The Bookshelf.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 18, 2 November 1910, Page 47

The Bookshelf.

By

DELTA.

BOOKSHELF FEUILLETON. The “ Triad.” NIQUE, bright, varied, and ■ I piquant as ever are the articles with which the current issue of the “Triad” brims over. Its “Dbita Dictum,” as usual, are pungent and high-flavoured, as olla podrida should be. A new feature is a column or two 'devoted to “Points About People.” Absorbing, interesting, and frankly demoralising are Frank Morton’s articles on “Francois Coppee” as “The Last of the JGrisettes,” and his semi-serious sketch of that villainous Emperor of Rome, designated Heliogabalus, A. A. Grace, in a noteworthy paper, which dilates on “The Horrors of the Daily Press,” after showing how large a percentage is devoted to the sanguineous in journalism, pleads for more humour and less gore. 'Dovers of Eastern poesy will revel in “Poetry Among the Arabs.” Diurnis deplores the commercialising of the newspaper, its wretched criticisms and its (failure to write good English, and its inadequate pose as an arbiter of public taste. In “Things Visible,” Epistemon, hearing on good authority that conversation is languishing in Auckland and the Kerguelen*, offers a few topics for converse. Other articles eminently worthy of perusal are “O. Henry in his own Bagdad,” “The ‘Triad’s’ appreciation of Calve,” “An Art Student in Europe,” and the last of Frank Morton’s translations of Antoine Berlin’s “Voyage to Burgundy.” What the “Triad” does lack is a table of contents. With the October issue is presented two extra supplements —one of beautiful art illustrations and another of good vocal and instrumental music. Readers acquainted with the “Triad” need no assurance of the respective merits of these productions. To Authors.

Wanted, novels with strong plots, absorbing love interests, effective situations, and welLdefined characterisation, suitable for serial publications. Also, short stories of 3500 to 4000 words, original, human, graphic. Stories of love, adventure, sport , and humour. Futher, bright, crisp articles on present-day topics of interest; illustrations (in line), suitable for stories; topical. cartoons ;(humorous, non-politieal) ; Christmas stories, without words. All MSS. promptly and carefully considered by This announcement, which we have copied from the front cover of one of the best monthly literary reviews in England, speaks volumes anent the increasing demand there is for really good fiction, etc. To those budding New Zealand authors who yearn for a wider audience than this Dominion affords, we commend this advertisement, as there is no doubt about its bona-fides. Whether the advertisers hope in this way to unearth the genius that is said to be moribund, or sleeping in England at the beginning of this twentieth century, or whether popular education Is responsible for the increased demand, we cannot say. But it is certain that the demand is there. For years to come it is certain that literary supply will exceed demand in New Zealand for the class of fiction advertised in this English (review. We use the words certain advisedly, since from the seed of the literary competitions that are being sown broadcast in this Dominion, there are sure to be heavy crops, all of which, for various reasons, will not find a market iji this country. Stories of over-sea romance', adventure, sport, and humour, by reason of the novelty of their setting, are especially esteemed. And so we offer Shis suggestion to those of our readers rho are essaying a literary flight in the forthcoming Auckland competitions, and to whom we wish success. The Proposed Extension of copyright. One great advantage of the proposed extension of copyright to fifty years from, .the death of the author, is that it will do awjiy with the nuisance of early work being reprinted without the author's emendations, as, for instance, in the base of Darwin’s “ Origin of Species,” and •unilar work. The whole of an author’s

work would “fall into the public domain,” as it is euphemistically put, at the same moment. An Entertaining Story. From “The Publishers’ Weekly’’ of New York we cull the following entertaining storyr Bernard Shaw is, on occasion, as characteristically original as ever. In declining a recent invitation to a luncheon in honour of Rodin, the sculptor, he sail that his own immortality was already lassured. ‘ln every future encyclopaedia you will find ‘ Bernard Shaw —subject of a bust by Rodin, otherwise unknown.” Shaw concludes: “To entertain Hodin seems to me to be rather presumptuous. It is as if Adam, after the seven days of creation had offered a snuffbox to the Almighty with the remark, ‘ My congratulations! It’s quite nicely done.’” Anent the Author of “ The Way Up.” Tn the July issue of “The Bodleian” there was a pen-sketeh of Miss M. I*. Willcocks, from which we learn that the author of “ The Way Up” is a graduate of London University, and a scholar of considerable knowledge and insight—as, indeed, might be supposed by a reader of her works.

