FROM... Bookstall and Study.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18188, 22 June 1927, Page 6

FROM... Bookstall and Study.

From John o’London's Weekly:—A lady travelling in Greece, on being shown the Acropolis, asked “ But where are the Four Horsemen?” Mr James S. Childers, of Alabama, U.S.A., has written in “ Laurel and Straw ” the first Rhodes Scholar’s novel of Oxford life. Mr John Galsworthy always makes a point of first reading over to his wife all that he has written after a spell of work. Among the contributors to “ A Cricket Eleven,” an anthology of cricket stories with verse interludes, are C. B. Fry, Stacy Aumonier and P. G. Wodehouse. The University of Glasgow is conferring its L.L.D. degree on Mr Alfred Noyes, the poet, this month. Mr Noyes is at present revising the proofs of the fourth volume of his collected poems. The members of the Caledonian Club at Oxford University recently had to drink the toast of the “ Immortal Memory ” of Robert Burns in ginger ale because, by soxne oversight, no extension of license had been obtained for their Burns night dinner. Writing is becoming more and more contagious. All the Asquith family have caught it; Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, has just finished a novel; her daughter, Princess Bibesco, is working on one; Cyril Asquith, a son, has written a book on trade union law, and Lord Oxford and Asquith is writing more memoirs. Jvnut Hamsun, the gifted Norwegian author, was once a shoemaker’s apprentice, a school teacher, a road mender, a farm hand, a train conductor, a lecturer, and a free-lance journalist. In 1920 he was awarded the Nobei Prize. My ambition in life is to create a book which will bring inspiration and happiness through the unborn years, and will carry a message of hope when the hand which pens it is for ever still —Jeffrey Farnol. A Frenchman is never quite happy unless he is teaching, explaining and using other processes of intellectual tidying up. _ Sometimes he does it by satire, sometimes^by imaginative suggestion, sometimes by pure comedy. The element of exposition and instruction is always there, whether it is Rabelais or Voltaire, Pascal or Fenelon, or Bossuet, Racine or Corneille, Balzac or Anatole France who speaks.—J. St Loe Strachey. « a Dean Swift once preached a charity sermon in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, the length of which disgusted his auditors; which coming to his know- • ledge and it falling to his lot soon after to preach another sermon of the like kind in the same place, he took special care to avoid falling into the former error. His text was: “ He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord, and that which he hath given -will he pay him again.” The Dean, after repeating his text in a more than commonly emphatic tone, added: “Now, my beloved brethren, you hear the terms of this loan; if you like the security, down with your dust.” Mr A. A. Buchanan, in “ The Last Victorians,” asks: “ How are great men to be created by an age which pours millions into the pockets of facecontortionists and prize-fighters; which thinks a Rugby back a greater man than a Cabinet Minister or a Judge; which crams the streets from Charing Cross to the Ritz to catch a glimpse of CHaplin or Fairbanks; and which turns it back with cold contempt upon the rest, the artistic and intellectual remnant?” Moors eat pgdoroi ayanwanwanwa An aspiring poet has discovered a new way to get his verses printed in the daily papers. He sends the first stanza to the editor of the correspondence column with the inquiry, “Can anyone give me the rest of the poem?" and then a day or two later sends in the rest of the poem under another name. Wordsworth is a quarry of splendid things; I 1 always think his lines— And many love me; but by none Am I enough beloved profoundly human. Who was ever enough beloved? That is the strength of religion, that it gives people the sense of being enough beloved.—A. C. Benson. Xv VI Moors eat prodigious quantities of food. They can do so without discomfort, I believe, because they never drink with their meals, but content themselves with a glass of water at the end of the repast. I found that T, too, could eat far more than I should ever dream of doing at a European meal as long as I followed this sage Moorish ( rule. Although, as good Musulmans, most Moors never touch wine, they sometimes serve it for their European guests. At one Moorish dinner I drank wine; but at that one only, for afterwards I felt as thought I could never face food again.—Alice Crawford in “World To-day.” Sir John Ilare. the famous actor, once said of Dickens: “I should like to say, speaking as an actor, that while the world at large has gained by Charles Dickens's devotion to literature, the stage lost one, who, if he had chosen to adopt it as his calling, would probably have been the greatest actor of his time. None who had the good fortune to see the play's in which he acted can forget his mastery of stage technique.” Oscar Wilde, in order to boom his poems which were not selling well, decided to become an eccentric, with very satisfactory results as far as his poems were concerned. But his eccentricity so exasperated his fellow students at Oxford University, that they decided to take drastic measures to cure him. They tied him hand and foot and carried, or rather dragged him to the top of a steep hill overlooking the surrounding country, and threw him into a muddy, shallow pool. Wilde, suffering and exhausted, raised himself and surveyed the landscape with a nonchalant air, and, after a long pause, exclaimed in affected tones: “Oh ! What a lovely view! ” Could eccentricity be carried farther than that? x A correspondent in T.P.’s Weekly writes: “In a recent issue you say ‘By our Lady’ became, by contiaction, that adjective which Mr G. B. Shaw used so sensationally in Pygmalion. I doubt the correctness of this. In 3£theredgc’s comedy “The Man of Mode,” which appeared in 1676, one character says “Give him half-a-crown,” and the other replies, “Not without he will promise to be bloody drunk.” Swift when writing to Stella informed her that “it groves bloody cold and I have no waistcoat.” Scores of other authors could be quoted who use the word as a superlative, but I have never come across any writing that satisfied me that “bloody” is a contraction of

