BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 19658, 10 September 1927, Page 14

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

verses HELEN’S THREE DAUGHTERS. Slim are tho bodies Of Helen’s three daughters, Slim and as snowy As swans on blue waters. Like water lilies Asleep on the river Drift Helen’s daughters Whore leaves lean and quiver. Three silver minnows That leap in the shallows Dip not so swiftly As three girls like swallows. I Fair as the lilies, The leaves, and the waters; As minnows and swallows Are Helen’s three daughters. *~La whence Lee, in the Virginian * Quarterly Review.’ EXHUMATION. Egyptian kings, dragged from their resting places To face a sun three thousand years more old Are found still clinging to some treu sured fragment, A ring, a rag, a gem, a piece of gold, Set by them there to comfort solitude If we wore given to indulge the dead. Each crazy wish, stuttered in last disquietude ; I would eeseech you lay beside my head A little cask of dreams, a box of ' visions, A reel of verso, a chaplet of things men said When I was still awake, that some seons hence, Anglologists exhuming London dyst May find a crumbled grave, and hurrying thence No richer for my spoils, say in disgust; “This was an Englishman. He dreamed. He was perplexed. There’s nothing hero of interest. Let’s try the next.’’ -R.C.C., in “ G JL’s Weekly.’ GOLDSMITH REVISED Is it by pure coincidence that Mr Belloc and Mr Chesterton have been dealing with the same idea in tho same way? (asks an English writer). In a recent number of the London ‘ Mercury ’ appeared the Belloc epigram:— “ 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay”; But how much more unfortunate are those Where wealth declines and population grows. Now, the first of Mr Chesterton’s 1 New Poems,’ just published, runs: “HI fares the land’, to hastening ills a prey, Where Wealth accumulates and Men ■ decay.” ■ So rang' of old the noble voice in vain O’er the Last Peasants wandering on the plain. Doom has reversed the riddle and the rhyme: While sinks the commerce reared upon that crime, The thriftless towns litter with lives undone, To whom our madness left no joy but one; And irony, that glares like Judgment Day, Sees Men accumulate and Wealth decay. A very pleasant and probably arranged piece of plagiarism. PEN NAMES THE REFUGE OF THE SHY A career of literature is. at the worst a harmless one. Many of its followers, however, appear to regard it as in the nature of a crime; at least, they are at the greatest pains to conceal their identity. Most readers, for instance, have heard of Lewis Carroll; the name of Charles Lutwidgo Daclgson is less widely known. Yet these two are oiio and the same. Lewis Carroll was a writer of children’s stories, Dodgsou an Oxford don and a mathematical lecturer. When he first began to write for the ‘Train,’ a magazine edited by Edmund Yates, he suggested “ Dares ” as a suitable pen-name, “ Dares ” being the first syllable of Daresbury, the Cheshire town where ho was born. But the proposal did, not commend itself to Yates. WHY “ELIOT”? George Eliot, tho novelist, was, as is well known, Mary Ann Evans in real life. She chose tho name “Eliot” because it was a “ fine, short, fullsounding name that matched her style and story.” At a later period Mrs Desmond Humphreys decided to be known to tho novel-reading public as “Rita.” She adopted a “short name —easily remembered—as in case ol success or the reverse she had no desiro to be known by her own name whenever she appeared in society.” A prominent novelist of the 'nineties was Mrs Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie, the brilliant author of ‘ Some Emotions and a Moral’ As a writer she perferred to be known as “John Olivet Hobbes.” “ John ” was the name ol her father and her son, while Oliyoi was fixed “ because of the ■ warring Cromwell, and Hobbes because it was homely.” Frances Elizabeth Mac Fall, after writing one novel under her own name, subsequently called hersoll “Sarah Grand,” in belief that such a name would be “simple, short, and emphatic—not easily forgotten.” Mr Arnold Bennett has contributed many articles to periodicals over tho signature of “ Jacob Tonson,” and even to-day he is apt* to suppress his first Christian name, which happens to ha Enoch. HIS OWN MODEL. Henry Seton Merriman, the writer of many popular, romances, was in private life Hugh Stowell Scott. Con oerning Merrifnan’s first book, ‘ The Sowers,’ Mr W. L. Courtney tells an interesting story id his ‘ Secrets of Out National Literature. ’ “His father,” writes Mr Courtney, “ possessed a lucrative business in the city, and Scott for some time rowed in the family - boat. But his hatred of business life get the mastery ol him, and he ceased to attend at daily practice. His father was wont at times to reproach him with frivolling in literature instead of dabbling, like his brother, profitably in stocks and shares, One day he said: ‘Now, if yon could write a book like this,’ holding up ‘ The Sowers,’ ‘ you might call yourself ah author.’ Even then tho youth kept silence. But he went on working. And at last the father aloried ia the son’s fame.

