BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3912, 5 March 1929, Page 73

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

“Esperantist,”’ Dunedin, writes: In last week’s issue of the Otago Witness under the heading “ Books and Bookmen,” in the “ Literature and Life ” section I notice a paragraph which states that “Dr Ludwig Zamenhoff, the inventor of Esperanto, has just celebrated his seventieth birthday in Vienna.” This is a mistake. Dr Ludwig L. Zamenhoff, the inventor of Esperanto died in 1917, in his fifty-eighth year. Perhaps the item of news may relate to some member pf the Zamenhoff family.

A correspondent writes to the Spectator:—

The mention of " Alph, the sacred river,” from Coleridge’s “ Kubla Khan,” recently leads one to ask why a great poet, with his presumably delicate ear, was led to choose a name that sounds more fitting for a street arab than a sacred river. If that was the name of the river, then he could have left it out. A little further on in the same -poem we get “As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing.” “Kubla Khan ” was composed in 1797, and I suppose that even as long ago as that a necessary undergarment was known as “ pants.” If so, the line can hardly be regarded as a very successful one in a poem, which, for som'e reason or other, is so much admired.

An interesting relic of Charles Kingsley recently came to light in Liverpool. It is the original chart kept by Kingsley pn his voyage front Liverpool to New Vork in the White Star liner Oceanic, the company’s pioneer steamer. On the back of the chart Kingsley wrote his log of the voyage, and the document has been placed in a hinged frame, so that both sides may be inspected, and placed in the lounge of the Majestic. Kingsley’s considerable knowledge of naivgation manifests itself in the language of- the log. The document was found in a second-hand book shop. Accompanied by his daughter, Rose, Kingsley sailed on January 30, 1874, and reached New York on February 11. The Jog, as intimated in a letter addressed by Kingsley to his wife immediately on his arrival at New Tork, had been compiled for the instruction of the author’s younger son, Grenville, whose name is mentioned in the text. The voyage took place after the publication of “Westward Ho!”

■ The last has not been heard of the death of Marlowe. In 1925 Dr Leslie Hotson, of Harvard, wrote “ The Death of Christopher Marlowe,” in which he proved from official documents that the poet had been slain by Ingram Frizer. Dr Hotson gave the verdict of the coroner’s jury that Frizer acted in selfdefence, but he suggested that Marlowe's death had been compassed in furtherance of the .work of Elizabeth’s secret service. Mr F. S. Boas, Shakespearian scholar and thp author of a number of books rn English literature, now announces that he intends to publish “ a small book which will uphold the at present unfashionable view that the verdict of the coroner’s jury at Deptford on June 1, 1593, was right, and tltat Ingram Frizer killed Christopher Marlowe in self-de-fence.” Until Dr Hotson wrote his book the accepted belief was that Marlowe had been killed by a serving .nan named Francis Archer in a tavern brawl at Deptford.

Prices paid to popular poets in the early years of the 19tli century were remarkably high even compared with the stuns obtainable in these days of much larger markets and lower money values. This is made clear by Mr A. S. Collins in his new book. “The Profession of Letters.” Mr Collins says that when “ Mannion ” was only begun Constable offered Scott £lO5O for it, and “The Lady -of the Lake ” fetched £4OOO. Byron’s prices from Murray, though for long he would not take the money for liimaelf, were little inferior. Beginning with £6OO for the first two cantos of “ Childe Harold,” he received an average of 500 guineas for such tales as “ The Corsair ” and “ Mazeppa,” and obtained £2OOO for the third canto of “ Childe Harold,” £1575 for the first .two cantos of “Don Juan,” with the “Ode to Venice,’ and in 1821 received £2710 for the rights of “ Sardanapalus,” “ The Two Foscari,” and “ Cain.”

