NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16152, 29 November 1924, Page 11 (Supplement)

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

CURRENT LITERATURE “R.L.S., Man and Writer.” ' Mr .T. A. Steuart’s “Robert. Louis Slcvenson, Man and Writer,” is, as it purports to be, a “critical biography,” the first that has appeared. Mr Stcuart.’s estimate of “R.L.S.” as man and writer—his personal charm, his unfailing courage under a life’s burden of ill-health, his exquisitely wrought style, seems as generous and as true as it is attractive. The “foreignness” of appearance which made Stevenson such an obviously non-Celtic, figure is traced by his biographers very interestingly to faraway of French blood. Stevenson’s amatory escapades as a very young man in Edinburgh have always been pretty widely known, despite the sedulous whitewashing of his early biographers and apologists. We hear here of “Claire,” who was “a Highland girl and her name was Highland, Kate Drummond.” Stevenson was scarcely twenty at the time of their meeting—which was as casual as such meetings are apt to be. The result was a passionate love-romance, as passionate, perhaps, as anything in the annals of literature. Yet it would be an utter mistake to suppose that the attraction for Louis, just then in the Edinburgh underworld, was wholly or mainly physical and sensual. There was a touch of comedy about the circumstances of Stevenson’s marriage to Mrs Osbourne. It took place at San Francisco at a time when Stevenson was particularly “hard, up,” as soon as divorce proceedings set Mrs Osbourne free. “Osbourne eliminated himself politely and quietly, and so far as I can discover never met his successor. But as a final act of grace and courtesy he gave Stevenson a letter of introduction to an • hotelkeeper at Galistoga, a hamlet in Nepa County, California, where the honeymoon might be spent economically.”

Mr Steuart estimates “Treasure Island" as Stevenson's “most popular book, the central turning-point in his history,” but “Jekyll and Hyde,” published in 1886, really boomed. “In a few months 50,000 copies were sold; the printing presses were going at full speed, and the invalid-hermit awoke one morning to find himself famous. He would not have been human were he not elated and fortified.” To top the flowing tide, the New York World offered turn £2OOO for one article per week for a year. It is a great part of Stevenson’s fascination that he not only “wrote romance but lived romance. Those queer wanderings in the South Seas; those flights from death; those levities and eccentricities of behaviour and appearance; the penury, the hardship, the Invincible determination, and then the sudden blaze of splendour as a Paciflo Island chief, so romantically reported—all these in their varied and cumulative effect were well calculated to fascinate the public imagination.” Through all his years of poverty, illhealth, and disappointments he never lost his crowning merit of courage. “Of the shirker, the Coward, there was not 'an atom in his composition.” Tales of the Stage. In an amusing introduction to his new book, “Chestnuts Re-Roasted,” Mr Seymour Hicks apportions the antique anecdote into two classes—brilliant impromptus of the great Bohemians, which have “helped to make history,” and “the others,” which, being “told in lighter vein designed only to raise a laugh, have become, through years of constant repetition, appalling chestnuts of no value whatsoever.” In point of fact many of these chestnuts were well worth warming up for a new generation’s consumption. For example, Nat Goodwin, the American comedian, was looking on from a box when a performer on the stage caught sight of him and immediately gave an impersonation of the popular favourite as David Garrick. “The house roared and the mimic, flushed with his triumph, looked up at the box and said, ‘Well, Nat, how’s that?’ Goodwin looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then, smiling blandly, said, ‘Well, one of us is rotten.’ ” There is this one about Comyns Carr: It is a custom in printing the names of two artists of equal position in a programme to conciliate the one who is not at'the top by putting “and” before his name at the bottom. “A dispute arose as to this on one occasion, and Comyns Carr, who was managing the theatre and was not deeply impressed with the talents of either of the gentlemen who were arguing, turned to his printer and wittily said; ‘I cannot understand what all the trouble is about. Why put the “and” where the art can never be?’ ” Mr Arnold Bennett. Mr Arnold Bennett’s new book, “Elsie and the Child,” Is one of short stories, of which the title-piece, the longest and the best, carries on the romance of his last novel, “Iliceyman Steps.” Elsie, the, lovable, ill-paid charwoman who so long “did for” the tragic bookseller, Earlforword, at the “Steps," is now inhabiting the basement at Dr. Raste’s house in Myddellton Square. The experiences of the untaught but mother-wise Elsie, rich in her beautiful nature, as she serves and none the less manages the, Rastc household, make a charming story.