Air Cameron Rogers has written a Life of Robert G. Ingersoll, which has just been published in America. It contains many amusing stories of this famous lawyer and agnostic. When Ingersoll, then a young man in his twenties, was practising law in the southern counties of Illinois—a region noted for corn liquor and religion—he found himself marooned during a week end in a house full of Baptist preachers. Bap- j tism was the subject of discourse—baptism as the only 2'eliable insurance against hell-fire. “Well, Mr Ingersoll, what do you think of baptism?” said one of the preachers, turning to the silent young man. Ingersoll gloomily appraised his rather shaggy and unkempt looking questioner. “Oh, I think baptism is all right,” he answered, “if you use plenty of soap.” Mr Ililaire Belloc’s wit is always refreshing, and a recent number of the “London Mercury” contained some sparkling epigrams from his pen. Here is one “On Chelsea”— I am assured by Dauber's wife That Dauber’s always true to life; I think his wife would far prefer That Dauber should be true to her. And this retort to Goldsmith is both opportune and overdue: — “111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” But how much more unfortunate are those Whose wealth declines and population grows. And the lyre of compliment has seldom been better sounded than in this: How did the party go in Portland Square ? I cannot tell you: Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's parti' g°? Juliet was next me, and I do not know. It is well for novelists to remember that, in the present phase of society and mechanical conditions of the literary market, their professional existence depends on the fact that the dullest class in England takes to novels merely as a refuge from its own dullness. And while it is certain that no novelist of real value really pleases that class, it is equally certain that without its support (willing or unwilling—usually the latter) no novelist could live by his pen. Remove the superior stolid comfortable, and the circulating libraries would expire. And exactly when the circulating libraries breathed their last sigh the publishers of fiction would sympathetically give up the ghost. If you happen to be a literary artist, it makes you think—the reflection that when you dine you eat the bread unwillingly furnished by the enemies of art and progress!—Arnold Bennett. X X X The recent lawsuit over the Gladstone case reminds an English writer of the times when the horsewhip was a substitute for legal proceedings. The early part of the nineteenth century was the golden age of the horsewhip. It was a period when the blackmailing journalist, notably Charles Molloy Westmacott, was prominent. Westmacott founded a paper called “The Age,” which, although it had few advertisements and little news, brought him in an income of several thousand a year. The editor specialised ip discovering family secrets, and whenever he unearthed anything of a disgraceful nature he had it set up in type and a proof of it sent to the person involved, together with a letter explaining it had been sent to “The Age” by “our own correspondent,” and requesting confirmation or denial. In nine cases out of ten hush-money was paid, and there is on record a series of three para graphs which were suppressed by payments amounting to nine thousand pounds, the largest sum coming from a high official at the court of King William IV. But Westmacott had his failures and his horsewhippings. Charles Kemble, the actor, was the first to inflict the latter punishment on him, the scene of the “summary execution” being Covent Garden Theatre. The editor of “The Age” had referred disparagingly to Kemble’s daughter, and as the offence could not wait on the slowness of the law, Kemble beat the offender so unmercifully that Westma cott had scarcely sufficient strength left to crawl to a doctor in Drury Lane. It is books that do the mischief. Without books we should know life for the humdrum thing and imposture it is. And even as it is, we know it; but books make us forget what we know. Books are in our blood. No one who begins bookishly ever becomes quite free again. There they are, all the time, in the background, dominating conduct and providing standards, ideals, limitations, and, above all, illusions and disappointments. For the books that one reads in the impressionable years, and therefore absorbs and remembers, are always so much better and more exciting than life. Ballantyne, for example, who came first —what chances his boys had that were never ours! Coral islands to be cast away upon; fur-trading; gorilla-hunt-ing—you - see the mischief of it all! Then Haggard, Stevenson, Defoe, Scott, Dickens. These are the corrupters of youth. One conies away from them for ever expecting something, where one might, without them, have been merely' acquiescent and at peace. For they all heighten ; they all arrange life their own way and sauce it. Dickens comes nearest to the life that one knows; one continually meets characters with a vague Dickensian flavour; but the breath of genius is not in them. They are the shells only: the great, comic, humane, living, unreal fairy-land spirit has not animated them. It never can: it began with Dickens and passed with him.—E. V. Lucas. Mr Alfred Percival is a clergyman who, through ill-health, was prevented from having a parish of his own, and he has, for over thirty years, lived a retired life in a little village in Somerset. In “Somerset Neighbours” he gives us a record of the lives and characters of the people among whom he has lived. The most delightfully humorous of the author’s neighbours is one whom he calls “Sam Barter, churchwarden,” who carries about with him a bottle of treble-distilled essence known as cider wine, “strong enough to lift the scalp off the uninitiated.” Talking about the new parson, and hoping they would be friends, Sam said: “Last parson, 'e ’oped to be friends, too, but under a month ’e treated we like a forkful o’ droppin’s. He was fly enough in the pulpit, always tryin’ to make our sins ‘jump out of us,’ as ’e said, but I telled ’im once in this very room, ‘Parson,’ I says, ‘we’m your sheep, but you don’t come near in the week, so we do remain verminful Sundays, and you can’t make ticks skip.’ “Then, again, last Palm Sunday, without a word to anyone, ’e give out as the offertory Easter Day would be given to the Rector, and when I tells ’im on the quiet as this was a new thing and the churchwardens should ’ave been consulted, he was took frisky about it, so I says I should not be col--Lutin' at: all. Xlu got Bill Berry-tho j