A LITERARY CORNER

THE POET HITS OUT WORDSWORTH AND CONTEMPORARIES No keen Wordsworthian can .afford to miss tho Juno issue of ‘ Blackwood’s Magazine,’ which contains an item of unusual interest—a series of letters written to his. mother by. a young Scotsman, James Patrick Muirhead, describing a visit ho made to tho poet in 1841 on tho introduction of James Watt, the son of tho inventor (says ‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). The letters are not remarkable for any light they shed on Wordsworth’s personality and habits; their value is in the revelation they afford of the- vigorous, even violent, view tho old man entertained of certain of his contemporaries. UN BURNS. Everybody knows that Wordsworth greatly admired tho poetry of Burns, and was even powerful in defence of the man, but to ins young interlocutor lie admitted certain reservations: — 'Ho said that Burns is the poet of unman passions and of the social enjoyments and rough friendships and little incidents of the life of a man in his own grade, but that lie,.never assumes the highest tone which best beseems a poet; that he never spiritualises, much less sanctities, his conceptions; that he never appears in the priestly robes or with the . majestic authority of a bard; that, while his most beautiful effusions are on a, daisy and a mouse, which met his eye as he followed the plough, and which, he has -embalmed for ever in immortal strains, yet that he nowhere in all his poems mentions the mountains of Arran, which lay constantly before him, had he raised either his eye or his mind even so high. . . .” Who will say that the criticism is not just? ON CARLYLE. ' Wordsworth went on to speak of Carlyle and tho latter’s views on Burns. Here he laid about him in admirable style:—“But who would mind . what Carlyle says, when he called Shakespeare and Milton ‘ things of shreds and patches’? True, he now Shakespeare is the first of human intellects. But who can heed even such praise from tho same judgment which could rashly and vainly and presumptuously endeavor to load the memory, of such minds with such poor censure ? I Carlyle is an enthusiast and nothing : more; if pressed about his character■ ho would say he was less, or worse, than an ordinary enthusiast, because he is an audacious, inconsistent, and unlearned one. I mentioned that I had hoard a German lady the other day say that, although she thought Car-1 lylo meant well, and had done a good j deal to get people in this country. to« read German, yet that he did not him-1 self understand German literature.' ‘And I,’ said W., ‘say that he does not understand English literature.’ ” MACAULAY AND THE REST. The next victim of the poetic wrath was Macaulay Macaulay, he says, is false in style, and in everything else; ho is more gorgeous than Gibbon, fatiguing a reader by the constant straining after something bright, and content to pick up tinsel rather than want his glitter. This, he says, may partly hp a consequence of writing much for periodicals, whore a man must condense as much showy writing as possible into the smallest possible, space; but tho false hollow nature of the man’s mind he deduces from other things as much ns from that.” Finally the old man disposed in one fell swoop of a whole constellation of contemporary stars:—“Mrs W. told him that on Monday next Lord Monteagle (Mr Spring Rice), Mr Whewell, and Mr Carlyle were to be at Keswick to lecture on astronomy, universal philanthropy, etc. Would lie go to hear them? ‘Go!’ said he. ‘I would as soon go to see so many carrion crows.’ ” And that was that. SHOPS IN FICTION FROM PUTNEY TO “BUR VILLAGE" Shops and shopping have assumed so much importance in modern times that it is surprising that more novelists have not introduced this phase of life into their books. Probably Mr H. G. Wells lias more shops in 'his novels than any other writer. Notable amongst these is tho drapery emporium of Messrs Antrobus and Co., of Putney—in that early book, ‘ The Wheels of Chance ’-—where Mr Hoopdriver worked, surrounded by piles of white linen and blankets. Outwardly ho was a decorous and attentive shopman, but, hidden beneath, was the natural man bruised and smarting after successive attempts to master a safety bicycle. WELLS’S STORES. The little hosiery shop in Fishbourno High street, that “ beastly silly wheeze of a hole!” is described in ‘ The History of Mr Polly.’ It was surrounded by a cloud of insolvency, and its steady passage to bankruptcy was indicated by an absence of returns, a constriction of credit, and a depleted till. In ‘ Kipps,’ too, tho inner working of a drapery establishment is shown; and in ‘ Tono-Bungay ’ Mr Wells describes the chemist’s shop .where that astonishing “ cure-all ” was first manufactured. But the shops most often met with in novels are the tiny general stores, like the cent shop kept by Hepzibah Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s ‘House oi the Seven Gables.’ It was with this little shop, scantily supplied with flour, apples, Indian meal, soap, candles, sugar, peas, and sweets, that Hepzibah hoped to retrieve the shattered fortunes of her family VILLAGE SHOPS. Miss Matty Jenkyns’s shop in ‘Cranford ’ was better organised, the small dining parlor being converted into a shop, but without a shop’s “ degrading characteristics.” Tea was contained in bright green canisters and comfits. in tumblers. Mis Matty’s sales during the first two days surpassed the most sanguine expectations, everyone in the village seeming to be out of tea at tho same moment! Another little general shop is described in Miss Mitford’s ‘ Our Village.’ It was “ multifarious as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will bo sure not to find.” Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, filled with suits of mail, fantastic carvings, and rusty weapons, is a type of shop which appeals specially to novelists. And few of these antique shops of fiction are so famous as Sir H. A. Vaohell’s ‘ Quinney’s ’ —both the original shop in Melchester, with its £2O black-and-white sign, and tho later establishment, a Georgian house in Soho square, where many valuable pieces, and some fakes, were bought and sold. R. L. Stevenson tells of a curio shop in ‘Markheim’; and Balzac describes at considerable length the contents of the curio shop where the magical “jvild asa’s sfcaa-1 Tjwa f<m*uL

READING AS Ml OPIATE SOME ENGLISH OPINIONS Changes in - the books found in 'the homes of the poor were referred to by Lord'Eustace Percy, President of the Board of Education, in an address to the annual conference of the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland at Cambridge. The homes of the poor used to be the place where ore -ould find at least ono or two books i *4. were companions, the homes where i.V' used to find the Bible and ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ’ being substituted at times by Fox’s ' Book of Martyrs,’ he said. There was much more real reading in those homes than now, when every member of tho family reads a great deal more. • 1 Pilgrim’s Progress ’ and the Bible had very nearly disappeared from those homes, and if they were going to revive among! the people the habit of reading they would nave to teach them gradually to select a few hooks which they would be able to read over and over again and make permanent friends and companions. THE HABIT OF READING. Speaking of the tendencies of the time in the matter of reading, ho said the purpose of teaching was not to create or stimulate the habit of reading. That habit nearly everyone had at the present moment, and had it very largely. The world had discovered that the greatest mental opiate was 'in carrying the eye along a certain number of printed lines in succession, and that habit was becoming one of the greatest dangers of modern civilisation. The eagerness with 'which people read the daily newspapers and the difficulty of getting away from them was due to the fact that, while the eye was travelling down the columns, the mind was practically asleep. The habit of reading was one of tho most interesting psychological facts of the present day, and one of the first things civilised man missed was the printed word. In that way during the war men passed even magazine covers round in order that the eye might rest upon the printed word. , In political affairs'the thinking of the great mass of our fellow . countrymen was a matter of reflex action, and the political speaker could be .perfectly certain what kind of interruptions tie would get at a given point of his speech. There was some indication that the habit of reading was . increasing that tendency to' reflex action, and it was obvious Hiat the modern daily Press was designed to increase it. CHILDREN AND THE CLASSICS.'