A Life of Harrison Ainsworth. “ The Bodleian,” which is the literary organ of_“ The Bodley Head,” makes the interesting announcement that a life or Harrison Ainsworth will appear early in the autumn. Mr. S. M. Elils, it says, has compiled a monumental work in two volumes, rich in hitherto unpublished letters—not only Ainsworth’s, but those addressed to him by his famous friends, prominent among whom were Scott, Lamb, Thackeray, Diekens. D’Orsay, Lady Blessington, Disraeli, Maclise, and Cruikshank—to select a few from a truly vast list. A New Williamson Novel. “ Papa,” by Mrs. C. N. Williamson, is «, new novel in Messrs. Methuen’s novelist series. Lapsus Memoriae. “ The Task of Rationalism” (Watts., fid net), by John Russell, M.A., was an address delivered to inaugurate the lectureship established in honour of the life and work of Dr. Moncure Gbnway. Mr. Russell naturally devotes a considerabla portion of his discourse to the contribution made by Conway to the progress of rationalistic thought. In the second part of the lecture Mr. Russell addresses himself to the prospects of rationalism and the work it has still to do. In a closing passage of considerable fervour, he declares that Conway, “our dear Master, is awake now, I am sure, with Lis true wife, also awake, by his side.’ However commendable and natural this sentiment may be, it hardly fits in with any conception of “rationalism” as technically understood. A Censored Novel in its Fifth Edition. Mrs. Mary Gaunt, who was the first author to be censored by the Libraries

Association, who refused “The Uncounted Cost,” has reason to bless that body, as through the wide advertisement furnished by its public censure, .her book has passed into its fifth edition. A new novel of hers, entitled “The Mummy Moves,” was published in August by Mr. Werner Laurie. An Unpublished Scrap of Thackeray's. Something of Thackeray’s yet unpublished? Yes, until this August number of “The Cornhill,” where it sees the light for the first time. It is a little song called “A Castaway.'* adapted from Beranger’s “The Vocation.” It. was found recently by Thackeray’s daughter, Lady Ritchie, pencilled on a page of the MS. of “The English Humorists''—a stray page in Lady Ritchie’s handwriting as a school girl. A facsimile of the page is reproduced in the magazine. Lady Ritchie’s brief explanation of the song and its origin will be read with interest by all lovers of Thackeray. Royal Lunatics. “Mad Majesties” is the title of a book written by Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport, am’ published by Greenaway’s. Its writer’s motive has been to prove the absurdity and the evil of hereditary monarchy, and he sets about his task by tracing the strain of degeneracy and insanity in some of the most famous ruling houses of ancient and medieval history. Don Carlos, the mad son of Phillip 11. of Spain, is the most important of the “Mad Majesties” presented by Dr. Rappoport. Dr. Rappoport is undoubtedly

right in tracing the common insanity in royal houses to inbreeding and to the intoxication of power. But his wholesale attack on hereditary monarchy is open to question. Dr. Rappoport will be remembered as the admirable translator of Rene Bazin’s fine work, “Redemption.” Books Awaiting Review. New books, just received from Methuen and Co., London, are "Jack’s Insects,” a delightful primer on entomology, and “Persia and its People,” by Ella C. .Sykes. REVIEWS. Jehanue of the Golden Lips : Frances G. Knowles-Foster. (London: Mills and Boon. Auckland: Wildman and Arey. 3/6.) Quite recently we had re-read Alexandre Dumas’ “Crimes of the Borgias and Others,” and had been re-convinced that Joan of Naples had been guilty of inciting her lovers and her immediate entourage to the murder of her husband, Andre of Hungary. 'Then we came across an admirable review in the “Bookman” of Miss Francesca Steele's book, entitled “The Beautiful Queen Joanna I. of Naples,” which embodies a vindication of that hapless Queen, who seems to have possessed the fatal fascination later attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, and who, like Mary, Queen of Scots, expiated her sins by the tragic manner of her death. And" now comes “Jehanne of the Golden Lips,” which not only shows that it has been inspired by Dumas' work, but shows also that Joan of Naples was more sinned agaiunt than sinning. Miss Knowles-

