NOTES

Evening Star, Issue 21748, 16 June 1934, Page 21

NOTES

Like Mr Baldwin, Mr Ramsay MacDonald is said to find his greatest recreation in books. Ho spent a recent holiday in rearranging his library. “ I believe that without variety of opinion life would be intolerable—especially without variety of opinion about trifles,” says Mr Robert Lynd.

The honorary degree of LL.D. is to be conferred on Mr St. John Lrvme, dramatist and critic, by St. Andrew’s University. The graduation ceremony will take place on June 29.

Mr Ivor Brown thinks it possible that Shakespeare knew his actors to be rather crude, and wrote for their strength, which lay in brave gestures and declamatory violence.

Telling of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey a writer in the London ‘ Star ’ says that the passage of years has left the older statues as brittle as the literary reputation of some of the poets. Wordsworth has lost a finger.

Captain AV. Jaggard has written * Shakespeare Once a Printer and Bookman.’ The volume gives instances of metaphors and technical expressions used by Shakespeare which, the author considers, show a knowledge of typography unusual at the time. Among the terms mentioned are indent, margin, and locked up in steel. The author of ‘ Napoleon and His Marshals,’ Mr A. 6. Macdonell, pronounces his name with the accent on the last syllable, according to the ‘ New York Times Book Review.’ It is added that “ it will bo well to remember that in case you should meet the gentleman. Many a beautiful friendship Jms been ruined by a "mispronounced name.”

Walter Savage Landor had many notable friendships with women, and was extremely fond of female society. Yet comparatively few of the protagonists of his ‘ Imaginary Conversations ’ are women. Mr H. C. Minchin, in his new book on the Old Lion, includes two “ conversations,” one of which _ deals with the most famous love story in the world —that of Abelard and Heloise—never previously printed.

‘ English ' Journey ’ is Mr J. B. Priestley’s twenty-fourth book. The ‘ Bookseller ’ explains why the names of two publishing houses appear on the title page. A -member of the Gollancz firm, it says, suggested the idea of the book as one that Mr Priestley might write and Messrs Gollancz publish. Mr Priestley was loth to leave his publishers, William Heinemann Ltd., and a collaboration of the firms was decided upon.

Mr W. B. Yeats, in one of his early articles for American journals now collected as ‘ Letters to the New Island,’ tells of William Allingham: “ He was greatly troubled by a custom his brother had of writing poems and publishing them in the Bally shannon papers by way of jokes, with the name of William Allingham at the foot. When one remembers his fastidiousness and his constant habit of polishing and repolishing all ho wrote, one can well imagine his indignation.”

Journalists from other lands are not free agents in Russia, says Mr Malcolm Muggeridge, in ‘ Winter in Russia.’ He states that they work under the perpetual threat of losing their visas, and therefore their jobs. Unless they consent to limit their news to what they know will not be displeasing to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, they are subjected to continuous persecution.

Lord Raglan, who has written the first volume in Methuen’s ‘ If 1 Were Dictator ’ series, offers a cynical explanation of the shuffling of offices in a new Ministry The Minister of A became the Secretary of State for B; the Secretary of State for B became the President of C, and so on. It was hoped by this means to ensure that the incapacity of these gentlemen in

their previous posts would be for* gotten, while their incapacity in their new posts would be excusable, at any rate for a time.”

As a tribute to Vernon Lee (Mist Violet Paget), a distinguished writer who has lived in Italy for many years, her play ‘ Ariadne in Mantua ’ wan performed in Florence in April. Among the books of essays and miscellanies-by Vernon Lee are ‘ Renaissance Fancies and Studies,’ ‘ Laurus Nobilis; Chapters on Art and Life,’ ‘ The Spirit of Rome,’ ‘ The Sentimental Traveller, and ‘ The Enchanted Woods.’ She haa also written a number of stories, such as those collected in ‘ Vanitas ’ and ‘ Hauutings.’

Thirteen was the age of the Russian author Michael Sholokhov when his school studies were broken off by the arrival in 1918 of the German army of occupation. His novel of Cossack life, ‘ And Quiet Flows the Don,’ now published in English by Putnam, was begun in 1926. His first stones nerd published in 1924. Under the Soviet regime in 1920 M. Sholokhov became a teacher, and at later times ho,wae an official in the collection of foodstuffs, a food inspector! a goods porter, a statistician, a bookkeeper, and 4 journalist.

Wilfred Owen was a young poet ta whom fame came only posthumously. Ho was killed in Franco in the las* week of war and a few days after winning the Military Cross. He was only twenty-five, but he had found time to write some of the most moving poems that the war inspired. His output was pathetically small, but enough to prove that the stuff of gemus_ was in him. Last month his surviving manuscripts, some in a voluE-v edited by two other young war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Blunden, some still on loose sheets of paper, were presented to the British Museum. They, had been acquired for the nation by an organisation called the Friends_ of the National Libraries, and with the help of contributions by leading British writers such as Hugh Walpole, Waiter de la Mare, H. M. Tomlinson, some publishers, and a iew others. Young Owen had a rare mind; the shell that killed him dealt an inestimable blow to literature. - - • • •