The Faggot—-

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 927, 21 March 1930, Page 16

The Faggot —-

A Bookman’s Bundle books of 1929 are readers of 1930 most likely to be conscious of?” asks Hugh Walpole in “Books.” He then say* that it is a foolish and unanswerable question, but, nevertheless, goes on to name four. They are Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms,” Blunden’s “Undertones of War.” “High Wind in Jamaica,” by Richard Hughes, and W. B. Yeats’s selections from his own poems. Mr Walpole, however, in making this choice should have been aware of the fact that Blunden’s book belongs properly to the previous year,

it having been pubiisnea in November, 1928. Mr Walpole says that the present is an exciting time for writers and readers all over the world. “Books are at last news,** he adds, “news as football, diets, and divorce are news. The pedants and the professors bewail this, but do not Gilbert Murray’s translations of the Greek tragedies sell now in thousands? Is not John Donne a popular poet, and are not the Sitwells familiar figures at the British breakfast table?”

John Buckland Wright, who has illustrated the sonnets of Keats for the new Halcyon Press, is a New Zealander by birth although he went to England at an early age and was educated there. After the war, he settled down, in London to study architecture, only to discover after four years test that his true course lay in the less restricted fields or painting and engraving. Seeking Continental experience he removed from London to Brussels in 1925, and he has remained there ever since. In addition to illustrating Keats, he has been commissioned to illustrate a selection of Poe’s tales.

Interesting dicta on the art of biography are made by Sir Sydney Lee in “Elizabethan and other essays”:

Scurrility is not candour. To pander to a love of scandal is a greater sin in a biographer than in anybody else. History encroaches on the biographer’s province to the detriment of art. The historian looks at mankind through a field-glass. The biographer puts individual men under a magnifying glass. It is perhaps some consolation that Shakespeare’e life was written after his descendants were dead I.ockhart’s “Life of Scott” is the second best biography in the language. Boswell’s biography being the first. I would place beside these noble biographic monuments two others—Carlyle’s “Life of Sterling” and Fronde’s “Life of Carlyle.” Biography of the right kir.d excludes from its scope the careers of living men, careers which are incomplete, because death withholds the finishing -touch. A discriminating brevity is the law of the right biographic method.

In “The Victorian Romantics, 185070,” by T. Earle Welby, it is recorded that when Tennyson died Swinburne was asked who ought to succeed to the Laureateship, and ho replied “Canon Dixon.” Few then h?ul heard of Dixon, and though more are aware of him since the present published selections from him, they are still few. Swinburne's answer was taken at the time as a contemptuous jolre. He was fully conscious of the unexpectedness of his reply, but it was the expression of great admiration. Mr Welby calls Dixon “the most unfortunate in the point of recognition of the original Morris group.” He mentions his pictorial gift, his grave passion, and his unobtrusive felicities. “Dixon is full of these unobtrusive felicities in poems which, written after he had emerged from preRaphaelitism, may seem rather bare and flat at first glance. With him the romantic im noise had been disci-

plined. by scholarship, by spiritual authority. He was the author of a great and disgracefully neglected history of the Church of England: his is art Anglican poetry, a poetry of spiritual romance poised between the Puritanism of Holman Hunt and the pagan Catholicism accepted for the purposes of art, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”