5, 199 TS No. 4675. Corelli 's Good 6d. Det THE ATHENÆUM CHRISTMAS BOOK SUPPLEMENT DECEMBER 5, 1919. CONSTABLE'S XMAS GIFT-BOOKS ARTHUR RACKHAM'S THE TWO ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR. THE 59TH DIVISION, ENGLAND IN FRANCE, SKETCHES BY SIDNEY R. JONES HISTORICAL TEXT by CHARLES VINCE. 21/- net. OTHER DELIGHTFUL ILLUSTRATED BOOKS ARE LITTLE BROTHER AND LITTLE SISTER. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. 12 illustrations 18 full page BLACK TALES FOR WHITE CHILDREN, by Captain C. H. and Mrs. Stigand, with 50 HANS ANDERSEN'S FAIRY TALES. 180 illustrations by Helen Stratton. Coloured frontispiece 5- net. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 130 illustrations by W. Heath Robinson and others. AMONG OUR GENERAL BOOKS ARE THE DARDANELLES, A Military Study by With maps. 18/- net. SIR VICTOR HORSLEY. A Study of his Life and Work by STEPHEN PAGET, F.R.C.S. VINCENTE BLASCO IBANEZ, THE FOUR LADY CHARNWOOD, THE DEAN, Second Imp. MARY JOHNSTON, THE WANDERERS, Write for our Autumn and Illustrated Xmas Lists LONDON: 10-12, ORANGE STREET, W.C. 2 A Second Volume of "UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES."-Just Ready. ALL AND SUNDRY By E. T. RAYMOND, Author of "Uncensored Celebrities." Cloth, 10/6 net. Brilliant character sketches of THE PRINCE OF WALES, M. GEORGES CLEMENCEAU, PRESIDENT WILSON, RUDYARD KIPLING, LORD ROBERT CECIL, JOHN BURNS, HILAIRE BELLOC, MR. SPEAKER, SIR THOMAS BEECHAM, G. K. CHESTERTON, and about 30 other prominent public men. THE LIFE OF JOHN PAYNE By THOMAS WRIGHT. With 18 Illustration s. Few great authors appeal more to the imagination than John Payne. Recog nised as a true poet by Swinburne, he was probably the most skilful translator of the nineteenth century. Among his friends were Swinburne, Dante, Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Victor Hugo, and Mallarmé. This is the official biography. THE LIFE OF LIZA LEHMANN By HERSELF. With a coloured frontispiece and 16 pp. Illustrations. Cloth, 10s. 6d. net. This autobiography has all the simplicity, the clear purity and delicate refinement of her best-loved musical compositions, and through it all runs a sense of joy and content and a happy humour. Mme. Lehmann lived a life of colour and activity."-Daily Chronicle. OLD AND NEW MASTERS By ROBERT LYND. Cloth, 10s. 6d. net. (Third Impres "A book of essays full of charm, insight and sympathy, and of the transmitted enthusiasm that is the basis of all good criticism."-Daily News. "This is a fascinating volume, and has the rigat quality of literary criticism."-Sunday Times. MEN AND MANNER By SIR HENRY LUCY. With a Biographical Note and 13 Illustrations. Cloth, 10s. 6d. net. "The book is of more than passing interest, and its value is enhanced by the reproduction of the portraits of men who were prominently engaged in public affairs half a century ago."Daily Graphic. BOLINGBROKE AND By the Right Hon. J. M. ROB- 'Mr. Robertson is an incisive writer with a "Highly interesting, researchful and valuable." -Daily Chronicle. SHAKESPEARE AND THE WELSH By F. J. HARRIES. 15s. net. Sir Sidney Lee writes: "The topic is most exhaustively treated and the author seems to me to prove beyond question his point that Shakespeare was a very accurate student of Welsh character and tradition. Mr. Harries' research sheds new and convincing light on Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness.' " SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP By SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M.A., Litt.D., "Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's analysis of Shakespeare's craftsmanship goes M.A.B. (Mainly about Books) "" 'M.A.B." is an illustrated monthly magazine for book readers and book buyers. The December issue, just ready, is a Christmas Double Number, and contains character studies of PRESIDENT WILSON and LORD ROBERT CECIL, by E. T. Raymond (author of "Uncensored Celebrities"): a literary criticism of JANE AUSTEN, by Robert Lynd, also contributions by A. P. Sinnett, Liza Lehmann, Arthur Hayden, and a gossipy LONDON LITERARY LETTER. THE ARROW OF GOLD A Novel. A copy of the December issue of " M.A.B." HALF PRICE OFFER. (Subscription Address "M.A.B." Author of "If I were to be asked in which of Mr. Conrad's writings his genius shows itself at its highest power, I should answer without hesitation, in this the latest of them."-Sir Sidney Colvin in the "Observer." THE POEMS OF ROBERT W. SERVICE 4 volumes. Cloth, 4s. 6d. net, each. SONGS OF A SOURDOUGH RHYMES OF A ROLLING STONE BALLADS OF A CHEECHAKO RHYMES OF A RED-CROSS MAN Send for a Copy of Mr. As a pleasant guide in the bye-paths of collecting, Mr. Hayden will fascinate those real collectors who love collecting for its own sake. Write for a copy of the illustrated prospectus. THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON In the French Pyrenees By ISABEL SAVORY. With TOWN PLANNING IN By RAYMOND UNWIN, F.R.I,B.A. OF INSTINCT: Chapters in the Psychology of Insects. SOME GREEK MASTERPIECES IN By WILLIAM STEBBING, M.A., Hon. Fellow of T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd., 1 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2. CHRISTMAS BOOK SUPPLEMENT. e THE GLOOMY DEAN FOR GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. Edited by Padraic Colum. Presented by C HRISTMAS is once more upon us and finds us worn' wearied, and disillusioned by a great war, and yet here again in the bookshops, meeting the eye, are two new and cheerfully illustrated editions, from London and Philadelphia, of "Gulliver's Travels," a book now nearly approaching its second century, for the use, behoof