A Literary Log.

Southland Times, Issue 18945, 19 May 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

A Literary Log.

(BY “IOTA.”)

THE GLORY OF EGYPT.—When Lord Carnanon and Mr Howard Carter penetrated the tomb of Tutankhamen, the Pharoah who took the first step in undoing the work of the heretical rulers of Egypt, the world outside of the archaeologists rubbed its eyes and proceeded to discover how little it knew of Egypt and Egyptology. The excavators of Tutankhamen’s tomb brought to light an immense amount of funeral furniture, and has.opened to the Egyptologists a new lot of pictures and heiroglyphics to be solved, but the most important aspect of the discovery is that it will clear up a number of doubts concerning the great heresy which culminated in Akhnaton ito adopt the spelling used by Mr Weigall). Most of the information we possess about Akhnaton came from the discovery of his body in 1907 resting in the tomb that was made for Queen Tiy’s mother. Mr Arthur Weigall, who was then Inspector-General of Antiquities for the Egyptian Government, was one of the party which first penetrated into this tomb after the body of the heretical Pharoah was .deposited there and from the scenes on the walls and the heiroglyphics he was able to build up "The Life and Times of Akhnaton.” Now that the tomb of Tutankhamen, who turned from the Aton heresy back to the Amen religion, has been invaded, that work is to be extended and amplified. It is too soon for Mr Weigall to say much concerning Tutankhamen, but in the meantime he has done something to prepare us for the flood of Egyptology which is sure to burst on us before long. Between the covers of “The Glory of the Pharoahs” he has collected a number of articles which form an excellent introduction to Egyptology from afar. Mr Weigall writes with the authority of the man who has been on the ground, and he knows how to breathe life and liveliness into what might easily be a dusty and dry subject. It will be remembered that some objections were raised to the "violation” of these royal tombs. Mr Weigall in a fine chapter “The Morality of Excavation,” put the case for the tomb excavator in forceful and convincing fashion—one of his strongest points being the unanswerable argument that these tombs have been plundered in the past and are being plundered to-day unless they happen to be guarded. It is better that scientific men should carry out this work under supervision than that robbers should be left to smash the •mummies or to leave them to do service as Aunt Sallies for Egypt's small boys. Mr Weigall includes a chapter on “The Preservation of Antiquities” which has the smell of the war about it still, though it is an excellent piece of argument for archaeology, and does not fit properl}' into the pages of this work, which otherwise is Egypt for those who are not Egyptians. He sketches briefly but with a certain pen the main points of the period to which Akhnaton and Tutankhamen belong and he also manages to put the ancient Egyptian before us as a human being, very much alive and full of what the modern American would call "pep.” It is surprising to find that the ancient Egyptians had their drink problem and their “wowsers,” for Mr Weigall quotes one of ihe maxims of Ami brought back to us by the excavators:

Do not put thyself in a beer house. An evil thing are words reported as coming from thy mouth when thou dost not know that they have been said by thee. When thou falleet they limbs are broken, and nobody givest thee a hand Thy comrades in drink stand up saying: "Away with this drunken man.” In writing of the temperament of the ancient Egyptians, the author gives us many arresting pictures which serve to give a new view of the excavator and of the history he is recovering for the world. The old Egyptians were not morose, but were Light-hearted and they liked to "eat, drink and be merry” before going to the Underworld. In this chapter Mr Weigall quotes from a remarkable inscription on the tomb of the wife of a high priest, who leaves advice for her husband: O, brother, husband, friend, thy desire to drink and to eat has not ceased. Therefore be drunken, enjoy the love of women—make holiday. Follow thy desire by night and by day. Put not care within thy heart. Lol are not these the years of thy life upon earth? For as for the Underworld, it is a land of slumber and heavy darkness, a resting place for those who have passed within. Each sleepeth there in his own room, they never wake to see their fellows, they behold not their fathers nor their mothers, their heart, is careless of their wives and children. This is an unusual view, and, of course, may have been inscribed at the husband’s orders after the lady’s death, but such things as those left the ancient Egyptians out of the order of mere mummies. It is • striking fact, too, that among the hymns to Aton found on the walls of these tombs are verses almost identical with Psalm CIV., so that one cannot avoid the suggestion that they have no relationship. Mr Weigall presents fc.r us the story nf Horemheb, who restored the looses sustained in the reigns of Akhnaton and his successors and summarises the report of unfortunate Wenamon who went to Syria for timber about 1113 B.C. It is impossible to go through Mr Weigall’s fascinating pages without a sense of awe. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians lived as a cultured people and now the archaeologists are discovering them for us in the tombs of Thebes. The subject is so alluring that one must necessarily pass from the pages of the "Glory of the Pharaohs'* to a work dealing more fully with the subject, but I doubt if any one could put these stories of an ancient people so vividly before us. Therefore, I will welcome the chance to read his “Life and Times of Akhnaton.” Mr Weigall has done signal service to Egyptology in this collection of articles, because he has revealed to the public that it is a subject full of romance and beauty. “The Glory of ♦he Pharaohs” is published by Thornton Butterworth, London, whence came my copy.

