the English Princess. Louisa Frederica was unused to control, and determined to live her own life in her own. way. She was very much in love with her bridegroom. Prince Bernard, and had ho been the ruling prince all would have been well; but he was completely under the dominion of his parents, especially his mother, who was a selfish, narrow-minded, determined bigot, a slave to convention, conservatism, and German etiquette. Very clever is the author’s picture of this little German court at the end of the eighteenth century; its plots and counter-plots; its numerous functionaries, high and low; its bitter jealousies; its minute divisions and subdivisions; its burning hatreds; its outward amenities. In every way it aped the state of the great European Courts; and its officials made up for the scantiness of their salaries by the greatness of their pretensions. Rank, ceremony, and precedence were fetishes before which all bowed. The English bride neither understood nor obeyed. She was young, healthy, full of life and spirit, and loved to frolic with her attendants. This, was shocking in the eyes of the Electress and her strait-laced ladies. Then came a bolt from the blue. Taking advantage of the Elector’s temporary illness, during which his wife* acted as Regent, the whole of the Princess’s suite were summarily dismissed. The Elector, though a fierce, dictatorial, high-handed autocrat, has a. genuine liking for his pretty daughter-in-law, and recovered from his attack of gout in time to command that Louisa’s favourite raaid-of-honour, Barbara Bellingham, should be allowed to remain with her mistress. Barbara had been with the Princess ever since she was a small child, the two were deeply attached, and the passionate devotion of the maid-of-honour, which caused her on one occasion to accuse herself of a crime of which the Princess had been wrongfully suspected, but of which it seemed impossible-for her to clear herself, forms one of the most thrilling situations of the book. The relations between the two girls are of the most touching kind, and lead to many adventures, some of which are as romantic and foolish as they are pitiably inadequate. There was already talk, on the one hand, of sending the Princess hack to Great Britain, -and, on the other, of a British army being sent to her rescue, when the birth of a lusty sou and heir eased the situation. The old Elector was delighted with his grandson, and did not know how sufficiently to reward the mother; the spiteful Electress was reduced to the position of a very human and interfering grandmother; Prince Bernard plucked up courage to stand up for his own rights and those of his consort; and Barbara was rewarded with the hand of a faithful lover whom she had kept at bay -so long as the Princess needed her. Added to this the establishment of a separate household for the young people, according to the British method instead of the German, cave promise of future peace. The story is admirably told, the illusion of local colour and environment is well maintained, and, above all, the strong human interest must appeal to the heart of every reader. ‘‘Love-birds in the Coco-nuts.’’ By Peter Blundell. London : John Lane, “The Eodley Head.’’ (3s cd, 2s 6d.j Mr Peter Blundell has already established a reputation as a. humorous writer, for which purpose he has found ready to his hand a mine of unused wealth in the Eurasian population of fcho Malay Peninsula and adjacent islands. Here on the outposts of civilisation is to bo found a vast half-caste race, representing, too often, the follies, not to say vices, of their respective parents, rather than their virtues. It is with these follies—these peculiarities ox thought, speech, manner, and pronunciation—that Mr Blundell chiefly concerns himself, finding in their presentment an endless fund of amusement for himself and his readers. To do this well, a very special knowledge of the place and people is, of course, necessary; and possessing this the present author is able to turn those racial peculiarities to good account-. The story is written partly in the first person and partly in the third, which method gives opportunity for an inner analysis of thought and motive of the most intimate kind, especially laying bare the workings of one heart, which, “secs things Western with the untrained eyes of an Eastern woman,” -and judges or misjudges them accordingly. Much of the story depends for its humour on comic situations, as when tho hero marries his aunt —by mistake of course—and declares : “I’m in tho middle of a whirlpool. I’ve lost my way in it. My mother isn’t my mother; by father has his

