LITERARY NOTES
THE "I REMEMBER” SCHOOL
Compton MacKenzie's New Novel.
GENTLE MELANCHOLY
"The darkening
green," Mr.
Compton Mackenzie's new novel,
belongs
to the
remember" "I
school. It is a re-creation, as "The Memoirs of a Fox-hunting.
THE CHINA MAIL, MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 1934.
AN ARTIST IN A FURY
Mr. Eric Gill's
Message
For The Moderns
(By Harold Nicolson.)
Mr. Eric Gili has contributed to, be re-established.
That connec-
Man" was a re-creation, of some-the. Twentieth Century Library ation can only be formed by an "It volume entitled "Art and a Chang: "Idea." What is such an idea to thing that is passed away.
(The Bodley be? Is it to be religious, political looks lovingly back to the parish ing Civilisation"
se or social? Mr. Gill does not ex- pump, which, long since. has given licad: 20. 6d). His book is
plicitly answer that question, un place to the petrol pump,
less his conception of "holiness" be intended as an answer.
It oxades a gentle melancholy over the reflection that the symbol of living water round which a community might dwell has yield. ed to something disruptive, some thing that keeps people haring away from abiding contacts.
Charm Of A Village The village of High Beeching is the background of Mr. Mackenzie's picture. In the foreground is the house called Wivelord, where
Grace and Constance Ardley lived
provocative that many readers will find it provoking.
"Rome," begins Mr. Gi, "is burning at least the gunpow der is in the cellars-this is no
Yet the value and interest of this book are to be found rather
time for dope. There is a thing in the questions which Mr. Gil] called 'bunk" It is not a nice raises than in the answers which thing; it is pretence, hypocrisy, he 'provides. make-believe... There is also
The main reason, I suppose, why
a thing called 'debunking. This some of us feel sa saddened by the
Nazi regime in Germany is be cause it has destroyed that other
is a most. salutary activity,
wish to debunk" Art."
The reader who survives this Germany which liked us and which
Joe E. Brown, First National comedian, is seen at his best at the Alhambra Theatre in "You Salda Mouthful", which is showing to-day,
WHIMS OF AN HEIRESS
Banker's Daughter Who Worked As A Clerk
REALITIES OF LIFE
CHINESE JUDGE IN LONDON
Visit To Law Courts
DEEPLY IMPRESSED BY BRITISH JUSTICE
Mr. T'an Chen, vice-president of The Best Time. Ever" by Bertha the Judicial Yuen of China, a
Ruck-Hodder and Stoughton; position like that of a deputy Lord 78. 6d.
Chancellor, visited the Court of The whims of a young and pret-Appeal in London recently. Ho ty heiress form the theme of this was welcomed by the Master of the book, which is full of light hum-Rolla, Lord Hanworth, and Lords our. The heroine-If this way- Justices Romer and Maugham. ward, "modern" girl could" be call Afterwards he wont into the ed such-is the daughter of a very court where Lord Hewart was pre- wealthy banker and she has near-siding..
..
ly everything she could wish for. Mr. Tan Chen, after attending But true to type she tires of do-the royal garden party at Bucking- ing nothing and decides the work at ham Palace, said that seeing the her father's bank for a period of King and Queen would remain one of the most memorable events of two months as a júnior clerk.
[his life.
Romantic Side
During these eight weeks le faced for the first time the realities of life-and
Convincing Story Of The Sea makes god.
initial passage will find in the we liked that new young Ger- FAMOUS BOOK FOR
Something Important
UNIVERSITY
Shakespeare's Works Owned By Lamb.
PHILANTHROPIST'S GIFT
Los Angeles.
Tropical Treasure Hunting.
He was deeply impressed by Bri- ho said: shetish justice, of which with "Your judges do not believe, la she theory when they are dealing with. la case. The main obiect is to
bring out the facts."
At the end of her period of vo- luntary labour she leaves the bank not the spoilt and pampered child she was, but a woman of responiai- bility, who has fixed Ideas on life.
.
