Books $ Literary Gossip

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 15862, 5 July 1919, Page 7

Books $ Literary Gossip

A shrewd appreciation of the British Prime Minister from E. T. Eaymond’s “Uncensored Celebrities”:— “Mr Lloyd George belongs essentially to the empirical school of statesmanship. He does not look ‘before and after,’ but only about him. He stands in sn ail awe of precedent, principle, aud doctrine; be is always readier to exreriment than to think. Intensely 1 interested in the things of the moment, in himself and the people he *■ likes, in the ‘causes’ which appeal to him in his varying moods, no man has less sense of the continuity of human things. For him the present tick of the deck has ail the dignity of the eternal. He i.-, in truth, as much .> man of action as any fox hunter o; the shires, or any leader of a forioru hope. Withal there is in him something of the poet; he has a touch of the true Promethean fire, and on;;.' when he is very tired does the coin from his phrase mint* ring tinyy.” Ella Wheeler Wilcox had a great run in London, so an exchange says, frying to get a bath. She rented a very dressv apartment, with a ‘‘double back action self-folding bath tub,” but .-he couldn’t wort it on account- of a t phone which was in the way. dho wrote a pka to the controller, enclosing a copy of “I Did Not Come Home Clean,” which is an unusual literary feat, a parody of her own poem, ‘'.Soldiers, Come Home Clean,” a fury appeal for spiritual cleanliness. Here is one of the verses that Mr Controller go*: This is the song for a woman As she crosses the seas of storm, Jo the lands afar, where bath tubs are, water that runs and is warm. O, turn on the faucet fully. The hot, hot faucet, I mean! fill up my tub for a grand old scrub. For I hive not come home clean. A common coincidence, gays an exchange, is the involuntary duplication of title* by authors and publishers in tbs season. This year has been especially productive of such cases in America. Two books have recently been l-gued in the same week under the title “The Valley of Vision”: one, a novel by Sarah Comstock; the other, Henry van Dyke’s book of stones. Such duplication’ is usually a detriment to both books, and every effort is made to a;oid it. Two volumes of poems have armoured, and are announced with the title “The Years Between,” and two books on the America:: Navy, with the title “Pull Speed Ahead.” Then there is the air-fighting book, entitled “Above the Battle*?,” ths title of which misses by mo lettar “Above the Battle.” Lady Jephson. widow of Sir Alfred k-Jephsoo, E.N., saw the famous entry of the ex-Kaiser and his following into Jerusalem in 1898. In "Notes of a Nmnad” she describes it. “He entered the city with all the regard to dramatic effect and theatrical display ao dear to his sonl. He and his suite wore kfaski, over which they had white mantles of the Crusader type, reaching from the backs of tbeir helmets to the tails of tbeir horses- and ornamented with huge red crosses. The splendid camp* where the Germans lived were nrovickd fa the Emperor by Mri Thos.

OP INTEREST TO LOVERS Of READING.

Cook—surely a huge compliment to English organisation and capability.” I think of one, dead m a lonely place, And the immortal thought that tilled his breast That sent him on his high heroic quest— Dead in a grave no loving tear shall grace. Only the image of a dear, loved face—--Ihe loveliest, the purest, and the best— Swam in his eyes to soothe him into rest. To be the guerdon of his finished race. Tiio only guerdon— no ! For unseen powers Built Lira a grave; God scattered precious flowers, And he lay dreaming of the. dear loved face. Earth has forgotten him. but he has found The long quest 's end—and now tie years whirl round O'er him who dreams there of the dear ’ovad face. From ‘‘Poems,” by C. X. S. Wolff. Lincoln's growth in power of literary c-ipros'ion, from the seeds of promise in the political “handbill” of 1532 to ibe ripened fruit of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, is (according to the New York Nation) well and clearly traced by Professor Luther Emerson Boh in sou in “Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Letters.” “The lesser achievements in verse are also noted, and an appendix gives adequate illustrations of both prose and poetic forms of composition. In no other single work Las the subject been so fully discussed. The author contrasts the touch of rusticity. evident in much of Lincoln’s writing, with the grace and purity of his expression when his mind was moved to its highest points of feeling and sincerity. Yet this very element of rusticity in Lincoln must have contributed to the simplicity, directness, genuiness, of his loftiest utterances —as probably the author himself would admit/’

In “Scene* Prom Italy's War,’’ Mr G. M. Trevelyan—a great authority on Italy—gives an instance of how German propaganda worked among the simple peasantry there. "In the spring of 1916 I was walking one day in the chestnut woods of the deep valley diriding Monte Sabotino from the village of Qnisca, where we quartered, w ben I came • acmes an Italian sergeant, and we passed the time of day. A. more simple and kindly soul it would he impossible to find in any land. We talked of the war. ‘You English are keeping it on,’ ho said. I suggested the Austrians, waving a hand towards them on Sabotino above us. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is between you English and the Germans. You English want to close the sea to all others,’ ‘How so?’ I asked. ‘For example,’ he replied, ‘yon make the ships of all other nations pay you tribute when they pass through the Straits of Gibraltar.’After ten minutes’ effort on my part to disabuse his mind, we parted the best of friends—for he was one of the most htvablo of men; but k am convinced he thought I was sent out to lie for my country, though 'he had far too much nati'je courtesy to aa/ so. Who

from the' lotus flowers.