double; my sister is a substantial unreality ; and now you tell me that my wife is my aunt. What am I ? Tell me that. Dusted, found under a bed in a sack of rice ; a mere make-weight. What becomes of the honourable traditions of my old family when I haven’t got one'; Where is my perfect respectability? Where is it? All gone at ono blow. Where is it? Give it to mo back. What am I now? A mere secondhander, Shop-soiled for ever. I shall bo everybody’s laughstock. Mistakes like this happen every day in London, but not in these small jungly places. Are you conspicuously sure of your auntship, Mrs Boga? Tins is a bitter pill. It will take a damnable long time to get the taste of this pill out of my mouth, I assure you.” Situations like this lose much in the telling. They require an audience, and their true destination is the comic stage. Under such conditions “The Love-birds in the Coco-nuts” would certainly evoke peels of laughter. The play on words is also another of Mr Blundell’s strong points. Take, for instance, tho following meaning of “allegorically” : “Allegorically is a nice word, used immensely by the American nation , beingderived from the reptile alligator or crocodile, and paregoric, a chemical consumed by infants who wish they had not eaten so much. So we obtain the figure ‘allegoric’—that is, ‘a disgorging crocodile, who has eaten 100 much, or has been a pig, that is to say, a boar, a wild bore.’ We students find this English language so wonderful. Such a hanging-together language.” “The Ink-slinger.” By “Rita.” London: Stanley Paul and Co. (35 6d, 2s 6d.) Most people are curious concerning the inner life of authors. To satisfy to some extent this laudable curiosity, “Rita” gives to her readers a peep into the arcana of authorship, and in tho typical caso of Wrothq i'ermoy shows an unpractical man of genius, who has allowed himself to be exploited by a dishonourable, grasping publisher, tho latter having taken advantage of his necessities to drive a hard bargain with him, and also to endeavour to hold him to the fulfilment of an iniquitous bargain. The merit of the story lies less in its fiction ■Setting than in its apparent fidelity to the subject in hand. “Rita” is well qualified to speak on this subject, and is abundantly justified in the statement: “Literature has degenerated into a trade, honeycombed with all the self-sustaining advantages_ of trade; tho author of a book is of less importance than tho publisher of one, because the. publisher has the business faculty for ought to have it), and knows how to dispose of his goods at tho host price and in tho best market. Tho author docs not.” Here lies the true tragedy. “ Daddy-Long-Legs.” Bv Jean Webster. London: Hodder and Stoughton. (Cloth, cheap edition. Is.) This is a delightful book, full of smiles, The conception and the execution are alike good. The story is told in the form of letters written by a little orphan girl to her self-appointed guardian and protector, whom as she had seen him only in a grotesquely elongated shadow—hence the title —she invests with all sorts of middle-aged qualities, while ho is in reality quite young enough to fall in love with his charming ward. “Tho Tocsin; A Tale of the Groat -War.” By Alice and Claude Askew. London: John Long. (Cloth, Is net.) At the first sound of the tocsin of war, Keith Martin, a young clerk in the employment of an English shipping firm,_ is sent by his employers to find and bring back their sister, who has been travelling in Belgium. This mission involves him in many adventures' and dangers. The railways being closed, he engages a motor car, which is also re.caiistioned. Ho then_ trudges the dusty road in tho mindst of flying Belgians and advancing Germans. Ho meets with a little American girl, who has. run away from school, and plays the part of knight errant. This loads to complications, as ho is already engaged. Tho story is well told and gives a good opportunity for describing some of tho earlier scenes of the struggle in Belgium. LITERARY NOTES. Mr John Masefield, the well-known composer of “ The Everlasting Mercy,” has gone to tho Dardanelles to take charge of a picket-boat and barge, which ho has provided for the conveyance of wounded. Before he achieved literary fame and won tho Royal Society of Literature’s prize for the best literary effort of 1912, ho had sailed the seas in the mercantile marine. This dicl not altogether satisfy his adventurous spirit, eo ho spent a few years on an American farm, and then he took to the more prosaic labours of a city office. He was born at Ledbury, in the West of England, something over 30 years ago. M. Maurice Maeterlinck, now in London, began his literary career with three apparent failures. The first was the founding of a literary review, which quickly wont under; tbs second, the publication of avolume of poems, which failed to attract attention ; and the third the issue of a play. “La Princesse Maleine,” of which ho printed just 25 copies with his own hands, and gave thorn away. A year later chance brought a copy of the play into the hands of M. Octave Mirbenn who wrote a glowing eulogy of it in the Figaro, and Maeterlinck awoke one morning to find himself famous. The death of Lieutenant Hornung is ono of those tragedies of the war that carries a peculiarly pathetic appeal to tho imagination. As a student at Eton he