Foster’s romantically historic novel brings Joan of Naples’ history down to her marriage with Louis of Tarentum. And here we are content to leave the fortunes of this ill fated Queen, the victim of a fascination as unexplainable, and as little productive of idyllic worship and ehivalrie allegiance as that inspired by her later prototype. To those readers who love a blend of the romantic with the darkly historic, we can conscienciously recommend “Jehanne of the Golden Lips" as being an eminently fascinating romance, reliable history, and supplying vivid fourteenth century pictures hard to realise in these prosaic days. Tlie scenes in which Boccaccio figures are by no means the least interesting of a book which has not a dull page between its covers. My Memoirs : By Princess Caroline Murat. (London: George Bell and Sons, Ltd. Auckland: Wildman and Arey. 10/0.) As we have often done before, we again record our protest against “ Memoirs ” or “ Recollections” of any kind being published that can serve no higher purpose than to amuse the satiated, gratify the modern taste for garbage, pain, or slander the living, or throw obloquy on the memory of the dead. Princess Caroline Mu rat’s “Memoirs” were penned late in life. Iler serious troubles began with the Restoration of the Second Empire, and ended only with her death on July 23, 1902. These “ Memoirs ’’ have been brae-

keted with Lady Cardigan's “ Recollections ” -as a twin “chronique scandaleuse.” There is no comparison, and certainly no extenuation to be urged in Lady Cardigan’s case whose motive for writing them, at best, was a desire to attain tiie notoriety which was all that was left to an aged woman who had long survived the beauty, espieglerie and charm that characterised her youth and early womanhood, and who had neglected to cultivate the imperishable graces and virtues that have no age limit, There is little in Princess Caroline Murat’s “Memoirs” that comes under the head of immoial or gross, if the difference between the French and English codes of morality, and greater license of expression is taken into consideration. Mr. Robert Leighton, in his introduction to the “ Memoirs,” informs his readers that the suggestion to write them came from him. Though wo believe that Mr. Ix'ighton has written this in all good faith, we can testify to the fact that over a quarter of a century ago Princess Caroline Murat costeniplated writing “ Memoirs.” But it is quite possible that, taking into consideration the enormous amount of Napoleonic literature that has Hooded, and is stilt flooding the literary market, and which has seemed to leave nothing new or interesting to say, Princess Caroline had abandoned her original idea. Like Mir. Leighton, we regret that the Princess did not see her “ Memoirs ’’ in proof, though we are equally convinced with him that she would not have retracted a single word she had written against the ex-Empress Eugenie, so great was her antipathy towards her. And Princess Caroline Murat would have had to have been more than human to have forgiven the Ox-Empress all the wrongs, indignities and slights which, real and fancied, she had suffered by her actions during and after tb e downfall of the Second Empire.

