NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20104, 6 December 1930, Page 15

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

A NEW DICKENS CORNER. Tka Dickens Advertiser. A Collection of tlie Advertisements ill the Original Parts of Novels by Charles Dickens. Edited by Bernard Darv/iu. Elkin Mathews and Marroc. (7s Gd net.) Mr Bernard Darwin's book is a delightful account of the advertisements ! which appeared in the monthly parts of Dickens's novels; beginning with "Pickwick." "When Sam Weller made his bow in the fourth number, the great j tide of popularity rose and rose, the j pillmakers and hairdressers and booksellers awoke and poured in their ad- i vertisemcnts. With Sam's advent there | began the Pickwick Advertiser, of ! which twenty thousand copies were ultimately printed and sewn into the j numbers." Bibliophiles know, of course, that the advertisements constitute an j intricate problem of "points," establishing the order of different issues; but Mr Darwin sensibly ignores all that and settles down to enjoy the advertisaments for their own sake. Clothes were treated in a commonplace style, though Mr Doudney the tailor broke out into verse, with an intolerable heave and struggle in the metre of the last line. Also. "Mrs Geary's genius has full swing'' in one of her products, which were corsets, and she proclaimed her skill in dealing with "parts adapted to prominences.'' Dr. Schmidt of Berlin had "discovered a method of constructing magnets of any power of attraction and succeeded in establishing their use as a certain and powerful remedy when applied, according to his own practice, to" any disease at all, almost. But the sufferer did not need to go to Berlin; the doctor lived in Half Moon street. Soap—perhaps because soap-makers thought people had to buy soap r:id would buy soap without being cajoled —was not advertised until the late period of "Edwin Drood," when Mr Pears was the pioneer; but there was a single exception. In "Pickwick,'' once and once only, Mr Pittis of the Isle of Wight advertised his Arenean Soap—"the result of Chemical and Geological research in the Isle of Wight, among whose enchanting cliffs a substance has recently- been discovered possessing qualities of a saponaceous character." Perhaps the substance ran short, }ierhaps l'unds; at any rate Mr Pittis cried once and cried no more. But hi 3 lofty style was upheld by other men, by Mr Ifowland, fumed for his Macassar oil, Mr Ede, who made the Odoriferous Comnound or Persian Sweet bag and Air Oldridge, the maker of Oldridge's Balm. They all crammed their space with dignified eloquence in small type; but the Victorians were more patient than the modern advertiser's public. They submitted, perhaps willingly, to long courses of instruction, and may even have read through the "sixteen closely printed pages" advertising Lockhart's "Life of Scott," with extracts from the indexes and contents lists and "page after page" of comment from the reviews. Pi us were solidly advertised, one a "splendid new pin with immovable solid head, patronised by her Majesty and all the Royal Princesses" and possessing "a brilliant silver-like appearance ami incomparable points"; allot her, the "Xe plus ultra pin," which had a "perfect solid head and smooth adamantine point.'' This was Kirby 'a pin, 'and another British pin was the ''Homemade Macaroni and Vermicelli," which, in spite of the Italian name, unpatriotic people neglected in favour of Italian pins. The makers stated their grievance very nobly:

If. has always appeared to us anomalous that Englishmen, iviiilo universally preferring to admire unci uphold the izifit'tutions, fame, and character of their own country, almost a* universally evince a strong partiality for articles of foreign production not on account of any superiority they possess over tho productions of their own country but merely because they are foreign.

Tho advertisement of tho London Stereoscopic Company is reproduced in facsimile. It depicts a numerous Victorian family, with woolly dog, admiring some of the "10,000 groups and scenes from Nature's loveliest nook and dell to its grandest alpine glaeier," while above them is scrolled the apt motto from "Hamlet'': "Seems, Madam! Nay, it IS." In the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appears the first advertisement of Jaques's Croquet Games. A young lady in billowing skirts and those odd, shapeless Victorian boots, is about to play a stroke. Alas, her stance is wrong and lier hands are misplaced on the mallet, the left below the right. An excellent chapter reviews the literary advertisements. One of them announces "Vanity Fair," another Thiers' "History of tlie French Revolution." Mr Moses, the indefatigable versifier, tailor, hatter, and hosier, deserves Mr Darwin's separate notice, as one specimen of his work will prove: If you entertain any respect for your calves, Come to Moses, whose articles ne'er rip in hulves, Come to Mopes, who drain not your purse to its dregs, To Moses, whoso trousers will honour THE LEGS. Hut perhaps the most entertaining part of this treasure of entertainment is the chapter on the Pill; and it would be a pity to forestall the reader's pleasure in it by even one quotation.

