BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3885, 28 August 1928, Page 72

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

A copy of “ Vanity Fair,” presented byThackeray to his doctor, was sold in London for £6BO. ¥ ¥ * For every 3d spent in the United States on books 5s is spent on moving pictures.” rf n* During his recent two months’ stay in England Dr Rosenbach, the famous American book-collector, spent over £400,000 in the purchase of rare books. ¥ ¥ ¥ A Detroit newspaper has formed the opinion that fiction is becoming more realistic because it has found that onlytwo novels this season mentioned a crescent moon rising in the East. * * * His Excellency- the Governor-General of Australia (Lord Stonehaven) has approved the payment of a pension of 10s a week from the Commonwealth Literary Fund to Zora Bernice Smith, who writes under the name of Zora Cross. ¥ . ¥ ¥ The Australian Literature Society, which has its headquarters at 234 Swanston street, Melbourne, proposes to carryout vigorous propaganda work to encourage authorship in Australia. With this object in view it is trying to increase its membership roll to 1000, so that a. definite amount of money may be sec aside each year to provide a fund to help Australian authors. Next year, thanks to the generosity- of Colonel R. S. Crouch, who has endowed the society with the necessary funds for the purpose, it will award its first annual gold medal for the best novel written by an Australian during the preceding y-ear. * * * Mr Stanley Weyman, novelist, whose death was recently announced in London, left an estate valued for probate purposes at £99.000. * * * The manuscript of Mr H. G. Wells's new novel, “ Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island,” has been delivered to th? publishers. Ijr his new work Wells has returned to pure story-telling. The book is coming out at the'end of the present month. * * * The late Sir Edmund Gosse was barely of age when he wrote the first' article on Ibsen ever published in an English newspaper. Ibsen was then so unknown that the editor of the Saturday Review actually- thought Gosse had invented Ibsen—as Swinburne, in point of fact, a few years before, had invented a French poet, a criticism of whom, with veryscurrilous extracts, he had palmed off on the editor of the Spectator. ¥ ¥ ¥ Hodder and Stoughton, the London publishers, offer a prize of £IOOO for the best religious novel. The two essentials are that the novel shall have a strong story, and that it shall deal—in anyway, to any purpose—with religious thought and conviction, and the effects of religion upon human character and conduct. It may have as its basis the religious problems of the day, or the writer’s personal experiences in religion, or the influence of religion, or what results from the loss of religion in modern life; or, providing a theme is history, it may deal with the clash of creeds and the part plaved by religion in the life of the past. * . # * Aubrey Beardsley once wrote to his publisher threatening that he would commit suicide I—if 1 —if a drawing which he called “ The Fat Woman ” did not appear in the number one of “The Yellow Book ”! This letter, decorated by a sketch of the artist himself looking very miserable and pointing to a noose hanging from a gallows, will be one' of the many hiterto unpublished drawings which will illustrate a book on “ Aubre" Beardsley, the Man and his Work, 5 *

by ; Haldane Alacfall, who was one of file artist’s intimate friends. * * * The Hawthorndeii Prize of £IOO, given annually by Miss Alice Warrender for a work of imagination by an author whose age does not exceed 41 years, lias been awarded by the committee this year to Mr Henry Williamson for his recent kook, “ Tarka the Otter.” Mr John Galsworthy, presenting the prize, said that Mr Williamson was the finest and most intimate living interpreter of the drama of wild life. For sheer beauty and power it was not easy to match some of his phrases in the whole of English literature. In him we had a writer akin to Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson in the power of feeling, seeing, and expressing nature in her many moods. * * * The number of words which Shakespeare either coined or introduced is very large, and as various as it is large. Air Gordon, in “ Shakespeare’s English,” a tract issued by the Society for the Purity of English, gives a list of more than 70; and among them arc “ aerial,” “ auspicious,” “ castigate,” “ critic ” and “ critical,” “ fitful,” “ gibber,” “ gnarled,” “ laughable,” “ leer,” “ pedant ” and “ pedantical,” “ perusal,” and “ sportive.” A page of unusual interest is that which collects a big handful of instances of Shakespeare’s creative power over the meanings of w’ords already in use. To cudgel one’s brain, to drink a health, to lay odds, to be fond of someone; to be sick of a thing, to seal one’s lips, and to get one’s boots on—it is, for all that is known, Shakespeare to whom we owe these now familiar phrases. « k- * Miss Drew, in “ Jane Welsh and Jane Carlyle,” does not shrink from a discussion of the suggestion, first made by Froude, that all the trouble between Carlyle and his wife really arose out of sexual incompatibility. The evidence, such as it is, comes from Geraldine Jewsbury, who wrote novels, and from Frank Harris, who asserted in an article published in the English Review for February, 1911, that Carlyle, in 1878, confessed to him that he had never consummated the marriage. Frank Harris also asserted that Sir Richard Quain, the Carlyles’ doctor, told him the same thing, but Sir James CrichtonBrowne said that when he mentioned the story to Quain he “ laughed it to scorn.” Jane’s letters to Carlyle after their marriage, and .his to her, seem altogether inconsistent ■with the idea of any .abnormality. * * *