While sympathising from the bottom of our heart with the financial ruin sustained, the loss of social power and prestige, and while deprecating the edict which made her an obscure exile from the France she loved so well, we have absolutely no sympathy with the sentiment of the following extract which we have taken from the book:—“I live over again the years from 1848 to 1870 —the years when 1 -really lived—when each day brought some fresh excitement, a wishedfor jewel, a ‘ sentiment ’ or a caprice. The days when the first thought in the morning was, * What shall we do to amuse, ourselvesf The last thought, ‘ How shall we amuse ourselves to-mor-row?’” Was there any reason? we ask, as does a ‘‘Bookman” critic, if this were the highest ideal set before the Court of the Tuileries, for prolonging the life of the Second Empire. There is much that is interesting about Princess Mathilde, the entree to whose literary receptions at the Rue de Coureelles served as a cachet of intellectual distinction. Such brilliant talkers as Edmund About, Octave I‘cuillct, Flaubert, Taine, Alphonse Baudot, and Barbey d’Aurevilly, were all of h<-r circle, as were Alexandre Dumas ai| d 1 ictor Hugo. Ernest Renan, too, and Theophile Gautier, and Prosper Merinice joined the circle on Sunday evenings, and on Wednesdays, Herbert, Giraud, Corot, Fromentin and Ary Scheffer, Were to be frequently seen among the company of artists who were privileged to attend these Wednesday evenings in the lute de Coureelles. There is much that is painful reading about the FrancoPrussian War, a war precipitated by the unwise action of the Empress Eugenie; much, too, about her ill-advised action in sending the Prince Imperial to Zululand, and a story, too, of cheap stirrup leathers that, breaking, really cost the Prince his life and the Bonapartists their principal chance of re-establishing the Napoleonic dynasty. Stories, too, that reflect on the generosity and justice of the ex-Empress Eugenie’s character and the quality of her patriotism towards I-ranee, all of which, deserved or no, should at least have been left to the obscurity in which they had lain for oyer a quarter of a century until the time, if publication were imperative, that 'they could add no fresh tithe to a burden already almost too great to bear by the bereaved Empress, who has surely expiated ere this any sins of omission and commission she may ever have been guilty of against France, her kindred, and her former entourage. And yet, we, who know something of the comparative poverty and the social obscurity to which the Princess Caroline was later doomed to, a poverty which had to take into consideration the number of joints consumed, and the keeping down of laundry bills, and all but necessitous personal expenditure, and a social extinction that must have pressed crushingly on one who had been one of the brightest ornaments of th.* court of the Tuileries, can conceive her excused. More than this, the continued slights on the part of the Empress, who, possessing an enormous income, and tho warm friendship of England's Queen, could afford to overlook the claims of her less fortunate relatives, all tended to widen the breach of distrust and hatred which, made shortly after Mademoiselle de Montijo’s marriage to Napoleon HI., did but increase in intensity as the years went on. Yet Princess Murat, who was a fatalist of the first water, and superstitious to a fault, might have lost some of that hate if she could but have perceived the finger of destiny in the repeated reverses of the Bonaparte and the Murat forces. Princess t.iroline's strictures on tho English are not worth refuting since wo know her warmly attached to individual English persons. The English character in tho concrete would scarcely appeal to n personage as distinctly French as the I’rineess Caroline Murat. Thero is much to commend in the literary style of these •‘unedited” “Memoirs”; much that is valuable and interesting and informative from a historic point of view; much that is audacious, scandalous, or overfrank, in the strictures on tho court celebrities of the Second Empire; much that is over-racy in raconteur; much to forgive, to extenuate, to sympathise with, to dissent from, to refrain from passing judgment upon. The series of portraits that embellish the book, and the photographs of the Murat House In America, and Rodishain, Suffolk, where Princiws Caroline Murat died, do but add to the absorbing interest of a book

that is characteristically French in atmosphere and sentiment from beginning to end, and a book no lover of Napoleana can afford to miss. The Martyrdom of Ferrer: By Joseph McCabe. (Melbourne: S. W. Cole. Paper, 6d. Cloth, 1/). Francisco Ferrer y Guardia will be best remembered as the chief scapegoat' chosen by the Spanish Government and the Papal authorities, to avenge themselves for the destruction of ecclesiastical property during the riots at Barcelona. Nor was this the only reason for putting Francisco Ferrer out of the way. For Ferrer, as an educator on modern socialistic and scientific lines, was a standing menace to Roman Catholicism as practised in medieval Spain. It will also be remembered that after a trial that was a shocking travesty of justice, Ferrer was sentenced to death, and his property and personal effects in Barcelona were confiscated to the State. Though it is now pretty generally conceded in Europe that Ferrer’s execution was a judicial murder; it had not been clearly proved, until after his execution, that for more than a decade before the Barcelona riots, Ferrer’s views had entirely ehanged, and he had come to look upon revolutionary methods as destructive to the end he had in view, namely, that of educating the Spanish people up to the highest European socialistic standards. Asked to fur-