A POET'S PHILOSOPHY. Coleridge as Philosopher. By Prof. John H. Muirhead. Allen and TJnwin. (12s 6d net.) Professor Muirhead, the author of this book, is also editor of tho series (the Library of Philosophy) to which it belongs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has long been known as a poet of genius, and as a thinker of very great merit. Of recent years many hitherto unpublished manuscripts have come to light, and it is partly on the basis of these that the present work has been produced. "Coleridge as Philosopher" has been published in the hope that its author will be able to make it the first of a number of books in which tho his tory of British and American idealism will be traced more fully than has been done hitherto. Coleridge's thought is in the great English Platonic tradition, and he has had a very considerable influence on Anglican theology. He was not a systematic philosopher, but Dr. Muirhead has succeeded in setting out in order, so far as the literary remains permit. Coleridge's views on Logic, Metaphysics, Morals, the Philosophy of Nature, of Politics, of Fine Art, and of Religion. His philosophy was a Christian-Platonic Theism, not unlike, in many respects, the doctrines of Dean Inge. From a purely philosophical point of view he laid more emphasis on his per sonal need of a forgiving God and on his own sense of sin than is justified by human experience generally. But many readers will-be glad to have the argument summarised from one of the unpublished manuscripts in which Coleridge expounds his ideas m the goodness of GJod, and the existence o* evil Dr. Muirhead is quite right when he savs that there are few things ot equal power in the literature of Theism, and likens it to the "daring logic ot Plotinus. One of Coleridge's greatest merits was his perception of the importance of individuality as a philosophical principle. A being's individuality lies in its being able to "reach out to and assimilate elements lying beyond the

limits of its own space and time existence," while still remaining a self-maintaining unit. Coleridge explained the world as a development of such individuality ever expressing itself in higher forms. All this is quits in accord with the best philosophical thought of our own time. Coleridge's high place in literary criticism has always been acknowledged, but this book will show that as a metaphysical thinker he is also worthy of serious consideration. He might well have done more, had it not been for the pathetic weakness shown in his slavery to opinion; a weakness that made his thought as well as his life something of a splendid failure. Students of philosophy will wish Dr. Muirhead God-speed with his historical enterprise, and hope that the remainder of it will be as successful as this beginning.

TWO POETS. (I) Collected Poeniß, 1920-IS3O. By Alfred Gordon Bennett. Duckworth. (83 6d net. , (ii) The Armed Muse. By Herbert E. Palmar. The Hogarth Press (3s 6d net). Mr Bennett is a wordy poet. lie uses too many words, an r 3 he is driven by his want of both tlio intellectual and the emotional force of poetry to make his verbal front as imposing as he can. He sees a liner going down the St. Lawrence at night and excites himself:

She comes. A pale pantechnicon of dream On this unmoonlit, ehimmering, swaying, vast River of starß afloat: leisurely past The somnolent city drifting as a gleam, A radiance, an effulgent, fulvous beam Strayed through the oether-wastes; a meteor fast Flung from some affluent sun, who idly cast It earthward in a golden, glowing stream.

No expense has been spared on the fireworks; but the ungrateful reader will still wonder how a creeping van can get up the speed of a meteor. Mr Bennett likes to range Time and Space, but he does not bring much home: Sleeps dead Carthage in the dust, Ah eventually must Sleep all cities 'neath the sun— Time permutateth every one . . . . . . You and I within the tomb, Dear, shall disintegrate—grow rotten — Decompose—be quite forgotten By the friends we loved the best ... Fiddlededee 1 I'd rather rest In bricky ruin like a city, Than engender maggots' pity. Fancy lying dead -and dirty— ' Two Immortals, under thirty! I It is the philosophy of fiddlededee, indeed. to prefer one impossibility to another. ... a star Tossing its fulvous, fiery mane, Down the abysses fell Thundering amid leonid rain. Tossing its fulvous, fiery mane, I Carving a devastating lane To its sidereal Hell— Tossing its fulvous, fiery mace, Down the abysses fell . . . The vain thing had "flaunted its glory in God's face"; but the reason is superfluous. Anybody would be glad to sec the last of that shock of fulvous hair. Even when Mr Bennett comes down to easier themes he is not less important about them. My love is going to take her bath; but there is in this perhaps ordinary event a significance alarmingly far beyond the hygienic delights of coap and water. Mr Palmer's poetry is not inflated. It is lean and tough, sometimes awkward, but moves often with a grace that expresses a clear and single purpose. "Cry, if you like, to God," says Islimacl's Song, "To help you to your winning. But deeper than crying to God Set your face against sinning."