and delight of the children of both worlds. Its author akes rank with Arbuthnot and Fielding as the greatest of our ironists; but what greater irony can there be than to discover that Swift's "Travels," his "Gulliver," his, to quote a writer I believe to be still living, "gospel of hatred, his testament of woe, upon which he expended the treasures of his wit, and into which he instilled the concentrated ssence of his rage," has become a child's book and a uitable Christmas present ? The genesis of Gulliver," though the execution was entirely Swift's, arose out of a combination of famous wits, who in 1714 composed the Scribblers' Club, consisting of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay as its leading spirits, though, as the late Mr. Aitken tells us in his admirable edition of Arbuthnot's works (Oxford, 1892), Lord Oxford, Bishop Atterbury, and Congreve were associated with them. One of the designs of the Club, according to Warburton, was to write (Pope, Arbuthnot and Swift combining for that purpose) a satire on the abuses of human learning, and to make it the better received, they proposed to do it in the manner of Cervantes, under the history of some feigned adventures. Co-operative plans of this kind are seldom carried out, great wits being usually intensely individualistic, and the nearest approach to any common authorship_by_the members of the Club was the composition of the First Book of the Memoirs of Scriblerus, and even this was probably the sole work of Arbuthnot. It does, however, contain in its thirteenth chapter a broad hint of "Gulliver's Travels." But it is no more than a hint, for if ever there was a book which proceeded solely from the mind and idiosyncrasy of one man, it was "" Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships." During the years 1724-5-6 Swift as author, worked hard upon his Travels." He writes to Pope : I have employed my time (beside ditching) in finishing, correcting, amending and transcribing my Travels, in four parts complete, newly augmented and intended for the press when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears. I like the scheme of our meeting after distresses and dispersions, but the chief end I propose for myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that design without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen, without reading. ... Swift paid his second visit to London in March, 1726, bringing the manuscript of his "Travels" with him to show to Bolingbroke, Pope and Arbuthnot, and to find for it a publisher brave enough to venture his ears." The three friends were delighted with the manuscript, and a publisher was soon found, Mr. Benjamin Motte, at the Middle Temple Gate. In November, 1726, the book appeared in two volumes, and took the town by storm; but by that time the Dean was back in Dublin, tortured by the illness of Stella, and maddened, when he came to read "Gulliver," to discover how the cautious publisher, with the fate of De Foe before him, and on the advice of his Reader, one Took, a Clergyman," had mangled the text. The author of a former famous book, yclept "Paradise Lost," had, not quite sixty years earlier, been much irritated by the caution and delay of another clerical gentleman called Tomkyns. "Gulliver," even thus mangled, sold better than" Paradise Lost." Gay wrote to the author: "The whole impression sold in a week. From the highest to the lowest it is universally read-from the Cabinet Council to the Nursery." Arbuthnot wrote saying that he believed Gulliver's Travels" would have as great a run as John Bunyan, adding, “Gulliver is a happy man that at his age can write so merry a book." Happy" and merry strange epithets to apply to such a man as Swift and to such a book as "Gulliver's Travels." But Arbuthnot may have been writing more as a wise and friendly physician than as a critic, searching for le mot juste. We need not wonder that the old Duchess of Marlborough gloated over "Gulliver," for it fed her hatreds, but it is sad to read that Maids of Honour chuckled loudest over those very passages for which buyers of the editions advertised at the top of this page will look in vain. Modern pressreaders are more squeamish than Mr. Took, who probably never conceived the possibility of "Gulliver's Travels" becoming a book for children. And yet we have Gay's word for it that from the first week children seized upon the Travels, and marked them for their very own. I suppose we may rely upon this testimony, though Gay was a bachelor. The only money Swift ever made by his writings was £300 for the English edition of "Gulliver." The Irish booksellers, despite their love for their great Dean, pirated his book without either mercy or shame. Nor did the English newspaper press treat it any better, for it was reprinted in instalments in a weekly newspaper. In France, we are told, "it was read with avidity, and a few weeks after its appearance, portions of it were twice dramatized." This was indeed success. So much for the Christmas of 1726. What about the A clear note of difference is discernible among the critics. and Mr. Collins quotes Hazlitt, who declared that "Gulliver" was an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world, and that nothing but imposture had a right to complain of it." Mr. Collins, after seeking to upset Hazlitt, proceeds: At no period distinguished by generosity of sentiment, by humanity, by decency, could such satire have been universally applauded. Yet so it was. The men and women of those times appear to have seen nothing objectionable in an apologue which would scarcely have passed without protest in the Rome of