j ‘Widder,’ as we calls 'im (what's got ! a widder mother, that is)—to take the nose-bag, and after service I counted it I out on this very table, and bids ’im i welcome to the bellyful of wind it was —threepence halfpenny, a peppermint drop, and a boot pertecter. “But I touched the hollow of his thigh (as you might say) at the jumble sale. He was for sellin’ a pair'of black trousers to my niece, Mrs Garland. Hold ’em .up to the light,’ I says to her. ‘There be a hole in the sittin’ bit o’ they. I see ’em split abroad when his reverence picked up a pin off the vestry floor Sunday week.' She did, and we found it were mended on the inside with a bit of black stickin’ plaster. ‘ ’Taint honest,’ I says. ‘Mr Barter,’ he says, ‘you’m drunk.* ‘Maybe,’ I says, ‘but not as tight as your breeches. Us don’t grow nothin’ for tail-holes on we.’ From that day he was took broody, but all his eggs must ’a’ been addled, for within a month he’d resignated.” Lord Frederic Hamilton, in his delightful volumes of memoirs entitled, “ Here, There and Everywhere,” shatters yet another of the romantic conceptions of our youth. He -writes: A curious misapprehension seems to exist about that term “ Spanish Main,” which somehow suggests to me infinite romance; conquistadores, treasure-ships, gentlemen-adventurers, and bold buccaneers. It is merely a shortened way of writing Spanish Mainland, and refers not to the sea but to the land; the terra firma as opposed to the Antilles; the continent, in distinction to the islands. By a natural process the term came to be applied to the sea washing the Spanish Mainland, but “ Main ” does not mean sea and never did. It is only in the last hundred years that , poets have begun to use “ main ” as synonymous with sea, probably because there are so many more rhymes to the former than to the latter, and it sounds a fine dashing sort of term, but I can find no trace of a warrant for the use of the word in this sense before 1810. “ Main ” refers to the land and not to the water. I can imagine no more detestable spot anywhere than this Spanish Main, in spite of the distant view of the mighty Cordilleras, around whose summits perpetual thunderstorms seem to play, and from which fierce gales swoop down on the sea. _ Clammy, suffocating heat, feverdealing swamps, decaying towns, with an effete population and a huge rainfall, do not constitute an attractive whole. Owing to the intense humidity, even the gales bring no refreshing coolness in their train. It is easy tq . understand the importance the old Spanish conquistadores attached to the Isthmus of Panama, for all the gold brought from Peru had to be carried across it on mule back to the Atlantic coast, before it could be shipped to Spain. The fever-stricken coasts of the Spanish Main needed but little defence of forts and guns to protect them against the aggressive efforts of other European nations.