COUNTRYSIDE LIFE AND COLOUR
Honest Tramps As Characters
and Vagabond's Road. By Halliwell make Sutcliffe. (John Long, 7s. 6d).
UNUSUAL TRAVEL
rhetorical repetitions of Mr. Gill many of 1928-"eager. friendly, with their mother.
owed nothing to
Of course there is a side-plot The tale is told by a schoolboy a continuous note of indignation. which,
South of the Line. By Gordon
[of romance. She falls in love who used to spend his holidays at This indignation, an Afr. Giil as any leader, which looked ardently,
Volk. (Skeffington, 78. 6d).
with the manager and the pro- Wirelord in the nineties; and the surea. us in a footnote to page 87, for the fulfilment of the Ideas of
There is no lack of excitement gress of their courtship is delight- | graciousness of the house and viis intellectual and not ethical. The social freedom and equality . .
in Mr. Volk's new story, which fully sketched. lage is increased in his mind and reader will find some difficulty in and which has since been murder- This quota- Intellectually, ed by its enemies."
Clever begins soberly enough with a de-
characterization our because it is set against the discovering what
tion comes from Miss Storm Jam- experience he has just left; a Mr. Gill is so angry about.
eson's long and profoundly inter-
scription of the 6.5. Dunbar moor-crisp dialogue combine to
It is a good many years since London school, "with its turbid
esting introduction to a book just
ed off Durban, desperately in need the novel exceedingly interesting.
Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe made a inkpots and chewed pen-holders
Can it be the bankers? Again Issued by Messrs. Constable under
A volume of Shakespeare's of a cargo. She receives a visit
name with that fine story of his and mean pointed nibs, with its and again does Mr. Gill rave the title of "Tale Without End" works, said to have onco been from a strange character named
own North Country, "Red of the weary masters and tickless clocks against "usury" in terms which 178. 6d).
owned by Charles Lamb, is includ-
His latest one has the and flatulent hot-water pipes." In are far too violent to be Intelli The author of this book swift recoli from these things, the gent. Is it the machine which ax Fraulein Lilo Linke, a young So Mr. W. A. Clark, Jr., philanthro-la ostensibly a salvage expedition. ed in the magnificent Ibrary of Lloyd, who charters her for what
Feud." same grip of outdoor life. the same colour and life of the coun- boy saw High Beeching as some cites his anger? Here again he cial Democrat, who has shared pist, which he has deeded to the but which turns out to be a search!
"wind on tryside, the same
the thing incomparably lovely; and confuses us by admitting that with her elders the fate of moral University of Southern California. for a treasure ship sunk near
"Tents In Mongolia." You may be sure ita loveliness is there is much to be said for the exile. The actual story is not in Mr. Clark, who has just died. Frenchman and bis family.
Hla chief characters are two enhanced rather than dimmed in machine provided only that it un-itself of great interest. It re deeded to the University his 20- Whe Lloyd produces girl
3
Routledge has an unusual tra- honest and manly tramps, who this retrospect.
derstands its function. Is it aes counts merely a hiking expedition tire estate (situated on one of the "breath-takingly beautiful" whom vel book appearing immediately really like the life of changeful Here High Beeching and those thetic theory which irritates Mr from Frankfurt to Paris, and a picturesque old streets here) in- he who lived in it, their small adven-Gill, and is his wrath aroused by subsequent visit to Marseilles. It cluding his astronomical observa-aboard, Capt. Nelson of the Dur-lia" tells of the adventures of the the food and shelter they get by has mysteriously smuggled after Easter. "Tents In Mongo-vagabondage and work civilly for tures and the big adventure that our always attributing to God the charm and Importance is to be came to one of them, are set down things that are Caesar's? Yet he found rather in the vivid picture or The gift was valued at $5 bar becomes uneasy. This is only young Swedish explorer Henning the way. Their daily existence is the beginning of the story, which Haslund among the nomads of pictured for us with an almost in something of a "Cranford" himself, at the end, resorts to a that it gives of what the younger spirit, writes Howard Spring in abstraction (which he calls "holi-generation of Germany might have
develops swiftly into a yarn full Central Asia.
