NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18413, 20 June 1925, Page 13

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

CONSTANCE GRANDE. No one will welcome a biography of tho late Mrs Julian Grande (Constance Barnicoat) more sincerely than the readers of "Tho Press." Long before tho Great Mrs Grande had made her mark in intellectual journalism, while during the war she came to be recognised as one of tlie most loyal, capable, and clear-headed correspondents on any European front. So iar as New Zealand readers are concerned she was easily the most instructive, and at the same time the sanest and safest, of the men and women on whom wo had to depend for our knowledge of the war situation on its political and international sides. Her letters from Geneva were not literature. Nothing that she ever wrote was or came near being literature. But her dispatches were and are history. They were wisdom and patriotism; and if any New Zealander ever does make literature out of the Great War, it will be to Constance Grande that he will have to turn for his political and international facts.

Apart from her work at Geneva, Mrs Grande moans to most people mountain climbing. If she was not the greatest of woman mountaineers, she was the most famous that the Dominion claims, or has bred. Her biographer has very wisely included in this record of her life and labours many pages of extracts from her letters, diaries, and published newspaper articles describing her adventures in snow and ice. Nor did anyone born and bred in New Zealand, but earned to fame abroad, ever retain more constant, intelligent or ardent love of our mountains, forests, and wild flowers, most admirable pictures of which both by her pen and camera are scattered through this fairly big book. One of the earliest photographs shows Mrs Grande as she appeared crossing the Copland Pass, "where no woman ever went before," in 1903; the very last is a photograph of Peak Barnicoat in the New Zealand Alps first climbed by Mr Julian Grande in 1923. and named with the hearty approval or the New Zealand Government after its most famous woman climber.

But as we began by saying, and must now repeat, Mrs Grande was first and foremost a journalist. The story of her struggle to establish herself in London—in days when that required far more courage and independence r 'f mind than it requires n.ow —will be •read with admiration by every lover of pen and ink. It was a great experience, among others, to become the friend and associate of W. T. Stead in days when his name was almost the biggest in journalism,, and it may be doubted whether Stead himself was ever so judiciously estimated as in the character sketch by Mrs Grande included in this volume. Of the work of Mr Grande as biographer no fault can be found on the score of accuracy and balance, but' it is to be regretted that he did not exercise more restraint in the reference to Mrs Grande's home-life. One sentence about her marriage, and two or three about h?r death, go about as far as a biographer may without lapsing into sheer vulgarity. (London: Chapman and Hall.)

WOMAN MILITANT. Mrs Bertrand llussell knows precisely what-she means, and says it. She means that man is very much of a lnimbug and .a good deal of a brute. Woman has been the victim of a "system of masculine repression which has lasted. almost unbroken since the beginning of history." The "sex war" of the last twenty' or twenty-five years was a "disgraceful exhibition," which would not have come to a truce so soon but that it was eclipsed by the "still 'more disgraceful exhibition of the European war." In reward for women's services "in helping the destruction of their offspring," men dropped them a few Dames and M.B.E.'s. They gave the vote to the older women "who were deemed less rebellious," and the women being foolish enough to accept this as the settlement, or at least as the beginning or the end of the class war, feminists palled a truce _and abandoned, the tactics of militarism. But "you never know where you have Jason. He was a soldier, mark' you, and a gentleman. Forbidden open warfare, he takes to sniping. He snipes tho married women out of those positions for which they are peculiarly fitted, as teachers or maternity doctors. . . . He cheats unemployed women out of their -unemployment insurance more craftily and brutally than he cheats his fellowmen. . . . He seeks

by every means in his power to drive woman * back to matrimonial dependence and an existence on less than half a miserably inadequate income; and then be mocks at her when she claims the right to stem the inevitable trend of children, whose advent will but aggravate man's difficulties as well as her own." only'her preliminary skirmishes. Mrs Russell does not bring all her artillery to bear until she leaves man as a politician and attacks him as a husband and a lover—or rather as one of the many husbands and lovers that she says every free woman is entitled to if she wants them. That ipart of her book—she calls it "Hypatia" because "Hypatia • was a lecturer denounced by Church dignitaries and torn to pieces by Christians"— readers of this notice bad better sample for themselves. (London: Kegan Paul. Ohristchurcli: Whitcoinbe and Tombs.)

NOVELS. Headers who are still prehistoric enough to be romantic will be pleased that "Elizabeth" has escaped once more from her German garden. Her new book is called simply "Love," and if that does not terrify, the book itself will not. It is probably quite sincere, and for all its sentimentalities is more than a little pathetic. "Elizabeth" cannot of course be pathetic without also being playful and mischievous, but it requires a good deal of callousness to laugh at the desperate attempts of a middle-aged woman to be an adequate wife' and sweetheart to a romantie boy. To balance this situatiou "Elizabeth" makes her heroine's daughter love a middle-aged parson, and offers us this double-barrelled tragi-comedy as an argument—so far as a novel can be an argument —for insisting on truth as the foundation of marriage. In spite of the situation the book, being by "Elizabeth," carries you along as easily as,* and a good deal less bewilderingly than, the average movie drama. (London: Macmillan and Co.)

Mr Allen Raymond's "The Heart of Salome" could fittingly be entitled "Hell Hath No Fury Like a- Woman Scorned"—except perhaps for the length of such a title. The main stage of the novel is modern Paris, and the author has moulded the elements of love, 'luxury, and passion into a thrilling

story. There is much of smart writing, also of the overdone descriptive touch. Diane Mayfield, the modern Salome, holds the centre of the stage. Her betrayal of her lover, of the American secret service, to her hidden employer, an Oil King; then the poignant period of remorse, are graphically depicted. An excellent character is the Hon. Hubert Mainwaring, an English aristocrat, vrho nobly plays his part in a satisfactory •unravelling of tho Mayfield dilemma. (London: Duckworth.)