Lad been at the pains, and why, to teach this simple and kindlv Ally of ours this extravagant myth about "Gibraltar? And what efforts had we made to undeceive him and a million such as he?” INVEBTTTUEE. Nightwnrd the gods of evening take their wav: And from their hands the golden rhalice falls, ' Spilling a wine of twilight through the halls Of this, the final dwelling-place of day. Mow, from our windows, ourpled with the bloom Of dnikness, we can see tie eternal sr.ows Knulle and smoulder like a charnel rose, Who.se flowering spells some old, predestined doom. 0 spinners in the silence, can von weave A garment tit to clothe us at the last? Dust is no longer regal: we posses The uttermost that kingship may achieve. . . . Believe us of our tarnished crowns, and cast A cloak of stars upon onr restlessness 1 (By Leslie N. Jennings in the New York Nation.) » The fall in money value due to the war has, according to the W r estminster Gazette, become a very serious matter to those responsible for the upkeep of the public libraries in England. While rating authorities are free to increase the rates to meet the demands of public services other than public libraries, the amount that can he legally raised for the latter purpose is limited to the produce of a maximum rate of Id in the £[. The result is that, with the exception of a few towns which have special statutory powers to increase the library rate, the 650 local authorities who have to finance public libraries have been compelled cither to restrict greatly their activities or actually to close their doors. The Government has replied unfavourably to a request for an amendment of the Libraries Act, but has intimated that there is a possibility that the control of public libraries may shortly be given either to the Board of Education or the Ministry of Health. In the meantime

A GOOD PLOT

local authorities -who own public libraries. are combining 1 , and intend to take joint action for a temporary alteration in the existing law, so that the work of the libraries may be properly carried on until a decision is arrived at with, regard to their future.

An anthology of Chinese poety covering the work of the poets of China from the earliest days to our own is being prepared for early publication by Alfred A. Knopf, of New York, under the title of “One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems.” The translations have ben made by Arthur Waley, of the British Museum. “The Autumn Wind,” by the Emperor Ou-Ty, of the Han Dynasty, 140 8.C., taken from “The Book of Jade,” contains the following lines;— The autumn wind rises.

white clouds are flying before it, yellow leaves are torn from the trees by the river Already the wild geese are winging their way \ towards the south.

the rose is sweet no longer, and petals are falling

Yery few non-combatants suffered more from the war than Henry James, whose sensitive and sympathetic soul was bitterly tortured by the aspect of humanity engaged upon the destruction of all its highest ideals. His writings, during the war bore witness to the depth of his feeling,,, and Messrs Collins are doing a service to his memory in collecting them into a memorial volume. The book is to be called “Within the Rim,” from an article which he contributed to the Fortnightly Review in the third year of the war, and other contents are his paper upon the American Ambulance Corps, an essay upon “Refugees in Chelsea,” and eloquent tributes to the heroic endurance of Belgium and France.

MASTER AND MAN CO-OPERATE, By J. R. Barrington (Gordon and Gotch).

This is a thoughtful and informative essay by one who speaks as “a labouring man with a fair knowledge of mankind.” He deals with what he suggests is the chronic State of bankruptcy of the working classes. High wages Jxe sees quite clearly only means increased cost of production, and therefore, increased cost of commodities—a result that Sir Robert Stout pointed out to workers many years ago. The chief causes of this state of affairs, in the writer’s view, are spending too much on beer and the support of “far too many non-essen'tial parasites in the shape of middlemen,” Labour’s only known remedy for relief is the strike, but Mr Barrington sees a better way in co-operation. The employer is to help by loaning capital, free of interest if need be, to enable workers to co-opera-tively purchase their necessities and so eliminate the middlemen, wholesale and retail. The case is well put in perfectly simple and convincing English. IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By W. A. White. Kansas, the scene of Mr White's novel. “A Corain Rich Man” is again chosen as the background for his new book. The theme has to do with a man’s growth in character and his ultimate surrender to the inevitable. Thomas Van Dorn has said in his heart “There is no God.” He sets himself up to take what he wants from society with the complacent belief that he can take as much as he likes without impairing his powers or his personality. !!■ is with his story that Mr White "is concerned, a story not without human interest nor lacking in literary skill, but hardly of a character that will greatly appeal to the average British reader.