Borrovian #delity. the "Evening Standard." There is ness" or "loveliness of the spirit") become.
000,000 Reuter.
SIDELIGHTS ON A FAMOUS POET
Swinburne's Interests
a
lonely island inhabited only by a
BOOK
heath."
BOSWELL AND LOCKHART”
of action and thrills, in which When a fellow-officer was plan- love and hate (the snake-deadly ning an expedition to Mongolia. not much, in the way of a "story" na the thing which distinguishes Lilo Linke and her friends were but the gentry and rustics are the good from the bad.
half-caste variety) prove danger-through which country he had Vet for typical of all that was most hope- counted over one by one like loved all his angered and stimulating|ful and encouraging in post-war
ous and happiness comes in the been forced to escape from the end only to those who deserve it Bolsheviks, Haslund joined him. An essay on "Boswell and Lock- specimens in a museum; and what confuson, Mr. Gill has thought of Germany, From the ordeals of
The author obviously knows his Hia book, which has already hart by Sir Robert Rait, is one they were like when they were something important which he their childhood they had derived alive and about their business is wishes to say.
way about the world, and writes been translated in Denmark, Ger- of "Essays by Divers Hands." If I understand not despair but buoyant hopeful-
convincingly of the men who go many, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia. These are the Transactions of the indicated. It is all very wistful, him aright, his message is as fol-ness, not bitterness but galety, Swinburne was one of Kenneth down to the sea in the less respec- France, and Holland, tells the Royal Society of Literature, which very "faint and kind"
not hatred but only an aggressive Grahame's admirera, and wrote an table kinds of ships.
Mr. R. W. Mocan has edited. The artist essentially is a work- love. No person who has had oe enthusiastic review of "The Gold- man-a person, that is. who is caslon to know and admire that en Age." This should not have skilled at making certain types of free and ardent generation can been a surprise to anyone who things. Commercialism. while it ever quite forget the enthusiastic knew his magificient poetry in re-
PACIFIC PROBLEMS
Essential Menace Of The Future.
UNBIASSED EXAMINATION
lows:
has degraded other workers to the sympathy it aroused. level of an int-heap, has raised
Days Of Hopefulness
the artist upon a pinnacle of isol Amid all the angered anxiety ated, and sometimes complacent aroused by Hitlerism it is a good individualism; it has thus render- and necessary thing to recall ed art parasitic, and not organic. those days of hopefulness.
Onr
membrance of childhood.
Some readers of Swinburne still remember that, in his daily walk at Putney, he stopped the nurse- maids, and admired and kissed the babies.
In the life of the community. Artjoptimism was not superficial; their Carlyle dealt with problems again, consists in making rather gay vitality was both progressİYA which are the cause, rather than than doing, whether the thing and true; this, I repeat, was the
us and He was intimate with the Leices the substance, of our present per-made be boots or pictures; the Germany which liked plexities. Mr. Hector Bywater, factory system, in that it has se- which we liked. I cannot believe ter circle, and later with the in his, "Sea-Power in the Pacific" vered the connection between mak-that the Furies which have fed Southampton circle.
users, means that the for such centuries upon the suf- have met Philip Sidney, Marlowe, (Constable, 105.), indicates the ers and elements of what may become the thing made is "no longer a thing ferings of the Teutons will never and even Shakespeare. He was in essential menace of the future. made by one person for another." be slaked, or that Fate will not business relations with that well. His book was first published in As a reaction against this soulless one day give us again that riot of wishing
tains a
He must
adventurar Thomas
1921, and the present edition con- standardisation, the "artist" has apple-blossom in the sun. Never Thorpe. He was certainly Secre- new preface and appen- tended to isolate himself and to should we allow ourselves to for-tary to two successive French dices giving the present relative become pre-occupied with his own get the essential rebirth of Ger Ambassadors and almost certainly And in strengths of the American and personality. This is a mistake. many, abortive though it proved a spy of Walsingham's.
