LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3443, 9 March 1920, Page 62

LITERARY NOTES.

Lord Weir in his new factory is establishing- a bookstall where his workpeople can procure the latest and beet literature. The idea originabd in the fertile brain of Mr Sidney Walton. Senor Perez Galdos, a leading Spanish novelist, has died at the age of 74. Senor Galdos wrote more than seventy novels, innumerable essays, and eleven dramas. His "Episodios Nacionalea," a work in forty volumes, relates, in the form of stories, the history of Spain in the nineteenth century. Some of his books have been published m English. Mt Fisher's description of a section of the press as "obstreperous ignorance screaming through a megaphone to a million scullerymaids"—like Lord Salisbury's phrase, "a paper written by office-boys for officeboys"—will not be resented by journalists (says a writer in the Sunday Observer) who recognise in what danger the press stands of forgetting its educative function. Naturally the vast mass of literate, but otherwise uneducated, citizens presents problems and temptations that did not confront the papers of fifty years ago; but no observer of public moods and mentalities- to-day can think that the press has made the most of its opportunity. The literary phenomenon of to-day is a thing never seen before in the history of the world —ignorance made articulate. ' about the capital of our Dominion cropping up in Maurice Baring's "Round the World in Any Number of Before he left London many people told him a story about Wellington, New Zealand. He writes:— "Ycu can always tell a Wellington man because he holds on his hat when he walks round a corner of the street, because the wind blows round the corners. Everybody in the ship coming out to whom I mentioned New Zealand told me the story again, until at last I thought of having a small placard hanging remind my neck with 'I know how to tell a Wellingion man,' or 'Don't tell me the story of the Wellington man and the wind; I know it.' The first thing that strikes an Englishman about the landscape of New Zealand is the absence of atmosphere. The jagged hills stand out sharp against the olear sky like a photograph seen through a stereoscope* There are no half-lights, no melting mist or wreathing haze, no vague distances . . . Wellington nestles among steep hills covered with light-green grass and shorn of all trees. Its roofs are nearly all red. If you climb up a hill you see the view on either side of it, and the sea, very deep and blue." A writer in a London paper who hasi been culling the of gardens in novels says there are three gardens in George Eliot's books which ncme of her readers can remember without pleasure. First of all, there is the garden of the Hall Farm in "Adam Bede" : —"Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of ricks, to the little wooden gate leading into the garden—once the well-tended kitchengarden of a manor-house; now, but for the handsome brick wall with stone coping that ran along one side of it, -a time farmhouse garden, with hardy perennial flowers, unpruned fruit trees, and kitchen vegetables l growing together in careless, half-neglected abundance. In that leafy, flowery, bushy time, to look for any one in this garden was like playing at 'hide-and-seek.' There were the tall holyhocks beginning to flower, and dazzle the eye with their pink, white, and yellow; there were the syringas and gueldres roses, all large and disorderly for want of trimming; there were leafy walls of scarlet beans and late peas; there was a row of bushy filberts in one direction, and in another a hugle apple-tree making a barren oirole under its low-spreading boughs. But what signified a barren patch or two? The garden was so large. . . . The very rose trees, at which Adam stopped to pluck one, looked as if they grew wild; they were all huddled together in bushy masses, now flaunting with wide-open petals, almost all of them of the streaked p;nk-and-white kind, which doubtless dated from the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster." "Paris Sees it Through," by H. Pearl Adam (Hoddor and Stoughton ; 15s), is a chatty account of the war experiences of the distinguished wife of the Paris correspondent of the Times, written with a humour that is often pleasantly mordant. Writing of the peace chaos, Mrs Adam, says: "When the war broke out, the individual past life of one's own self became a dream; a tale told by on'e nearest friend, but not one's own property, not a thing one had experienced. . . .1 cannot believe that I am the same person who lived the life I lived throughout the war; and when I look round at the groat ones of the earth I fancy this must be a truth, and that nobody is the same. We have all been changed at Armistice by the Little People. The energetio war-making leaders have become vacillating and patient; the never-sheath-the-sworders think more .of the Pacific than of Belgium; the voices that thundered 'To work! To work I' now make speeches in favour of forming sub-commissions to report on the ramifications of labour questions in the new kingdom of Godknowswhere, and the necessity of withdrawing troops from the neighbouring republic of Godknowswhy." Ever since the description by Roggeveen, who visited it on Easter Day in 1722, Easter Island has been regarded as the chief mystery of the Pacific. It is a rather barren volcanic islet some 2000 miles west of Chile, and almost as far from the nearest islands inhabited by Polynesians. Travellers have told of great stone platforms, of extremely numerous great stone statues, the like of which are not known elsewhere of characteristic small images, and other wooden objects. But most remarkable of all were wooden tablets with engraved piotographs resembling a script of hieroglyphs; nothing of the sort is known from elsewhere in Oceania, and consequently they have given rise to much speculation. With a tow to elucidating the mystery, an expedition was prepared by Mr and Mrs Scoresby Routledge, who had a yacht named "Maud" specially built. The result of that expedition is ftow given in "The Mystery of Easter Island," by Mrs Scoresby Routledge (Sefton Praed, and Co.). The Observer, in its re-' view, says the work is a delightful book of travel. On the voyage out visits were paid to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Patagonia, and other places. Sixteen weeks were devoted at Easter Island, of which 14 weeks wore spent by Mrs Routledjre "alone with the natives and statues." The tallest of these stone figures which could be measured by Mrs Routledge was 32ft 3in, while othor3 were lift with large stone crowns on the head. Close questloninc* of the natives revealed the fact that these images, which

were described two hundred years ago as "lining the shore," were overthrown in tribal warfare by means of a rope or by taking away the small stones from underneath the • bed-plates, and thus causing them to fall forwards; other statues which had been set up in earth were deliberately dug out, and it is therefore unnecessary to look, as some have done, to an earthquake to account for their collapse. The latest standing statue was overthrown almost within living memory; the oldest man living said that he was an infant at the time. "It is not, after all, only in Easter Island that pleasure has been taken during war-time in destroying architectural treasures of the enemy." The events took place, wo are told, in reprisals for cannibalism. The statues were carved wherever suitable stone occurred, and were thence removed to the places where the platforms for the dead were built. The labour of carving, of removal to a considerable distance, and of erecting these solid figures was enormous, but there is no reason to suppose, as some writers have done, 'that this laborious work was undertaken by an unknown race, and not by the ancestors of the present population. Mrs Routledge points out that most of the statues have indications —of ears with elongated lobes, sometimes with discs in them, as had the inhabitants of Easter Island when first discovered; this practice, however, appears to have gone out of fashion 150 years or so ago. Large numbers of statues were erected on the broad seaward wall of the platforms, but with -their backs to the sea,' and thus facing the burial vaults. They may have been erected as guardians of the dead, or more probably actual ancestors. The tablets have not yielded us their secret. It appears that each glyph was of the nature of a mnemonic device to enable the priest to recite correctly a lithurgy or formula; if that be so it is impossible that the narration can ever be recovered, as this special knowledge was confined to a few,- and they are still dead. The book is the forerunner of another volume, one more strictly scientific in scope which will contain descriptions of some 260 burial places on the island, thousands of measurements of statues and other matter. One important, and in some respects most portion of Mrs Routledge's work is that referring to the bird cult, the last of the old order to pass away.