A Literary Log.

Southland Times, Issue 19500, 14 March 1925, Page 11

A Literary Log.

By

“Iota.”

ANOTHER MARK SABRE.—There is much in “Harbottle” by John Hargrave to remind one of “If Winter Comes”, though the two novels are sufficiently unlike to clear the younger author of any suspicion of plagiarism. John Christian Harbottle is a man whom Mark Sabre would have understood and liked, because he has many of the qualities which, though they may be classed as weaknesses in this dogmatic age of oure, made Hutchinson’s hero so human and so lovable. Lake Sabre, Harbottle is a gentle soul, caught between the hammer and the anvil of disastrous circumstance and almost crushed by the unequal adventure. In the face of quick, terrible blows he goes down, but never loses the intense humanity which allows him to see the world as it really is—not as the cynics ‘paint it. Hargrave, the author, too has peculiarities cf style, an excitement, which recalls the Hutchinson method without being like it. In the opening, Harbottle, the editor of the Evening Echo, an insignificant and failing London daily, is struck by the death of his youngest son at the front, on top of which comes his own entry into the forces and an inglorious service in Egypt. He returns to England long after the Armistice to find that his remaining son has died of injuries received through the accidental explosion of a mine after the war was over, and that his wife Rachel, freed of the restraint which the existence of her sons put on her, has gone off with the man she really loves. Harbottle returns to an empty house and faces the facts in his own way: A hopeless dawn, with Harbottle tinkering about with black fingers in a fireless grate, reshuffling the damp newspaper, and picking out pieces of coal. His home come to ruin. His two sons dead. His wife—gone. Emily gone. John Christian Harbottle stricken and deserted, trying to set alight a damp copy of his own newspaper. A young major. Rachel with a young major—somewhere or other. Hotels. A strong man's love and protection. “Damm, the damp paper.” He gave it up. Breakfast—food, what about food ? Milk—would the milkman come? Of course not—no one would come. No baker. No newspaper. No anything. The postman might come. What time do the shops open Seven thirty or eight ? Doubtful. Coffee. His mind switched back to that breakfast when the telegram arrived. Ccld coffee, “Killed.” But Rachel wasn’t here now for breakfast. No one was here. There wouldn’t be any breakfast. In that scene you get a Harbottle and the Hargrave method—the sharp, excited way of chasing the confused mind of the crushed Harbottle. And with a great burden on his back John Christian Harbottle goes into the wilderness. He steps on to the road and tramps about his England meeting with many people and seeking he knows not what, until at last there comes to him the New Idea—the mission. Out of the welter of strange adventurings, in which he meets by accident Cynthia the girl who loved his younger son, he divines the need of the world as the discarding of petty selfishness and materialism. Harbottle meets and comes under a multitude of philosophies, but all the w'hile he is seeking the solution of the great muddle of life. To Cynthia he shows his new possession, bis symbol—Mercator’s Projection—and Cynthia, the believer in the New Patriotism, understands. Harbottle sees it as—“ World Patriotism as opposed to all the little Harbottlish patriotisms which keep things apart”—and the fight against “Our Great Sin of Sloth.” Everybody is to work in the world and to work for it. Harbottle is very happy planning with this understanding Cynthia who feeds his body as well as his mind and gets him fit for the evangel. And then comes another burden for his shoulders. He falls in love with Cynthia and finds that she has already acknowledged to herself that she loves him. He tells her she is young and strong and he is middle-aged and broken, but she simply scatters his excuses with “Fool, what has that to do with it?” But Hargrave has not done with his Harbottle yet—Rachel’s letter arrives and the dutiful Harbottle goes back to her, but determined to do his bit in the New Duty, which is to save the world. An operation for appendicitis gives him a glimpse of the great teachers of the past discussing the world and its worries—he sees man’s mind thinking and then returns to consciousness, but to die with a globe clutched in his hand, — the symbol cf the Patriotism, which never really evolves because Harbottle is taken before he can make anything known. Hargraxe. through Harbottle, has tried to •icture the confusion of post-war mankind, the eagerness to climb on to a higher plane and the terrible burden which the pre-war days and the war have put on man’s back. It is the story of an unrealised Hope and yet it is hepeful, largely because one becomes infected by Harbottle’s supreme confidence. Hargrave’s book is a sincere effort, a distinctive effort and it is sure to be popular. Since April last year it has run into four editions in the Old Country and one can confidently expect a warm demand for it here. Why? Because of the qualities which made “If Winter Comes” a great seller. The humanity of Harbottle, with his queer, nervous manners, is a potent factor and some of the snapshots which stud the book are really excellent. This is an astonishingly effective first novel in spite of the extravagant style which now and again seems to be too overwhelming, and it will prepare me for something infinitely better when Hargrave takes his next bow to the public. •‘Harbottle” is published by Duckworth, my copy coming through Hyndman’s.