Then, when the great Darkness steals on you, And your feet slip away from the ground, When the leopard and lion have got you, And your best friends make no sound, When the desert's devouring starkness Is taloned on sunset shelf.

Point lightly your spear at the darkness And put your trust in yourself.

And you'll find, ere the night's half over, That the hideous moonlit sand Is soft to the feet as clover And cool as snow to the hand . . .

When the desert wakes bloody and rampant, Stand; and take heart where you are. For He stoops to the aid of the valiant To the nethermost star.

Mr Palmer sometimes ■weakens sentimentally, as in "The Tramp," and one or two other poems, but he does not weaken towards himself, and this is his great strength.

THE RAKONITZES. . Mosaic. By G. B. Stern. Chapman and Hall. This is the third of Miss Stern's novels dealing with the Rakonitz family, and it is perhaps as well to name the other two, for the benefit of readers who do not know them: "Tents of Israel" and "A Deputy was King." Like the "Forsyte Saga," this group of novels becomes more impressive as it extends and the diversity of characters, places, and episode grows into unity. "Mosaic" is itself a long novel, perhaps half as long again as the standardised product; but we are all getting used to amplitude again, and even if we were not, would be foolish to wish that Miss Stern had been briefer. From the beginning, when old Great-grandfather Bettelheim of Dantzig. pays one of his trade visits to Sigismuna Rakonitz in Vienna, to the end, when Letti provokes Berthe by old-time devices to make sure that Berthe is herself still, nothing is superfluous; at least, there is nothing one would wish away—indeed, nothing that does not draw the eye back (the infallible test of goodness) to enjoy it again. Letti looked up innocently. ''But what is it t* * v "Always the ash in the coffee-cup! Always' A hundred times I have asked you! ilon dieu, have I not provided ash-trays? All over the room ash-trays. But no, you prefer the cup; or if not the cup, the saucer, like a horrid little vendeusel" "Berthe, you are a fuss. 1 ' Letti [a grandmother many times over] was delighted at tho success of her ruse. This was home ii now and then, "when there is no one to see—' * . "It does not matter, to but it does to me, very much, that- you ruin a whole Sfcvres coffee-set!" . . "Ma ch6re, to have ash put in it, it ao«» not hurt the china at all.*' "And the buruing end of the cigarette when you extinguish it, pressing it down, that does not hurt the china, either? No! Nor* "No," said Letti. •'I tell you it spoils the china/'

"I tell you it does not." This was better, much better. Presently, humming a little. Letti went into Bertha's bedroom to unpack the heavier portion of Berthe's lugeace, which had now been brought up. When Berthe came to bed, she would find the room as though ahe had never left it. But after all this only has its true flavour when JBerthe and X>etti are familiar ; and the excellence of Miss Stern's Jewish saga is that its characters stand the exacting test of familiarity. THE HONEST MIND. Straight and Crooked Thinking. By Robert H. Thouless. Hodder and Stoughton. From W. S. Smart. (5s net.) It is to be hoped that no reader will pass this book over because its title suggests an origin in the jargoneering school of mental uplift. The title is an honest anil exact, not a pretentious, description 02; the contents. Dr. Thouless, who is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Glasgow, writes penetratingly about the tricks of thought and language by which people deceive them-

selves, and are deceived by others. The very first chapter, on Emotional Meanings, exposes perhaps the most mischievous habit of controversialists. If men were quicker to see that truth of fact is harder to find when opinions about.it are emotionally phrased, they would be moro suspicious of pleaders who habitually use emotional words. "The spirit of impartial investigation of facts unswayed by irrelevant emotions has given us great advances in the sciences. We look forward to the day," says the author, "when we sliall be able to discuss and settle such questions as Free Trade v. Protection, Public v. Private Ownership, and Disarmament treaties as successfully as physicists have discussed and settled Einstein's theory of relativity." The book is as amusing as it is practical and acute, and the discussion at the end, illustrating crooked thinking, with footnotes on the arguments employed, is a little masterpiece in its own way.

