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MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 1933.
NOVELIST TURNS REVIEWER
Observations Of E. F. Benson
In "As We Are
WAR-TIME IMMORALITY
Mr. E. F. Benson has already the guillotiac.
Victorian times, and
now he con-
THE CHINA MAIL:
MEN WHO DEPLORED PRINTED BOOKS.
Ruskin's Peculiar
Parallel.
"Did people ery out against prin- ting as mechanised literature as they describe broadcasting as me. chanized music?" asks Sir Walford Davies,
Book Reviews
"Bowsprit Ashore By Alexander price to pay for freedom from the Under Indiani- Bone. Illstrated by: Fread cares of intrigue. Bone. Foreward by II. M. sation most of the best jobs must go Tomlinson. Jonathan Cape.to the Indians... The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the 78. ed. net.)
unaеnsa-
*
*
The malice.
"Treohaven." By Kathleen Norris. --(John Murray. 7s. 6d.} Ruskin got nearer to the parallel down in forthright and
Once again Mrs, Norris aucсEB¤~ | when he deplored printed books tional fashion are of the ships whose (which he classed with gunpowder bowsprits-usually terminating in as one of "the age") on the ground the shark's tail, they bore partly for fully exploits her favourite theme, Her four graceful sisters "Sou" Spalner"-were, no more than fornia, that they "made people use to have luck and partly to indicate a real that of pleasant family life in Call- ing everything the same shape."
NEGATIVE TROUBLES.
•
Gd.)
A beautiful singer mysteriously
The
It is a vanished world with which strong, but to the man who makes Yes; they did. One of them was Mr. Bone's memories are mostly fewest mistakes, and who know to the Duke of Urbino, who said he concerned, yet for all that surpri-profit by the mistakes of his rivals." While some of his conclusions "would be ashamed to posse95 A
challenged, Mr. printed book:" he kept some forty singly near in point of time. Those
who can write of It from first-hand will be hotly acribes copying upon parchment. A distant echo of him will be found knowledge, as Mr. H. M. Tomlinson Trevaskis has the satisfaction of in "Saint Joan," where the noble remarks in the charming preface knowing that he has expressed what To the Earl and mana deplores that "nowadays, in which he contributes to the present he had to say without fear or
volume, "do not yet dodder." reviewed us "As We Were" in early Countess "it was as if a picnic party stead of looking at books, people recollections Mr. Boce has here set
of boys and girls had invaded a read them." Druidieal temple." tinues his quest with "As We Are" Highly Coloured Picture. in an interesting volume published Mr. Benson's chapter about the He reckless young people of the war by Mesara. Longmans, Green. calls it a modern revue, and though time is a highly coloured picture of the new immorality. With the ad-
a score of years since, still literally are as attractive as any characters there is a considerable element of vent of lipstick and the rest thero
outstanding features of the wharf she has so far created and Cynthia, fiction in the narrative he evades is an appreciable tendency to plea-
eide scene in most of the seaports the dark sister, is drawn with some- Ilistsantly arranged divorce and sexual the restrictions of the novel.
of the warld, He recalls also the thing more than her ordinary skill. chapters are not without sequence promiscuity, writes Allun Monk-
The negative has its dificulties; race which vanished with the ships One feels that the writer must have they lavished their been brought up in companionship and coherence, but the scenes and house in the "Manchester Guar
dian." He does not fall in sympathy but it is not often that it presents upon which
their labour, and
their with the Lonisa M. Alcott novels and characters are typical rather than with those who "went through it such a tangle as is found in an skill,
their that this latest book is a new and devotion-the skippers and
vorsion of "Little particular.
and there is intelligent commentary, American paper.
on The sentence is froni a letter wives, "Chips," "Sails," and Bosun, quite modern
Women." In the frst place we are intro-social and political reflections duced to the country house of an the Fool's Paradise that followed written by an official of West Vir- and the old hardcase. A.B.s who re- ginia: "None of my employees garded steamboats and steamboat-
By Sinclair "Cornish Interlude." the war.
Murray-(John Murray. 78. earl, and its pictures, acen by Mr. The war is over. the war is aare not only not related to me but men with an immense disdain right to the end of the chapter. He writes Benson as something like geological bore, and we are the Bright Young are not related to each other.".
about their traditional supersti- strata, indicate certain planes or People; auch is the note. Natural- phases of taste; Bellini, Botticelli, ly, Mr. Benson writes rather of Lon- erotic fiction, a serious passage on tions, the recreations of their scanty Titian are succeeded by such a don than of England. Perhaps D. H. Lawrence, something on leisure, their pets, their pubs. The in hiding. A man living in the hotch-potch ne Leighton, Rossetti, some of these people of charming Lytton Strachey, a discussion on modern seaman, he tells us, takes shadow of some past disaster. Edwin Long. But on the whole the manners and advanced views ap-bigness versus length in novel writ-his ease no longer at his inn, but meeting of the two in the sunny Doubtless It is seclusion of a Cornish cove is the caricature. The hectic ing. Mr. Benson does not like at a whist drive.
a pretty romarice tradition of stateliness is maintain-proach ed, though frolicsome young visi- Londoners, with their frantic at- novelists to review novels, and cites a great deal better for his soul and beginning of tors are disposed to pinch the foot- tempts to escape boredom, may be Arnold Bennett as a pontifical and his pocket that it should be so.. Yet which culminates in a murder trial
a certain unregenerate contempor-there is of the traditional inferior judge of his man's calves as he hands them of the stock
I think he is wrong; that glamour, at all events in retrospect, dish or to throw peaches at the familles, but their problem is a farles.