PIECES CF PINERO.—It is fashionable nowadays to condemn the plays of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero as the artificial products of a period in which artifice was the chief instrument of the playwright, but an occasional revival of a Pinero serves to give the superior critic a nasty jolt and to remind the play goers that if Pinero was artificial he was at least diverting. With one or two exceptions, the Pinero plays were always coldly brilliant and burdened excessively with etiquette. For the most part they are comedies of manners with epigram and aphorism scattered freely in the dialogue spoken by characters which rarely if ever became real. There were occasions, too, when Pinero employed thinly disguised variants of ancient pantomime wheezes for the purpose of ekeing out his comedy, and though G. B. Shaw was not above borrowing of this kind, the practice cannot be excused even by the critics who place Shaw on the top Yungs of the dramatic ladder. These absurd borrowings, it must be admitted, belong to the later period of Pinero’s activities when only his playcraft saved him from extinction. It is in the mid-career plays that he is seen at his best and it is largely from these works that R. O. Blackman has drawn extracts for his “Enchanted Moments,” a collection of some

of the most striking portions of the dialogue which scintillated in all of the Pinero comedies. Pinero was never dull and he had a habit of compressing some startling revelations of his knowledge of human nature in his well turned lines. He quotes effectively, as this extremely interesting book shows, and I am not sure that much of his material is pot made vastly more momentous by being divorced from the text, where at times it put too great a strain on one’s valuation of the characters who had to produce the ideas. “Enchanted Moments” is full of good things, full of biting sentences and shrewd shafts. It will be read with chuckles and with a sense of satisfaction. To-day the dialogue in plays is rarely quotable, it rarely betrays the wit of a cultured mind, and so “Enchanted Moments” comes to one happily. I can see myself returning again and again to enjoy the pungency of the old Pinero, who in spite of the passage of the years, has not lost his piquancy. This excellent anthology is published by Angus, and Robertson of Sydney, whence came copy. WALTER de la MARE.—There is one sense in which this poet has never grown up. and we may, if we please, recapture our own childhood as we wander with him through his enchanted garden. And if it be true, as John Masefield says, that “the days that make us happy make us wise,” it is blessed wisdom that should be ours at the end of our ramble. For see what a delightful place it is! Not one of your opulent, gorgeous gardens, with insolently wellgroomed lawns and beds that teem with precious nurselings; but a much homelier region, and one of more elusive and delicate charm. Boundaries there are, for order and safe going, but they are hidden away in dancing foliage; and there are leafy paths which seem to wind into infinity, and corners where mystery lurks. Some one is always sitting there, In the little green orchard; When you are most alone, All but the silence gone, Some one is waiting and watching there, In the little green orchard. Flowers grow in the sunny spaces, and all the wild things that children love—primrose and pimpernel darnel, and thorn: Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet, Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit; Brown bee orchids, and Peals of Bells ; Clover, burnet, and thyme. It is mostly a shadowy place, however, not chill and glomy, but arched with slender trees, through whose thin leafage slant the warm fingers of the sun, picking out clear, quickly-moving patterns upon the grass. The air is soft, the Light is as mellow as a harvest moon, and the sounds of the outer world are subdued almost to silence. Nothing loud or strenuous disturbs the tranquility ; only the remote voices of happy children and friendly beasts and kind old people. Wonder lives here, but not fear; smiles but not laughter; tenderness but not passion. And the presiding genius of the spot is the poet’s “Sleeping Cupid,” sitting in the shade with his bare feet deep in the grass and the dew slowly gathering upon his curls: a cool and lovesome elf, softly dreaming of beauty in a quiet place.—Mary C. Sturgeon, in “Studies of Contemporary Poets.”

THE COMING OF POETS.—There are poets who have written only one inspired poem, others who have written only two or three. It is hard to say whether it is a greater miracle that Shirley should have written “The Glories of our Blood and State.” or that, having written it, he should have written nothing else in the same kind. Mr Hardy, in a recent preface, reminds critics of Coleridge's proof that a versification of any length neither can nor ought to be all poetry, “but critics cannot help being astonished when on reading some of the most deservedly famous short lyrics, they find that that even these are not all poetry. Many a poem has won immortality merely because it begins beautifully. Waller cannot maintain the full beauty of “Go, lovely rose,” even through four verses. In the last line of “My Soul, there is a country,” Vaughan suddenly droops from imagination to exhortation. Byron’s “She walks in beauty, like the night,” never again recovers the magic of its opening lines. Coleridge's and Wordsworth’s poems are full of examples of the same intermittency of inspiration. Both “Tintern Abbey” and “The Leech Gatherer” contain many a dim line. In Tennyson and Swinburne, again, bright light and dull light alternate with extraordinary suddenness, and Sir Algernon Methuen's reduction of Swinburne's “Garden of Prosperine” to three verses seems to me to be a just criticism of the transient inspiration of a beautiful poem. And poetry is as capricious in visiting nations as in visiting men and women. It makes a royal progress through one country rather than another, and we can account for this no more than for a season of fine weather. We can, no doubt, invent explanations, but, when we have invented all **e can, the coming of Shakespeare and the poets who surrounded him is as amazing an event as the appearance of a new solar system.—Robert Lynd. Introduction to “Shakespeare to Hardy.” A Methuen, Compiler.

A BUNDLE OF SPLINTERS.—"A Saturday Life” is the title which Miss RadclyffeHall has given her next book, published this month.

A firm of publishers has told the Publishers’ Circular that the money spent on a three-coloured jacket for a novel, generally speaking, exceeds the cost of the paper for printing a first edition of 1,000 copies. Mr W. L. Courtney, who has resigned his post as Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, has written his reminiscences in “The Passing Hour,” which Messrs Hutchinson are publishing shortly. Apologies will be demanded by “The Wasp” of the great American nation. The Dr. James Moffatt whose translation of the Bible excited his rage is not an American He is Professor of History in the United Free Church College of Glasgow.

Thomas Hardy, now eighty-five years uf age, is bringing out another book of poems. It is announced that the five best sellers of 1924 in London were : ‘The Green Hat,” by Michael Arlen; “After the Verdict,” by Robert Hichens; “The House of the Arrow,” by A. F. W. Mason; “The White Monkey,” by John Galsworthy; and “The Reckless Lady,” by Sir Philip Gibbs.

“The Divine Lady,” by E. Barrington, the love-story of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, which is already in its ninth edition in America, v to be published in Britain by Harrap early this year. Emma Goldman is said to be writing a book on “Creative Women of Central Europe.,”