"A Bowl of Red Roses," by H. C. ? Hardingc, is full of tensely emotional situations. The author, whose second book it is, possesses undoubted dramatic power; in the daring phases of the narrative there is nothing overdrawn; the 'various characters are strongly, and naturally, presented, while through all there is threaded a strengthening vein of cynicism. Stephen Meynell—a rising politician, handsome and ambitious —becomes intrigued with Claire Bathurst, wife of his boyhood chum, while the latter, a hunter and a man of open spaces, is away in Africa. Meynell'a wife, engaged in slum work, is oblivious of -the liaison, which has developed into a 'topic for society gossip. Bathurst returns, and, coldly received by his wife, seeks a solution. He has, however, dallied too long in the wilds. The incidents which lead to an exceptional climax, are powerfully described. (London: Constable and Co.)

"The Happy Recruit," by W. Pett Ridge, is one of John Long's half-crown series of copyright novels, which he has found it worth while re-issuing. It is good to meet Mr Pett Ridge again, whose humanity and humour afford so welcome a change from the ever-dominant problem of many of the modern novels.

NOTES. Those who pay income-tax will -welcome the "Income and Investment Record' compiled by Messrs "Whitcombe and Tombs to meet the requirements of the individual tax-payer when furnishing his annual return in the new income-tax form. The book contains four pages of instructions, with a specimen statement for a tax-payer whose income is part salary, part commission, part rent, and part interest; and tho rest of the volume (about 90 pages) is ruled and headed page by page for actual entries of receipts, payments, investments, etc.

Mr A. B. Piddington, K.C., of Melbourne, who was chairman of a recent Royal Commission on the basic wage, and who is> not unknown in the Dominion as a writer and lecturer, has reissued through Macmillan and Co., his 70-page booklet. "A Family Basic Income." Mr Piddington believes' that it is possible without injuring industry to provide a generous living wage for all workers and their families, and he believes also that he has a practical method for doing it. Unfortunately he believes also that, in issuing 'this booklet, he is helping to carry out "the paramount, biological law of nature and of society," and it is a little difficult to rise to that conception of things before beginning to read him. The book is an interesting discussion of a problem in whirh millions of people are interested, but to call it a contribution to the problem's solution requires a little more courage.

"The epics cf 'Tom Jones' and 'Amelia' ought to be given to every girl on her eighteenth birthday. . . . Carefully read and taken to heart, they would save women from innumerable mistakes and tears." That was the judgment of John Oliver Hoboes (Mrs Craigie) in an article slip contributed to the "Academy" in 1904. It is not everyone who could subscribe without hesitation to this opinion, for it is obviously somewhat paradoxical, and Fielding's novels were not intended for "jeunes lilies." Nevertheless, writes W. L. Courtney in the "Daily Telegraph," for those who have the greatest admiration for the novelist and are not deterred by his occasional coarseness, the views of so clever a woman as Mrs Craigie represent a real truth. Fielding is not coarse in himself, as his rival, Richardson, tried to make out; he is living in a coarse age, and has to deal with people who are totally devoid of refinement. If he is to give a picture of the period with which he is concerned, he must of necessity deal with ugly things; and it is often the case that ugliness frankly expressed—without shy reticence or sniggering hints and innuendos —is better and more honest than the suggestiveuess of Richardson's heroines. Moreover, whether Fielding is coarse or not, he is never vulgar or meretricious or prudish: he will have nothing to do with effeminate, or emasculated specimens of humanity, nor yet with those who prate about virtue more often than they practise it. - But i 3 there any necessity to defend Tom Jones? After an enumeration of his many faults and his deplorable lapses from correct behaviour, is he not at his worst a lovable scamp and at his best every inch a man?

The vorse which the Prince of Wales wrote on the battJe-cruiser Repulse as the warship bearing him down the African coast from Lagcs, crossed the equator recently, finally has made its way to land. Catching the spirit of the festal occasion, when Father Neptune during the ceremony presented an address offering to the Princo the hand of his "daughter," a green-gowned sailor lad with a "fighting" face, the Prince responded with a verse of his own composition:

"I thank you for vour kind suggestion "About your beautiful Princess; "But may I ask you juat one question "Where in did ehe get that dress? "But in epito of all I'm forced to spurn her "Though your offer makes me proud. '"ics, my Kin?, I must return her, "Pets en board are not allowed.

Ecstasy 5s not a worn-out emotion, says the "Literary Digest," for Arthur Symons, though of the group of the 'nineties, shows some of it in a sequence called "Chant d'Amour," of which we quote one phase from "The Buccaneer":— CHANT D'AIIOUR. I lean from the window and wonder and dream, As I wait, as I wait; She is coming to-night, and I dream end I wonder, At watch for a hurrying shadow from under The trees by the fountain, the Bhadow of trees; She will see me, and wave from the shadow of trees Her love with her hand, as I wait, as I wait For my love in a dream. Then a step on the stair, then a hand on the door, A3 I wait, as I wait; She is here in her hat and her mantle of mauve, Just matching the tint of the cheeks of my lore; Her lips are on mine, and her arms are around me, Her heart on my heart throbs with joy to have found me, To have found and to know that I wait, that

I wait Por her lore evermore.. "The difference between wine and tobacco is that wine makes people talk without thinking, but tobacco makes them think without talking," said Mr Justice Shearman at a recent dinner in London. .