One of the greatest needs in the literature of to-day is a greater sense of balance between the two component parts of a work of art —the spiritual side and the physical side, writes Miss Edith Sitwell in T.P.’s Weekly. As regards form, there is,, in the one hand, too much lolling over the borders of freedom into vacancy, and on the other hand, too much tight-lacing and revulsion against growth. The proof of originality in a work of art is to produce personality in the bare line. At the same time, there has grown up, nowadays, an almost maniacal hatred of beauty in detail, a loathing of imagery. Persons who are incapable of perceiving the relationship between two objects, and who are incapable consequently of perceiving the design of the world, refer to images as “ bric-a-brac.” Naturallythe. greatest poetry in the world is not that on which the images are incrusted in such a way that they could tumble oil without the design being disturbed, but that in which you cannot separate the image from the structure.

Flesh and hair make the living form more beautiful, you may have observed, however elegant the structure of the bone may be. English poetry to-day is a positive charnel-house of deformed and strengthless skeletons, on the one hand, and, on the other, a warehouse full of cheap rolls of linoleum. All this because of fear—fear of life, fear of madness, fear of free verse, though, as Mr T. S. Eliot has pointed out: “ The term is a loose one. . . . Any' verse

is called free by people whose ears arc not accustomed to it.” In “cultivated” circles to-day, there is too much loose talk about “the civilised mind.” By “ civilised ” the writers mean usually a finicking little fashionable taste and a dog’s nose for smell, with a complete deadening of the other senses, an incapability for • seizing the difference or likeness between objects and points of view. The consciously civilised mind has rarely produced a great work of art, nor has the

consciously uncivilised, for the great artist rarely wears a label upon his mind. Is it to be imagined that Mr Hardy consciously rids himself of civilisation, or that Marcel Proust wore it consciously', like a garment? The great artist does not wrap himself in civilisation. nor does he rid himself of it. He examines civilisation; lie rids himself of the crowd.

THE POET PRAYS. The crushing: of a thousand petals, Lord Distils one drop of essence from a flower— Crush me, O God, if through it my song makes Some tired heart walk with beauty for an hour. If under bruising pestles I give voice To the high white rapture of a faint perfume— And, catching it, one weary of paved Turns back a lost path where wood violets bloom; If I can bring the quick relief of tears To dry eyes dulled with bitterness for long— Gather the fragrant petals of my life— And-crush them, Lord—then help me sing the song. —Grace Noll Crowell, in “Good Housekeeping.”

THE RAINBOW. I saw a rainbow in the City; O'er Paul’s high dome its arch was curved. It looked particularly pretty, As somebody indeed observed. It made me think of life and spring, And love and all that sort of thing. Why should it fill me with elation, A rainbow that so brightly shone, Although I know the explanation Of this most sweet phenomenon? It shows us what, as I conceive, Collective effort may achieve. One raindrop lacks sufficient brilliance To send that spectrum down to earth, But when it comes to countless millions, The perfect rainbow comes to birth. Therefore the more together we, The more effective we shall be.