GIR, Japanese navies.
Meanwhile we can recapture that 1626 he died of the plague and
monstrates how difficult it will be
In his preface, Mr. Bywater de- "The productions," writes Mr. Gill, orchard feeling only from photo poverty in his house at Fulham.
"of individual gealus and sensi-graphs; and "Tale Without End" The British Museum contains bility do not, even in their own is the beat of all such photo two copies of Florio's "Mon line of business, reach such graphs.
taigne." The first copy bears the heights
in 1935 co repeat the compromise reached at the Washington Con- ference of 1921, and adds some interesting reflections upon the influence of air-power on the strategical position of the Ja- panese islands."
sume an
as the productious of Miss Frances Yates's "John signature of Ben Jonson, and the University second copy bears what many be communities labouring under the Florlo" (Cambridge inspiration of ideas communally Press, 158.) is a monument oflieve to be the signature of Shake accepted and communally loved scholarship and research. With speare. Few men can have occu Art la more than fine art. infinite accuracy and patience pied so central a position in the more than aesthetics, more than Miss Yates has reconstructed from diplomatic and literary life of the business of producing pay-rare and difficult material a con- their age. NĮ A5-
chological states. It is more nective and a convincing portrait Miss Yates hus expended enor
The Pacific problem is kely, within the next decades, to
importance comparable only to that filled in the nine- teenth century by the Eastern. question. We
are many of us Ignorant even of the elements of this problem. Mr. Bywater's -lu- cid and unbiassed examination should prove of value to all stu- dents of foreign and Imperial af- fairs.
NEW VOLUME OF ESSAYS:
Comments On Authors.
than the adventures of special-Her investigation, for instance, mous industry on the search for Ists in self-revelation, however into the identity of Hugh Banford material. One wishes that the Intimate and moving. Art is is a model for all such inquiries. had been rewarded by discoveries the business of making in gen-land her careful criticism of Florio's as dramatic as those of Mr. Les- eral. All things made are works "Montaigne" is extremely illustra-lle Hotaon. But she has certain- of art that is the theme of this tive of the dangers of euphulam. ly produced a book which throwe John Florio was not, it is oba vivid and valuable light upon.
book."
Florio And Montaigne
S
It would be unfair on Mr.. Gillvious, an attractive man. Miss the literary background of the age to press this argument to its logi-Yates claims that he was a con of Shakespeare. feal conclusion. He would not, summate artist. Yet was he real Of all writers of detective Ac suppose, wish to be represented as ly much more than a philologist? tion, Freeman Wills Crofts seems contending that the Ajanta Cave He emerges from these pages as a to me to understand most thor- paintings are”, more "valuable" sycophantic pedant...
oughly the purposes and limita than Cezanne. His book must be
tions of his craft. His "Mystery read as a sincere amotional pro- To the ordinary reader this of Southampton Walter" (Hodder test rather than as an intellectual book will be of interest as a pie and Stoughton; 78, 6d), is exactly thesis
ture of the Elizabethan, age-an what a detective novel should be Mr. Deamond MacCarthy is the
epoch, which at times seems as ingeniour, lucld, reasonable, in- most readable of the essayists It is a protest against the mis-Abyssinia Itself...
tricate, and exciting. Mr. Crofts about books. "Experience" is the take made by the nineteenth cen- Owing to the Italo-mania of the always pays to his readers, the title of his third book of essays, tury in divorcing the idea of work period, and to his own "First compliment; of ting them which Putnam will publish later. from the idea of utility. This se- Fruits." Florio drifted at once with some acuteness These", comments on books and paration has resulted in work be into cultured society. He knew gence. He knows authors will find many readers coming too impersonal and art to Spenser. Fulke Greville, Glordano among Desmond: MacCarthy's personal. If either to Improve, Bruno. Hakluyt-Samuel Daniel great audience.
the connection between them must Ben Jonson and Anne of Denmar always prov
Work And Art
11
atory, of this adventure.
CAPSTAN
It's the finer flavour!
Navy Cigaret
for
Quality!