nish an account of the origin of the Modern School, Ferrer said: —When Zorilla died (Ruiz Zorilla was the brilliant and passionate leader of the Spanish Republican Progressist party), I lost all my confidence in the results of revolutionaries, who were themselves the victims of much the same prejudices as the monarchists whom they would deprive of power. From that time forward I devoted all my activity to the task of establishing a school which, in my humble opinion might serve as a model for all the schools which advanced bodies were endeavouring to found, in order to preserve the child from tiie mendacious teaching of the official school.” And this was the real crime for which Francisco Ferrer was murdered. After reading Mr. McCabe’s able, trenchant and convincing pamphlet, which has been written not so much with the intention of exposing the methods adopted by the -Spanish Government and the Papal authorities in securing Ferrer’s conviction, as with the idea of vindicating the memory of a noble patriot, as much a martyr to the cause of truth as any who burned at Smithfield. And in recommending the perusal of this spirited vindication which sets forth the life and career of Ferrer from his earliest youth down to its disgraceful and tragic climax, we desire it to be clearly understood that it is purely in the Interests of justice, fairplay and free thought, and not out of any pronounced sympathy with Rationalism or animus towards Roman Catholicism, against which it is a terrible indictment. For we cheerfully concede to every man the absolute right to worship at his own particular shrine without fear, and without prejudice. Mr. McCabe’s pamphlet is bound to have the effect it aims at, namely, to move the men and women

of Great Britain to follow the life of Spain with closer and more informed interest, and thus verify for themselves tho disclosures made in this book, which, unbacked by reliable evidence, would transcend belief. Miss Fowler’s Cook-book. (Melbourne: George Robertson and Co., 107 ‘to 113, Elizabeth-street. Price, 1/-) This capital little cook-book, which has been compiled from tried recipes by Miss Fowler, teacher of cookery at the Education Department’s College of Domestic Economy at Melbourne, is -specially adapted for use throughout Australasia, as it gives only such recipes as ean be carried out in the natural foodstuffs, or with such foodstuffs and Condiments as can be obtained conveniently eo far from the world’s great markets. Indeed, it is wonderful to read of the infinite variety of dishes that can be prepared from purely Australasian food products. It comprises 260 pages, and the recipes range from soup to fish, joints to vegetables, game to poultry, sauces to salads, puddings to pastry, sweets to savouries, cakes to confectionery, icing to invalid cookery, pickles to forcemeats, and household to toilet 'hints. There is an admirably arranged index, too. Altogether it is splendid value for the shilling its publishers (George Robertson and Co.) are asking for, and from whom we have received it.

The Little Company of Ruth : By Annie Holdsworth. (London: Methuen and. Co. Auckland: 'Wildman and Arey. 2/6 and 3/6.). If the origin of a great many of our philanthropic societies were looked into we should find many of them, in their early formation, differ very little from the lines on which “The Little Company of Ruth” was founded. Miss Holdsworth’s stories are deservedly popular, both for their quaint, fresh, and charmingly humorous qualities, and this admirable study of a village Dorcas, who was left a large house and fortune by an eccentric old lady to whom she had onee acted as good Samaritan, makes excellent and entertaining reading. It is pleasing, also, to see that Ruth, disappointed in her early hope of becoming a wife, and a possible mother of children, devoted her life and fortune to the succouring of certain old persons destitute of kith and fortune. The rustic courtship that filters so haltingly through the book’s pages, ends satisfactorily, though we could very well have excused Ruth Dimsdale if she had sent Roger Cartwright empty away, though we are bound to confess that none of Ruth’s lovers would have suited her half so w’ell as ho. The book is worth investing in, if only to spend an amusing hour with Mrs. Cartwright, who is a character after our own heart, and whose breezy conversation is splendidly tonic. “The Little Company of Ruth,’* which wo have received from Methuen and Co., ie a book we can unreservedly recommend for the perusal of youth and adults alike.

THOSE BRUTALLY AFFECTIONATE FICTION HEROES-