SYMONDS AND MARGOT.—When Mar got Asquith’s Autobiography was published In the United States it contained references to her visit to John Addington Symonds, I irith some remarks that caused pain to admirers and friends of R.L.S. Those passages had been cut out of the English ; edition and were not intended for publics ’ Von. In Symonds’s "Letters and Papers” which have been published it is interesting to find mention of this visit. Symonds did not like Stevenson when he met him, regarding him as uneducated, superficial and third rate, and had little sympathy for him in his illness, an illness due to tuberculosis, from which Symonds also •uffered. On November 26, 1886 Symonds

Invercargill, May 19. | wrote of Margot : “I am stupid—having ' spent three days in tobogganing up and down vale in various directions with Margot Tennant, introducing her also into Wirtschaften, where peasants smoke and drink—and where she drank and smoked. She is a mad girl with a pocketful of familiar letters from Gladstone, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold,” and a month later he was writing of her: “She is a wonderful companion. I have never seen a woman like her. And the corresponds with all sorts of people. Letters are always coming from Gladstone, Jowett,. and Prince of Wales, Arthur Balfour, Lords Rosebery, Granville and Pembroke, the Lyttletons and innumerable ladies of society, all of which have things of interest in them. She keeps her friends up to the mark.” Still later he writes that though Margot keeps tongues wagging, she is “not really bad.” LATEST MAGAZINES.—A batch of magazines, the latest of the popular varieties, has come to hand from Noble’s. My Magazine, conducted by the energetic and informative Mee, contains an interesting article on Ahknaton, the father-in-law of Tutankhamen, profusely illustrated. Briish birds and a host of other subjects also receive attention. The Detective Magazine is full of thrills and combine fact and fiction judiciously. The article on the Indian Police is exceedingly interesting and gives one an insight into a splendid force’s very difficult work. The “colour” magazines, Red, Green and Yellow contain the usual assortment of light fiction, grave and gay, and in this excellent company we may include the Corner Magazine, which is well up to their standard. From the editorial offices comes the latest “Aussie.” I have not space enough to do justice to this publication, but I must say that the New Zealand section grows apace in size and excellence and I am pleased to note that includes one article written by a journalist well known in Southland.

A LONG FRIENDSHIP.—It was in the year 1877—but exactly on what day in it I cannot say, having, as before observed, burnt my diaries—that I first met Mr Austin Dobson. I had been living out of London for nearly ten years before, and had made few new acquaintances in that city, having just returned to establish myself there, as it turned out, for nearly another twenty. But already for some time, owing chiefly to the then not long established Academy and to the Savile Club, a more or less loosely connected literary society—far inferior in quality, of course, to the greater ones of former times and of the present day, but somewhat akin in genius and not utterly contemptible in species—had come intcF being. I was asked to meet Mr Dobson at dinner, and we, either liked each other well enough or dissembled our dislike completely enough to walk home together from Pall Mall to Kensington. And the friendship, or the simulation thereof, lasted forty-four years. . . . In this long acquaintanceship I can remember not merely no quarrel—but no single instance of that uncomfortable reflection, “I wish he hadn’t said that or done this” which one’s friends sometimes suggest to one, and which, no doubt, one sometimes suggests to one’s friends. That he was rather sensitive to unfavourable criticism I think very likely; to tell the honest truth, I have yet to meet the man of letters who is wholly indifferent to it. . . It is by no means uncommon—almost every one of the craft, even if himself immune, must have known it in others—for men tn think that, because they have touched a subject or an author, they have established a “claim in the strictest mining sense, and nobody else may make or meddle. You might follow, or accompany, or (which is, perhaps, most unforgivable of all I anticipate Dobson in any matter without his being in the least aggrieved; and whatever he knew about Fielding or Walpole, Hogarth or Bewick, was, whether published or unpublished, heartily at the service of fellow-students.—George Saintbury, in “A Scrap Book.”

THREE WRITERS.—St. John Ervine in “Some Impressions of My Elders” (Allen and Unwin) has given some frank opinions on eight famous writers, “A.E.,” Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy. Bernard Shaw, George Moore, H. G. Wells, and W. B. Yeats. Here are three views he gives. in his sketches. The first is of Arnold Bennett: Some dullards have exclaimed despairingly of Mr Bennett, because cf what they called his trivial and commonplace interests as revealed in that enthralling book “Things that have interested me,” failing utterly to discern that it is his interest in these days which is so infallible a sign of his zest for life. Anyone can be interested in the Alps, but it is only a superbly romantic man who can be absorbed in Wolverhampton. Then he approaches G. K. C. in this way: His sendee to us is that when we are inclined to run frantically after the superman, he reminds us of the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen, reminding them that even a superman can be a fool. His picture of Shaw contains some surprising fines: It is my purpose here to insist that Mr Shaw is a shy man with a large element of the gawky schoolboy in him, so that he is awkward and embarrassed when he comes suddenly into the presence of strangers without having been H arned that strangers are to be encountered. SOME CHI PS.—"Midwinter” is the title of a new story by Mr John Buchan, which Messrs Hodder and Stoughton are publishing. London is to have a new popular literary weekly, the name of which, will be “Cassell's Meekly.” Mr Newman Flower is editor-in-chief and Messrs H. M. Tomlinson and Edmund Blunden, the poet, are members of his staff.

Joseph Ilergesheimer, the American novelist, says that, if he u r ere marooned on a desert island, he would taken ten blank books and fill them with his own writings. Edison chooses the following in the same circumstances: The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the “Outline of History." Mendeleff’s "Chemistry,” Karl Marx’s “Economics,” “Les Miserables,” McLeod’s “Economics,” Oswald’s “Practice of Medi cine,” Daniel’s "Physics,” Ix)ngfellow J s "Evangeline,” and Kent’s “Mechanical Engineering." Hergesheimer’s idea is very human and ’s selection of the E.B. strikes n d, though it must be

confessed that he would want a fair sized shelter on his desert island for his library. Mr Murray’s Two-Shilling Novels Library already numbers seventy-three volumes, and it is shortly to be enriched by four new volumes, Stanley Weyman’s "The Great House”; "Master and Maid,” by L. Alien Harker; "The Fourth Dimension,” by Horace A. Vachell; and “The Farm of Girdlestone,” by A. Conan Doyle.