achieved more tlian ordinary distinction. When lie left that institution, at, the ago of 19, to serve his country in the war, ho apparently had a splendid career before him. The son of E. W. Hornung. the creator of Raffles, and the nephew of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he was one of tho finest specimens of young English manhood ■ —a youth whose tastes and inheritance promised an exceptional record in tho literature of his country. Mr 35. Temple Thurston wrote IBs first successful novel. “Tho Apple of Eden,” when ho was 17 years of age. “It shared tho fate of most first books.” he says. “It was refused where rnosr I expected it to be taken, by the only publishing house where I thought I had a. friend. I lived in Ireland at tho time, and not until, I was 21 and married did I come to London. There I had no friends at all, and I started married life on two pounds a week, I was still writing—still with no success. Then, when

I was 22. I wrote ‘ The Apple of Eclon' again, not altering the story, but improving the _ stylo of it. In the hands of an agent, it went from one publisher to another, and was eventually published.” . Herbert Spencer, perhaps the most continuous thinker within memory, did not believe in “sitting down to a problem.” George Eliot, then Miss Evans, ono day remarked to him that, considering how much thinking ho had done, she was surprised to see no lines on his forehead. He replied, I suppose it is because I am never puzzled,” to which Miss Evens retorted, “Oh! that’s the most arrogant thing I have ever heard uttered.” But Spencer denied tliis, and proceeded to explain that ho was never puzzled, because ho never put hie mind at the mercy of a subject. Instead of sitting down to puzzle it out, ho was satisfied to take an idea into Ids mind and return to it-from time to time until, “little by bttle, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organised theory,” —Maarten Maartcns, the well-known English writer of Dutch parentage, died in August at Zoist, near Utrecht. He was born at Amsterdam in August, 1853. A barrister by profession (says Public- Opinion), his real name was Joost Marius Willem Van dor I’oorton-Schwartz; but in after years, when he devoted his life entirely to literature, ho chose the pseudonym of Maarten Maartcns. The no in do plume remained, and the real name, eo far as English readers were concerned, did not exist. Indeed, so effectively hidden was the origin of the novelist that it was suggested the name came from the Celtic “ Martin.” He made a special study of law in his early years, and, after passing through the University of Bonn, ho became a law-lecturer at Utrecht University in 1883. Some few years later he made his first literary venture, and in 1880 he was introduced to readers in Great Britain by the publication in English of “ The Sin of Joost Avclingh.” In many respects- Maarten Maartcns held an exceptional position in English literature. He was a Dutchman by birth, residing in Holland, and, almost with his first book, lie became a recognised writer of fiction in English. “ I write in English,” ho explained on one occasion, “simply on account of the enormous public you get. Whoever reads Dutch books out of Holland?” Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, is now serving with the British forco out at the Dardanelles. During the temporary disablement of Ashmead Bartlett ho acted as official war correspondent, and is at present on Sir lan Hamilton’s staff as head of tho interpreting department,” • says Mr Adcock in tho Boston Transcript. “ . . . . Mackenzie holds such an established position among our successful novelists that it is rather surprising to think that tho literary reference books of four years ago do not acknowledge his existence. His first novel, ‘ The Passionate Elopement,’ was rejected by seven publishing houses before Seeker took it up, and it confirmed his judgment by becoming one of tho successes of 1911. There is a world of difference between the romantic, Dresden-china daintiness of ‘ Tho Passionate Elopement ’ and tho ultramodern realism of Mackenzie’s latest books; but the subtlety of his characterisation was notable from tho beginning. In the short interval since the appearance of that first book, ‘ Carnival ’ and the two volumes of ' Sinister Street ’ have placed Mackenzie at once with the few living novelists who matter.” The war has come down heavily on “ Tauchmtz.” It. was. a very popular series with English readers all over the Continent, and English writers liked to get into it. The present Baron Tauchnitz, son of the founder, had many friendly relationships in England, and was highly esteemed. He has, perhaps, according to tho Book Monthly, tho most wonderful collection in the world of autograph letters from modern writers, including Macaulay, Carlyle, Stevenson, and Kinling. His usual payment for the rights of an English book was £2O. and that sum came as a pleasant addition to tho earnings of many an author.