HISTORICAL DIVERSIONS. Bagatelle and Some Other Diversions. By George Preedy. John I»aue, The Bodley Head. (7s 6d net.) Mr George Preedy, a romantic whose 4 'sense of the past 7 ' has constructed two fascinating novels in "General Crack" and "The Rochlitz," iu this book allows it to play upon the roofless towers of Karolefeld, where th#» oak growa near the hearth of tho great ball and the trees of the heavy forest have encroached up to the fallen walls—the tarnished mirrors in the gilt and stucco pavilions hidden in airy woods or agreeable paths—a villa on the Brenta —a straight-fronted, shuttered palace facing the fountain where th-: gladiators washed their wounds outside the Koraan Coliseum—a secret and dark-balconied residence in a narrow street of Madrid —an extravagant chateau close to the Russian frontiers. .... They are "easily peopled by phantoms," whose story (the writer feels.) he transcribes rather than invents, for it- arises "as naturally. ... as mist from a lake at the close of an autumn, day, or pungent perfume from a plucked and dying flower;" As becomes a romantic, Mr Preedy is melancholy. These creatures of the misty, perfumed past are "cheated, thwarted in ambition or passion, or dissatisfied to agony with the bagatelies of their moment." They all pursue each other in vain, "hoping to clasp the long-lost, the perfect lover; and always embrace delusion." So readers know what to expect; and to many readers this is a rich expectation. It, will not be di-sappointed. Wallenstein at Karolsfeld, near Nuremberg; the Grand Duke Gian Felice of Florence; Philip V., a rat in the gilded trap of Madrid; the Marfichal de Villars subduing the rebel Camisards: there is not a story without the gallant., that stirs the heart and the sadness that touches it; but, as Bentley said of a celebrated work, "You must not p.all it Homer." MORE EVERYMAN. (i) Conversations of Goethe •with Eckermann. (11) Amelia. By Henry Fielding. 2 Vols, (iii) Middlemarch. By George Eliot. 2 Vols. (lv) Shorter Novels: Vol. 111, Eighteenth Century. (t> Battlin the Beefer. By Edward Howard. Everyman's Library, Noa. SSX to BG7: J. M. Sent and Sons, Ltd. (2s set each.)

Tlio standards which have kept Everyman's Library at the licad of all the reprint series, while its list hag lengthened towards the thousandth volume, show no sign of being relaxed. It would be idle to recommend any of the new titles; they stand above any such need. But it ought to be said that the "Conversations" are introduced by Mr Havelock Ellis, while it would be worth duplicating " Amelia" on the shelf in. order to have Professor Saintsbury's few pages. With "Middlemareh," an imperishably great novel, is reprinted part of .Leslie Stephen 's essay from 1 ' Hours in a Library." The scries of shorter novels, having reached the ISth century, provides the reader with "Rasselas," "The Castle of Otranto," and "Vathek" in one volume, which is the best kind of "confused feedingand if children no longer want to read "Kattlin the Reefer" the race is in its decline.

FROM THE MINNESINGERS TO FRANZ WERFEL. German Lyric Poetry. By Norm a. n Macleod. Hogarth Lectures on Literature, No. IS: The Hogarth Press. (3s 6d net.)

A study of the German lyric from Walther von dcr Vogelweido to Hofmannstkal and Rilke, George, Munchhausen, and Franz Werfel. It is also an anthology; for about sixty poems ara quoted in full, and translated. Mr Macleod succeeds very well in his own translations. A few in Lowland Scot* are specially happy, including Heine's "Elogest aus nack Sonn' und Glfick," in which the difficulty of Deutsche Treuc, deutsche Hemde, Die verschleisst man. in der yremd*, is neatly dissolved in German sarks, leal German herts Fare but ill in foreign, pairts. But the translator remembers Johnson : s remark on second marriages, that they are the "triumph of hope over experience," and applies it with a sigh, to verse translations of Heine. As s sketch of a long development the book could hardly be bettered. ♦ MIMIC. Laments for tho Living. By Dorothy Pajker. Longmans Green and Co. Miss Parker has a good deal of Sinclair Lewis's skill in dialogue: as if she had listened to people talking, and then with perfect mimic aecuraev -revealed them by repeating their speeches. One of these sketches is the monologue of » woman slowly getting drunk in a "speakeasy"; in another a woman's thoughts trace over and over again the same painful circle, while sho is waiting for her lover's telephone-call; many of the ethers are like the overheard dialogues of strangers, brief, but completely informative. There are a few stories in an ampler manner, among them two of thj best things in the book, the story of Mr Durant, a meaner, more odious Babbitt, and the pitiful story called "Big Blonde." Miss Parker's humonr is corrosive. She knows what she dislikes in life, and that appears to be nearly everything. The rare touches of charity are,, therefore, all the more welcome.