A BOOKFELLOW’S GOSSIP.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 959, 8 March 1917, Page 2

A BOOKFELLOW’S GOSSIP.

One of the easiest and pleasantest ways ,of realising the psychic changes wrought by the war (writes “The Daily Chronicle”), is to compare Arthur Fetterless’s “Gog” with his frivolous pre-war fiction, “Willie in the Isle of Man.” The novelist has done, or is doing, his “bit,” and the artistic result is excellent. Gog is a young Highlander who goes to the war not only as a “sub” but as the knight of a lovable Scottish lassie. The novel is simply and graphically tragic, but it is not harrowing, being too well supplied with interesting detail and characterisation to pin one’s mind to an individual fatality. The novel gives one a fakly representative picture of practical training for war in Great Britain, and of what is meant by trench warfare and being in the trenches. In the author’s 1 Hli chapter are some pages [so vivacious and well-knit that they can be read aloud with the absolute certainly of enlivening the average English-rcader.

The American publisher of "Mr. Britling" writes to a London friend that he has already sold a hundred thousand copies of the book there, and that he hopes to sell as many more. We could never compete with America in a "boom," because the way there is to buy a new novel direct, while here we largely borrow it from (he circulating libraries. This gives a novel a second innings as a reprint at a popular price, and the reprint has been having an extraordinary war vogue. "F am living on my reprints," said a well known novelist the other day, after the lament, "1 have been so unsettled since the war began that I haven't been able to do any new work."

Tl is said that of our leading novel- ! ists there are but two or three who I avoid Ihe crass error of "whom" and "who." A writer in the "Athemcum" says thai lie lias kept a black list, which al present does not contain Mr Maurice Hewlett, Sir Conan I Doyle, or Anthony Hope. "Between j each" (with the authority of Cole--1 ridge and Mr Kipling) is frequent. Sir Gilbert Parker lias a character ; who "laid down" to (ire his ride; ; Miss Dorothea Coiners (lo whom he everlasting thanks for "The Slrayings of Sandy") speaks in her last book of a certain rock "where j the seagulls were accustomed to rest ion." Finally, a very learned proI fessor at Oxford divides an army

info "two equal halves"—as if there can he unequal halves, or more than two of them.

According to an English paper the vanity and intellectual snobbishness of Mr Bernard Shaw find expression in his reply to the Drama League of America, which lately invited him to visit the Unite 3 States. Mr Shaw's response was:—

"1 cannot help asking myself whether it is not now too late. Ij could have come when I was young j and beautiful. I could have comej when I was mature and capable. I] did not. lam now elderly and doddering. Could I live up to my reputation? Have I any right to bring my white hairs and my crowsfeet to blast the illusions of the young women who send me my own photographs of 30 years ago to be autographed, and to address American audiences with a fictitious clearness of articulation that is due wholly to my dentist? If I were a modest man 1 should not think of such things. Being notoriously a vain one, they daunt me. Authors, unlike good little children, should be heard, not seen. I shall leave America its ideal unshatlered." One can almost hear G. B.'s chuckle when he reads this English paper.

Friepds of the late Rupert Brooke, who died of blood-poisoning on a hospital steamer in the Dardanelles, are gathering together the scanty literary remains of the poet and having them published. The latest is "John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama." This was the late poet's dissertation for his fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. He contends that the circle of Webster was a peculiar and abnormal sphere peopled by morbid beings, adding, "A play of Webster's is full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots." He overlooks the spiritual and tragic greatness of the Duchess of Malfi, and even of the evil characters in "The Beautiful White Devil" and "The Devil's Law-case." "Nevertheless," says the "Athenaeum," "this is a thoughtful and penetrating study, that helps us lo understand the greatness of this exalted poet, who stands apart from every one of his contemporaries, and approaches most of all in his frequent sublimity of conception." II would seem that Rupert Brooke will become the centre of a "cult."

The following appeal to Ireland appeared in a recent English daily:— Ireland awake! Hark to the clarion call! Hise for thy life, shake oil thy slumber's daze, Wake ere too late!- The roof-trcc is ablaze, The Hun is hammering at the outer wall. Traitors within arc lurking in thy hall: ('.case sullen murmnrings of long dead days. Arise and smile the savage foe who slays The babe and holds the wile in brutal thrall ! Fair flowering cradle of my mother's race, Ireland mavoiirncen lilt the rusty shield, Sulk not. like dark Achilles in his pride, But send thy martial sons to keep the place They've won, and prove upon the battlefield Thy right to Nationhood by England's side I —M. S. I\

II was in prison (says a correspondent in the "Daily Chronicle") that O. Henry's genius was awakened, that he passed, as Professor Smith puts it, from journalism to literature. Previously he had been a writer of light verse and gay paragraphs, the editor of a humorous weekly called the "Rolling Stone," and later the writer of Ihe "Some Postscripts" column in Hie "Houston Post." But in the penitentiary be began to make short stories out of the experiences related to him by his fellow convicts and lo sell these stories to the magazines. He sent them first to a friend in New Orleans, who put them in new envelopes, and sent them to Ihe editors from his address.

Mr Werner Laurier, writes the English "Daily Chronicle," is making the interesting experiment of publishing his new novels at half a crown net. Some years ago the house of Chalto gave the same plan a good trial, without success. The "library habit" was then too strong to permit people to buy their novels instead of borrowing them.' That habit, like larger institutions, has probably been disturbed by the war, and so Mr Laurier's venture has a new chance.