Mr Frederic Whyte, in his memoir, “ William Heinemann,” tells this story of Sarah Grand’s most popular book:—

The " Heavenly Twins ” appeared about the time Mrs Ormiston Chant was carrying on her crusade against the London music halls, especially the old Empire. Heinemann walking in the Strand one day, saw a man selling fiinny-looking dolls, in short paper frocks, to the cry: “One penny for the Empire lidy! ” One penny for Mrs Ormiston Chant! Another man was having much less luck with a tray of bladders which, when blown out, took the form of a fat-faced baby. Presently Heinemann had an idea. " Your business is bad, my friend,” he said to the less successfull street vendor. “ I will advise you in your affairs. Hold up two of your beautiful babies together, and offer them for 2d as “ The Heavenly Twins.” The man did so, and with triumphant results. * * *

“You write a book and enjoy it, and there’s no further trouble,” said Mr A. A. Milne, in an interview. “ The reputation of your previous books helps it along; you know exactly when it will he published; you are collaborating with nobody; and there is nothing to prevent the public from forming its own opinion about the thing. But with a play it’s different. Your pleasure hi it ends at the moment you write the word “curtain,” and you are never free from anxiety until its last night. You may have to wait years before you can get it produced, whatever your reputation. You can never be sure of the cast you want. The production is neces-

sarily a collaboration between you and the producer. And in a week the play has to establish itself as a success, against all the adverse chances of criticism, weather, politics, shortage of money, rival attractions, and so forth; whereas a book can wait for the public to discover it, and make its name six months afterwards.”

Mr Humbert Wolfe, critic, has, it seems, been “ caught out ” by a critic. Reviewing in the Sunday Times, London, “ Swinburne’s Selected Poems,” with an introduction by Mr Wolfe, this critic says:

It is difficult to see how any man with an ear for literature, any sense of style, could attribute to Kipling the words which Mr Wolfe attributes to him In this introduction. Mr Wolfe says that “ Swinburne has authority; he sings, and he has the poet’s last loneliness—Kipling’s ' loneliness of wing.’ ” This last beautiful phrase is not, of course, Mr Kipling’s, but is taken from a comparatively unknown poem, " The Lost Ideal -* the World,” by a writer named Eric Sutherland Robertson. He is now almost forgotten, but he deserves to be remembered for that one last phrase of a vision from the Gate of Paradise :

" 0 God, what was She, there, without the Gate— Sad in such beauty Heaven seemed incomplete? Drawn by a nameless star’s young whisperings. With hands stretched forth as if to pass by Fate She drifted on, so near Thy mercy-seat, Blind, and in all the loneliness of wings.” But could anything on earth be less like Kipling? Mrs Browning, even Rosetti, if you like;’ but Kipling! Really, some of these- young critics must begin to read a little. * * * Miss Dorothy Sayers, in an introduction to “ Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror,” which she has edited, writes thus of the relation of reader to writer: —

The mystery-monger’s principal difficulty is that of varying his surprises. “ You know my methods, Watson,” says the detective, and it is only too painfully true. The beauty of Watson was, of course, that after 30 years he still did not know Holmes’s methods; but the average reader is sharper-witted. After reading half a dozen stories by one author he is sufficiently advanced in Dupin’s psychological method to see with the author’s eyes. He knows that when Mr Austin Freeman drowns somebody in a pond full of watersnails there will be something odd and localised about those snails; he knows that, when one of Mr Will Croft’s characters bas a castiron abili, the alibi will turn out to have holes in it; he knows that if Father Knox casts suspicion on a Papist, the Papist will turn out to be innocent; instead of detecting the murderer, he is engaged in detecting the writer. That is why he gets the impression that the writer’s later books are seldom or never "up to ” his earlier efforts. He has become married to the writers' muse, and marriage has destroyed the mystery.

In recording the death of Sir John Murray, the Daily Telegraph, London, describes some of the rooms of 50 Albemarle street, the headquarters of the house of Murray, the scene of a number of interesting happenings:—

It was in the room upstairs that Scott and Byron were introduced to each other, spent two hours in close conversation, and then, each of them lame, helped one another downstairs. Nine years later in the same room, after the “ Pilgrim of Eternity had run his course, a very different company assembled for a very different purpose—that of burning Lord Byron’s “ Memoirs,” which took place after a stormy altercation between Hobhouse—representing the executors —and Tom Moore, which nearly led to a duel. Flames never licked and consumed the pages of a more assured “ bestseller." Irving, to whom Moore had shown them, said they were “ quite unpublishable.” Nevertheless, nothing is more certain than that they would have been published long before this had they not gone up in smoke on that May morning. Murray behaved most handsomely over the transaction. He sacrificed a fortune, as a friend said, “to preserve public decency and private tranquility.” Yet there had once been mention of a Barabbas !