The only kind of reading worth stimulating was. the reading that encouraged reflection. They had discovered in the schools that school children had an enormously full appetite for classical reading, and were attracted by books like North’s * Plutarch ’ rather than by books' written specially for '•hem. That was a matter of greater significance than theories about adult reading. “ The greatest need of the present day is reflection,” ho said. “I hardly like to mention to an audience in this room that Wordsworth’s complaint was that while be was here the pulse of contemplation almost ceased to beat.’’ (Laughter.) _ What they wanted to revive in themselves and in their fellow countrymen was the pulse of contemplation. None of them had it sufficiently—it had been largely weakened by too much mechanical reading. That would enable them to avoid the taking of “ cut-and-dried ” ready-made views, whether they were traditional or novel, and would save them from the temptation to cluck violently like a hen that had laid what it thought was a new egg, when, in fact, the egg that was laid was a reproduction of what had been laid in every generation-. It would save them from all those mistakes which were daily made hy politicians as well as everyone else at the present time, and enable them sometimes to sit down and reflect and think and contemplate. (Cheers.) Professor Seward, blaster ,of Downing, supported the desirability of encouraging reading as a means to the encouraging of thinking. . Something of the kind was necessary in these days oi the crosword puzzle fanatic, the wireless fanatic, tho golf fanatic, and of many other varieties. They ought to do what they could with boys and girls still at school to stimulate the desiro for good reading. A NOVELIST’S VIEW. Mr Hugh Walpole, the novelist, snoka of the manner in which lie spent his free time during school days—reading the novels of the early nineteenth century, time which everyone who had au.v control over him described as wasted. He axnressod doubt v> he the r tho glorious picture of the vast drawn bv Lord Eustace Percy was wholly true. He believed it was “a very iirty, messy, insanitary, and unthinking past.” It did not natter so much what people read so long as they took an interest in reading, and ho saw no reason why they should imagine that the despised penny newspaper was incapable of awakening .. There was since the w.ir a great and new class of reading public feeling their way, and if they were too high-orow and too priggish in their attitude towards that public, they would only succeed in frightening them away. JOURNAL OH PIRATE SHIP A MYSTERIOUS-ENTRY. ‘ A New Voyage Round tho World,’ by William Dampier, with an introduction by Sir Albert Gray, K.C., has been published. The ‘ Sunday Times ’ says of the volume: “ A most valuable feature of this edition is the learned intro-, duction from the pen of Sir Albert Gray. Dampier, he tells us, was a born observer, and never jailed to note down in his journal descriptions of all birds, beasts, fishes, and plants which were new to him. How he managed to do this aboard a pirate ship amid a crew of noisy, drunken messmates, it is difficult to imagine; but to preserve his manuscript from damage by.water he used to keep it in a hollow piece o, bamboo, closed at each end with wax.. . “ Reference is made to a passage in the journal which has always baffled all attempts at elucidation. This is the mysterious entry in 1681, which states that in that year Dampier was in Virgiiia, and fell into trouble there of some sort. Documentary evidence has lately turned up which goes to prove that at this time Dampier was arrested by the Governor of Virginia and tried on a charge of-piracy,” j

NOTES At n luncheon parly in London recently, Mr Augustine Birrell said that some years ago he picked up a first edition of ‘ G ray’s'Elegy ’ for. & 6d, sold it for <mKn. :md suffered. the chagrin of seeing it sold to America tor ioOU, and later sold again lor £I,UUU. Mr A. S. Collins gives some interesting particulars of authors’ earnings ni his ‘ Authorship in the Days.ot' Jolmson.’ Pope received £.3,000 for his translation of Homer, Thompson £I,OOO for ‘ The Seasons,! and Akenside £l-0 foi his first book, ‘The Pleasures of Imagination.’ Young was paid Ogo for his ‘Night. Thoughts ’; Goldsmith received only 20gS for the COgs for Ins immortal vicar, but ns much as 800 gs for the comm ation called ‘ History of Aiinnatcrl NaturG. F’*iclin», drew less than £2OO Horn ‘Joseph Andrews,’ £7OO from Im Jones,’ and' £I.OOO from. ‘Amelia. Hume received £3,400 for In? Hmtory of England’; Robertson, £4,600 for ms ‘Charles V.’ Clelaiid sold his • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure for 20" S, but Griffiths, bis publisher, made a profit of £IO,OOO from it. Hannah More is said to have earned £30,000 from her works. In those days money bought at least twice as much as it buys to-day. There are.sixty pieces in Mr Walter Do la Mare’s new volume, Stuff and Nonsense.’ Some of them are written in a new form, which D© lacalls ‘Twiners/ because they consist of duoble limericks of the Lear model, moulded or twined into one. Here are two examples ; There was an old Begum of Frome, There was an old Yogi of Leicester } She sent him a tulip in bloom, Ho rolled his black eyes and he blessed her, . How replete with delight Is a flower to the sight! H brightens the day and it sweetens the night. , Oh! if all the old ladies grew tulips in Frome, . . „ . ■ , How happy the Yogis in Leicester! There was a young lady of Rheims, There was an old poet of Gizeh; Ho rhymed on the deepest and sweetest of themes. ■ She scorned all his efforts to please AmNm sighed, “Ah, I see She and sense won’t agree. So he scribbled her moonshine, mere moonshine, and she, With jubilant screams, packed her trunk up. in Rheime, , Cried aloud “I am coming, O Bard of my dreams!” And was clasped to Ins bosom in Gizeh. ‘The Solitary Horseman’ is tho strange title of a biography by Air b. M. Ellis, of G. P, R- James, an Early Victorian novelist. 'The explanation of the title is this: James made a practice of putting into his novels a character, riding, on horseback, who was seen emerging from a wood. One day James, on a visit to New York, ran in among bis friends much excited. “ Have you seeen ‘The Intelligencer?” By George! it’s trtio!”.he exclaimed. Six times has my hero, a solitary horseman, emerged from a wood! My word! I was totally unconscious of it! nancy it' Six times. Well, it’s all up with that fellow. He lias got to dismount and enter on foot—a beggar, or burglar, or pedlar, or at best a mendicant friar.” “But,” suggested one friend, “he might drive, mightn’t ho? “ Impossible!” said Mr James. “ Imagine a hero in a gig or a curricle!” “Perhaps,” said another, “ the word ‘ solitary ’ has given offence. Americans dislike exclusiveness. They are very sensitive, you see, and look out for snobs!” James made himself very merry over it; but the solitary horseman appeared no more in the few novels he was yet to write. Mr Ellis says that on 01m occasion at Abbotsford James asked Sir Waiter Scott why he had chosen to preserve for a long period the history of the anonymous authorship of the Waverley Novels. Sir Walter replied that the idea of secrecy arose, partly from caprice, partly from policy: “I didna’ like, my friend, to spoil the tolerable reputation for writing bad poetry by gaining another for writing worse prose, and I took all the precautions imaginable to guard against the discovery.” He aded that eleven persons knew his secret, and not one betrayed him. “ I restricted it to that number,” lie said, “ for I was sure if I had made it twelve there would have been a Judas among them.” ‘ Julia, Daughter of Claudius ’ has been published. This will always be memorable among Newdigato. poems, because with it the author (Miss Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan) won a prize which had never fallen before to her sex. 'The subject of tho poem is fascinating. It is the story of the Roman sarcophagus inscribed “Julia, Daughter of Claudius,” discovered in 1485 by workmen digging in the Appian Way, in which ray “the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time.” The story is told in Addington Symonds’s ‘ Renaissance in Italy.’ Removed to the Capitol, the body became an object of pilgrimage, til! • tho Pope, Innocent VIII., fearing that the orthodox faith would suffer from this cult of a dead heathen, had Julia buried secretly,' leaving, in the Capitol only the empty coffin. Miss Trevelyan follows the story closely, but strengthens its human appeal by introducing a shepherd youth from tho northern hills, who bears of Julia from a stray traveller, and comes to Rome, a breathless pilgrim, only to find:— .... the pillaged shrine, the blank bare tomb, Its faded garlands trodden into pulp By hasty feet and broken incense Ground on tho pavement, boats