Mr. Ben-different one. Whichever way we to abolish the novelist-reviewer about those dingy Sailortown bars egregious Grand Duke. son treats with a gentle irony the look it seems that this is a doomed would involve a considerable de- and saloons with the picturesque! pre-war complacency and its ruf-society; if this Is the English terioration in the quality of reviews, names-"Hell's Kitchen," the "Hole
"The theft of the second volume flings; he is very successful, too, in aristocracy it is time for it to go. and that Arnold Bennett, if not in the Wall," the "Liverpool Ship,"
a shrewd and and the rest of them-by which the of the Manuscript of "Guy Man aggressive Perhaps there is something of the great critic,, was
was wont to nering" is one of those crimes that suggestions of
Mr. Benson treats the old-time sailorman
seem to be without reason." liberalism. The Earl's son intro wider view in "Only those of middle sincere one.
The pages! duces to the house party a young age count who, though they may Book Society to some well-deserved steer his devious course ashore.
The book is one full of the smells writes "Observator". Fellow of Magdalene: "They called not be able to initiate any longer, sarcasms.
far and sounds of the sea and of remote are valueless except to a collector, The final "stocktaking" is him "Tickets, and he explained. with taste promise in the new wine of some pride to Lady Buryan that life, though they may personally from a cheerful one. He seems to harbours, of the tang of salt and tar and a collector dare not buy unless This is pathetic. have some dim hope of advance in and old junk and lumber and he intends to bury the loot in a cel-
rum this was a nickname given him be-prefer the old."
belar. is nitrate. Nor should Novelists as Reviewers.
psychical investigation, but he
Is there really a secret market cause his father had been a ticket- collector at Cambridge Station. The "Grub Street" that Mr. Ben-worried by algna of physical and omitted from the list, for Mr. Henry protested: 'Do shut up. son wrizes about is the upper end of moral deterioration and such trifles Bone's concluding chapters describe of this sort? We heard the other Tickets, he said. "You are such a it. He gives the points of view of as the supremacy of the American the episode in his career which day of a Morley madrigal which is frightful snob about your family." Mr Woolf and Mr. Joyce, and aug-golfers; can it be possible that he brought him into fairly intimate anly now available because the only And there is the young duke called gests that Henry James, preceded thinks Mr. Bradman greater than association with that lawless fluid. copy was in the safe of an Ameri- His conclusion is a But smuggling, robbed of the glam-can collector" who refused access alto it; and it may be that there are Tinny to distinguish him from the by Richardson and Gautier, had W. G. Grace? Iron Duke, It is amusing, a little been working, for forty years on the rhetorical indictment of all recent our which distance lends, is
National sordid, material sort of business. others whose conception of connois- heightened from reality perhapd;"stream of consciousness" method Governments up. to the
the manger. a little in the spirit of the gallant before it became a modern fashion. Coalition, which, we are to under-Rum Row as Mr. Bone writes of it seaurship is just to play the dog in
on stand, leaves us just a chance. no exception to the rule. French aristocrats making fun of There are some sensible words
Miss Freda Bone enlivens the
pleasant wood pages with gravings, some of which, however, seem to belong rather to the "Trea- sure Island" period of sea history than to the late nineteenth century of the letterpress,
the
Dear Sir/Madam,
Gloucester Building
(Residential) bong kong
January 23, 1933.
Just a few lines to advise you'
there will be a Carnival Dinner Dance on
·
Wednesday the 25th January, Chinese New
Year's Eve, extension to 1 a.m.
We trust our old patrons will bring new guests to participate in this
celebration.
Assuring you at the same time that no effort will be spared by us to ensure
successful and pleasurable evening,
Sincerely yours,
therman.
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en-
"The Punjab of To-day." Vol. II.
By Hugh Kennedy Trevaskig- (Civil and Military Gazette Lahore.)
Mr. Trevaskis continues his ecu- nomic survey of the Punjsh of to- day with the same painstaking care that he paid to his earlier volume. The author refors at length to vari- ous latter-day problems and ends with some pertinent comments on the future not only of the Province "Of old, but of India as a whole.
"and seniority ruled," he says, though some dunder-heads got more than they deserved, it was a cheap
HONG KONG NATURALIST.
Informative Issue Published.
The combined issues of Nos. 3 and of volume 3 of the "Hong Kong Naturalist just published, have been produced under the edi- torship of Dr. G. A. C. Merklots, Ph. D., M. Sc., F. In S., Biologist at the University. The price of the book te $4.
Father D. J. Finn, the local an- thropologist, contributes an article on ancient pottery, in which he deals with the subject in fascinat- ing mooner. Traces of pottery which have been found on Lamma sland are also dealt with and are well illustrated. Dr. R. B. Jackson writes on mosquitoes, an article that is Instructive and should ap peal to the layman and scientist alike,
pou
Dr. Herklots is resp for an article on local birds, while Dr. F. A. McClure deals with the narcissus, the sacredly of the Chinese, which is much in evidence at the Chinese New Year.
Articles ont the anatomy of spiders and on fishes of China, complete & most Informative issue
with a happy ending.
THEFT OF FAMOUS MANUSCRIPT.
STARTING JANUARY 25th.
AT THE
CENTRAL THEATRE
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