The Faggot

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 909, 28 February 1930, Page 14

The Faggot

A Bookman’s Bundle 4 ■ 'HE LIVES and characters of J[_ most people, and their writings if they happen to be writers, luyre length hut very little depth,” writes Leonard Woolf in “The Nation and AthenEeum.” “Milton and Wordsworth, Racine and Voltaire were great writers, and the literary critics and biographers of every age find something worth saying about them or thei works. But even these giants, though Ajeir works are masterpieces. .are easily fathomable. There is no mystery about them, and what has been said about them once can only be said again. Their art or wit or poetry lives magnificently oa the surface, but as snen and writers, one can never forget, they are dead, mummies—you have only to unwrap one or two of the magnificent wrappings and you soon come to the little pinch of dust. It is this shallowness of the human mind and character which makes the dead so terribly dead —the libraries so full of books and the hooks so empty. But this shallowness is not universal nor inevitable. Very, very rarely a man is born who may not have one of the commoner gifts ’of dazzling genius, immense talent, an iron will, colossal intellect, or supreme imagiaatiom but a little more depth of character than the average. Old Johnson had to r little extent this depth of character, and so, I think, had. his namesake Ben. Goethe had it, and Beethoven and Tolstoy and Disraeli, and possibly —though this is pure conjecture—Shakespeare!” ■J6" •M’ *3s’ A new poem by Walter de la Mare published recently in the “Observer”: Twinkum, twirlum, twistum, twy, llow many rooks go floating by. Caw, caw, in the deep blue sky? Twinkum, twirlum, twistum, tw'ce, 1 can listen though I can’t see, Seven sooty-black rooks there be. Twinkum, twirlum, twistum, twoh. Who can say what he don’t know? Blindman’s in, and round we go! •* In her introductory note to "A Personal Record,” one of the volumes in a new collected edition of the works of Joseph Conrad, the novelist’s widow describes how her husband fro. quently took her copies of his first editions and replaced them by a second, and, in one case, a third edition without having a remote idea of th vealue of his first editions; nor did she herself realise this until long afterwards —apparently when she wae about to transfer all or most of these, her treasures, to Mr Keating, a true and sympathetic friend of both her husband and herself.