BIETH. By Zona Gale. In this novel Miss Gale tells the story of two generations—Marshal and Jeffrey Pitt. The craftsmanship of the “Friendship Village” stories is here—the humorous, sympathetic powers of observation, and insight into motives and character. The theme involves many people and illustrates a spiritual law.

FASHIONS IN FICTION,

RETURN OF LOVE STORY WITH

The old-fashioned novel with the black-moustached villian, the dashing hero, and the pink-and-whrte heroine of the clinging type, appears to he coming into its own again. A London bookseller, who does a big business in the lighter kind of literature, told a Daily Chronicle representative that there was a renewed demand for the old-fashioned love story, provided that the plot was good and the tale well told. There were more inquiries for Mrs Henry Wood and Mias Braddon type than he had known for some time past. “There was an appreciable decline in reading during the war,” he said, “and the taste of the reading public also changed. Hundreds of wEat I call ‘novelette girls’— girls who spend most of their spare time apart from visits to pictures in reading exciting novels with a keen love interest—abandoned the reading habit altogether. They took up the knitting needle instead, and knitted socks and ‘woollies’ for soldier brothers and sweethearts; or they devoted their evenings to canteen work or organising entertainments. SERIOUS READING. “Those who still kept up their reading developed a different taste in books. Many of them went in for more serious stuff—histories, accounts of past wars, and works of travel. For instance, a girl who Y will wager belonged to the novelette section before the war, came

into my shop one day in search of a book about Montenegro. ‘They are our Allies—and I must know something about them/ she said; and another asked me if I had a ‘history of the Czechs!’ Now the swing of the pendulum has come, and war novels and historical and geographical works are no longer sought after with the same eagerness. The old style love story with a big dash of melodrama is popular again. It seems to link the readers with old times, and act as a stimulant to mental reconstruction.”

“OUT AND ABOUT.” •

“MEPHITIC” MR BURKE,

Thomas Burke’s new book' is better and worse than his last, “Limehouse Nights” was mephitic (the author’s own pet word), but it was sufficiently novel to fire the average imagination. “Ofit and About” is not now novel, and not particularly mephitic, but it is an interesting enough picture of one side of London to be worthy of purchase and preservation. In places, too, it has considerable vivacity and elasticity of style. And in places it hasn’t. Vigorously blue-pencilled, it might have ranked as an exceedingly brilliant piece of journalese; pushed through the press with all its vanities and, affectations, it, wheezes and glitters like a cheap acVordion. We have said, too, that it is apt particularly sensual. That is true. But either because Mr Burke has struck a remunerative attitude, and can’t afford to. abandon it, or does really find the normal passions and enthusiasms of mankind a trifle ordinary and dull, he spatters a little nastiness here and there. Most of the way he is just sentimental and (vividly, we must confess) a self-conscious cataloguer and guide then, it would seem through sheer prurient perversity, he drags you, into some loathsome den to be a witness of London’s material and moral filth. We don’t know at all what his attitude was to the war, for example, but his chief impression in the absence of young men as that London is full of “middle-aged women of 30, in short skirts, trying to attract the’ aged satyrs by pretending to be Jittle girls,” Limehouse is a place “without salt and savour; flat and unprofitable; and of all that it once held of colour and mystery and the micabre, one must write in the past tense.” Yet he contrives to give one dash of colour by making the reader pause to watch two demimondes fighting in a Chinese eating house, “tearing at each Other’s faces, and biting at uncovered breasts.” The police records being dull, too, he harks back to a real or imaginary East End paper of 30 years ago and produces two pages of a richly suggestive overcrowding prosecution. Or he recalls the Eoyal Sovereign, which had a skittleally. “There would gather the lousy Lascars , and there they would roll, bowl, or pitch. Then they would swill. Later, they would roll, bowl, or pitch with a skinful of gin, through the reeling streets to whichever boat might slaim them.”

There are, of course, good things as well. If this were a book by an unknown author we would say merely that it is very clever, very shady, very interesting, very affected, very mercenary, very insincere. But for pictures that were a little better than this and a little worse, the author was hailed as a genius by Clement K. Shorter, as a writer of great romantic force and' beauty by H. G. Wells, as a radiant genius by Holbrook Jackson, a writer of masterpieces by the Bookman, a second Poe by the Globe, and by an important Scottish journal as “the most vigorous and most gifted realist our literature has produced.” If he was all those things as 'the author of “Limehouse Nights,” he is something only a little less lurid in “Out and About.” And we are determined that our readers shall have a sufficient indication of his manner to form at least a preliminary opinion for themselves.