In concluding his address at the annual dinner of the Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers, Sir James Barrie, the president, said of Thomas Hardy:—

I suppose many of you have been reading the noble biography [by Mrs Hardy] of which half has just appeared. There is a passage of two or three lines in it that may be more revealing than anything else in the book, that in which we are told how from his earliest years he disliked being touched by anyone. In his youth he used to carry in his pockets two dumpy volumes of verse by one whose sympathetic shade perhaps pressed so close to him that day that there were two on the gate. There are a hundred, a thousand, pencil marks on those two volumes that look now like love messages from the .young poet of one age to the young poet of a past age. What in human experience can be more stainless? I think Hardy’s first words in the Elysian Fields were, “ Which is Shelley?” and that then the hand fell upon his shoulder for which he had so long been waiting. Perhaps., those pencil marks on the books are the scrappings of a skylark, trying to bring those two together, and succeeding at last — . . . the lark that Shelley heard And made immortal through times to be, Though it only lived like another bird And knew not its immortality. Lived its meek life, then one day fell, A little ball of feather and bone;

And how it perished, when piped farewell. And where it wastes, are alike unknown. A little bird, twice immortal, and in its end more fortunate than they.

Mr C. C. R. Carter, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, says of a remarkable sale at Sotheby’s, London, that many students of literature felt that the most piquant item was a letter, written by Thackeray not long before he died in 1863, which realised £450. This communication was addressed to the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, the editor of the Quarterly, and generally dubbed “ Dr Primrose.” In the first sentence Thackeray expresses a fear that he has been refused as a member of the Literary Club, adding, “ I think sometimes I am deservedly unpopular, and in some cases I rather like it, for why should I want to be liked by Jack and Tom?” Then follows this remarkable passage:

Not long ago I went to the stalls at Drury Lane with Robert Bell, and to us came in the next stalls, Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Dickens and I shook hands and didn't say one single word to each other. And if he read my feelings on my face, as such a clever fellow would, he knows now that I have found him out. Forster was the man who cut me because he fancied I meant him in one of the Roundabout Papers. ... I know the Thackeray those fellows have imagined to themselves. . . . Ah, if I dared but put all these fellows into a book ! And suppose they put me into another—giving their views of your humble servant? Those books would be queer reading.

This shaking ’of the hands in guarded silence at the theatre was obviously a sequel of the unfortunate Garrick Club controversy in which Dickens had espoused the cause of Edmund Yates versus Thackeray, and one would rather remember that afternoon at the Athenaeum a few days before Thackeray died, when he and Dickens accidentally met and spontaneously shook hands — for the last time.

_At a sale at Sotheby’s, London, in November the most important volume offered was the suppressed English edition of Rudyard Kipling’s “Letters of Marque,” Vol. I (all printed), in original wrappers, 1891. With the exception of three, the whole edition of 15,000 copies of this work was destroyed. The bidding opened at £5O, and rose rapidly to £lO5O, at which price there was silence in the room. The auctioneer (Mr C. G. Des Graz) then announced that he had a commission for £lBOO. No further bid was given, and the hammer fell at this sum. The name of the buyer was given as Mr Menkin, an American collector. Previous to the sale of this work Messrs Sotheby sold to Mr Quaritch a copy of “ Schoolboy Lyrics,” 1881, for £ll5O. The particular attraction of this volume was that it had on the top wrapper a pen-and-ink design by the author. It depicts the title “Poems, 1881,” written in a scroll in the centre and surrounded by devils and grotesque figures, flowers, leaves, etc., with Kipling’s monogram at the foot. The “ Lyrics ” were printed for private circulation only at Lahore. Following this came a copy of “ Echoes by Two AVliters (Rudyard and Beatrice Kipling),” inscribed “ from Ruddy, Sept., 1884,” which made £450 (Maggs) ; a first edition of “ Plain Tales from the Hills,” 1888, with the inscription, “J.M.R. from R.K.,” £125 (Quaritch); the original manuscript of “ With Scindia to Delhi,” 21 four-line stanzas written in black ink with variant lines in red, £550 (Spencer). On the back of page 1 of this manuscript Mr Kipling had written out the “ Irish Rebel Song,” which he used in the “Mutiny of the Mavericks.” “ With Scindia to Delhi ” was published in “ Barrack-Room Ballads ” in 1892.