An unsigned review in the New Statesman roundly denounces Emil Ludwig for his latest book, “ The Son of Alan,” in which the well-known German ■writer deals with the life of Christ from the point of view of one who does not believe in His divinity. “ Exceedingly stupid or else an exceedingly impudent charlatan,” “ shallow,” and “ shoddy ” are some of the wrathful reviewer’s criticisms. He refers to the author himself as a “ second-rate German writer of saleable historic fiction,” who has deceived many people with his “ glib biographies of Napoleon and Bismarck,” and predicts a falling-off of his sales and royalties in future both in England and in America, “ which will not be balanced by the sums accruing from the sales of this worse than worthless piece of ‘ psychological analysis.’ ” » * * At the end of his talk on books in “ Our Inheritance ” Air Stanley Baldwin, Great Britain’s Prime Alinister, confesses that in the life he leads, he feels and thinks, “ I have sought for peace, and I have never found it save in a nook with a book, and back to the nook some time I go. I do not know whether physical conditions will allow me to enjoy my reading as a child; whether I can balance myself on the hearthrug as I did when’ a child time alone will show. But that I hope to do before I die, and then -1 have no higher ambition than that of my cousin, Rudyard Kipling. If the first people to greet me in the next world should be good Sir Walter (Scott) and Jane (Austen) —and may I just add a little Schubert music?—who so happy as I provided always I may be allowed to sit in a corner for a real good talk with Airs Gamp.” Air Shane Leslie has been inquiring into the life of Swift after haring seen the dean’s skill in the cathedral church, of St. Patrick, Dublin. This is his. sardonic. conclusion:— It is possible in the infinite vagaries and ' combinations of minds, bodies, and souls that some human beings may' be sufficiently ..exalted above good and evil to need or possess no soul. We know Swift left a mortal soul. It is difficult to believe that ■ an immortal soul ever quitted that in- , verted bowl of . bone.-. i Elsewhere he likens him to a vulture, .'"an ecclesiastical Hamlet,” and an i i “ Irish Noah.” Dismissing the estimate of Macaulay, for wisdom he was an ■“apostate politician, a ribald priest, a ■ perjured lover,” he says:— Mysticism, enthusiasm, and Catholicism he tossed sky-high, for he would accept nothing except what lay before him. He ■ was too meticulous to be a mystic. He counted seconds and half-pence. He oozed realism more than religion. i • * * * ” Noticing in a newspaper that Air Bald!i win, the British Prime Alinister, was being blamed for not having spoken about Airs Mary Webb before the author .was dead, since lie said he read “ Preeidus Bane ” witli admiration a year before, the editor of the Bookman writes;

He does not deserve that reproach. It must be over a year ago that Mary Webb called on me with a letter she had just received from him, in which he had written as appreciatively as he spoke last month. I urged her to write, or get her publisher to write, and ask Mr Baldwin’s permission to print that letter in an advertisement; but being highly nervous, and possessing no proper business instinct, * she was horrified at the suggestion ; he might not like it, he might take offence at such a request, she could not think of such a thing; otherwise the revival of interest in her books might have come a year ago instead of now. Now the booksellers have been besieged for “ Precious Bane,” “ The Golden Arrow,” and for those books that are out of print; and I am glad to hear that it has been arranged to publish a collected gdition of her works.

Before lie was nine Air Baldwin had read aloud to an aunt the whole of “ Guy Alannering,” “ Ivanhoe,” “ Red Gauntlet,” “ Rob Roy,” “ The Pirate,” and “ Old Alortality.” Scott’s “ Tales of a Grandfather ” introduced him to history, and it was Scott who introduced him to poetry. His early reading included “ The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the knightly tales of the “ Alorte d’Arthur,” Grimm, Lamb’s “ Tales from Shakespeare,” Kingsley’s “ Heroes,” which he liked much better than Hawthorne’s “ Tanglewood Tales,” and he browsed at intervals on that fascinating miscellany, Hone's “ Every Day Book.” Then, after he began to go to a private school, he came upon Dickens: “ I reverence Dickens as in some ways the greatest genius this country ever produced ”; he rejoiced in Captain Alarryat; in “Sandford and Alerton,” “ Holiday House,” “ Harry and Lucy,” “ Rosamund and Her Terrible Charge,” and thinks, now, that Cabinet Alinisters are “ very much like Rosamund.” From “ Tom Sawyer ” and “ Huckleberry Finn ” be went on to Airs Radcliffe’s romances, to “ John Inglesant,” and later to Boswell’s Johnson, to Elia, to Thackeray, Trollope, Jane Austen—“ God bless her! ” —to Borrow, and great writers of his own and other countries, reading always for the love of the thing, making a pleasure of it, instead of a business or a scholarly exercise.