Petronius. ("Jonathan Swift," by John Churton Collins, Chatto & Windus, 1893, pp. 208, 213.) Mr. Gerald Moriarty affirms that "in the records of misanthropy, Gulliver's Travels' stands for all time supreme and unapproachable.' Mr. Thackeray's estimate is well known. Sir Walter Scott was content to say: Severe, unjust and degrading as this satire is, it was hailed with malignant triumph by those whose disappointed hopes had thrown them into the same state of gloomy misanthropy which it argues in its author. But younger critics may now be found who take Hazlitt's view and think more nobly of "Gulliver's Travels." Mr. Charles Whibley, for example, has an easy task in disposing of the calumny that Swift was a misanthrope who hated all mankind, for he was not only one of the most practically benevolent of men, but the best-loved of all authors of equal fame. And as for his cynicism, Mr. Whibley declares : CLASSICS IN THE NURSERY TANGLEWOOD TALES. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Blackie's Library for Boys and Girls." (Blackie, 256 pp., 1s. 9d. net.) N° O parent whose memory goes back to the pinafore age will buy this new edition of "Tanglewood Tales" that Messrs. Blackie have issued, or it has been edited most grown-uppishly. W. K. L., who was surely born in a state of middle-age, announces in a prefatory note that he has compressed "some of the exuberantly full diction of the original text," forgetting that in those days we might be bored by piousness, but never by prolixity. So long as it was the right kind of story, with courage flashing bright weapons under dark towers and villainy working a twenty-four-hour day, we did not mind how long it took in the way. In those days we would read the worst and dullest Dumas as nowadays we could hardly read the best, and Eugène Sue's "The Wandering Jew," which it is inconceivable that any adult could now get through except in prison, seemed the most fluent and coloured of stories. Most modern children's books are actively hostile to this tendency of the child mind and give these sharp little mental teeth the softest of predigested pap. And the mischief done leaves its mark on literature, for the child brought up on the standard British "juvenile gift-book" about a little girl who goes into a wood and falls asleep and dreams of insipid fairies, certainly grows up into the Tired Business Man. It is therefore a shame, a serious shame, that Hawthorne, who had the ideal manner of story-telling, who was long-winded and yet always carried the undimmed lamp of fancy so that the child knew that it must keep on listening or lose something fine, should be forcibly brought into line with the modern superstition of infant fatuity. The heart that was torn by sæva indignatio, to use a phrase from the epitaph he composed for himself, was no cynic's heart. The truth is he was a born idealist, with no desire either to snarl or smile at life. The master passion of his mind was anger against He hated injustice and dishonour injustice and oppression wherever he saw them Why, then, should Swift have been thus monstrously misunderstood? Why, should he be pursued after death by a kind of personal venom? I think for the very reason that he was no cynic. He could not regard leniently the folly of those about him. He did not write for his own pleasure, or to put money in his own pocket. He wrote in scorn of stupidity, or with a fixed desire to reform abuses. He does not temper the wind of his wrath to his shorn victims. He does not bring an easy He is ever cruel in message of perfectibility to a sanguine world. his denunciation of abuses, and those who regard literature as an anodyne do not like cruelty. But let it be remembered that Swift's cruelty was always justified. ("Swift," by Charles Whibley, Cambridge, 1917.) There however the book is, and there it will remain. New editions of the Travels" will appear for the next two hundred years at Yule-tide! In the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1782, there is a character of Dean Swift, "From the MSS. of a Gentleman lately deceased in Dublin," which concludes thus : From the whole survey of the man I am inclined to think that. like Rembrant's figures, he would have been lost in the shadows of his character, if the strength of the lights had not relieved him. But that is not the only blemish on this edition, for "The American setting of the tales has been omitted as needlessly local in colour for other readers," and that is a great pity. Not only were the spectacled student who told the tales, and Periwinkle and her playfellows (each with an entrancing name) who listened to them, the very pleasantest of company, and the woodland rambles so prettily described that they overcame the infant aversion from descriptions, but they were also of historical and literary value because they were introductions to a continent which has passed away, and now exists only in literature. From the setting of "Tanglewood Tales" and from "Little Women," and to a certain The thing best worth having would be the opinion of those children in Great Britain and America who will read for the first time their Gulliver's Travels" in these two new editions. I wish such unbiased testimony could be first obtained and then preserved for another two hundred years. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. extent from The Wide Wide window and Melbourne House World" and "The Lamplighter" (although the infant mind could see that the authors of these latter works were pious humbugs and given to the disingenuous moral babble that one accepted as the grown-ups' harmless favourite sin), one became acquainted with Lincoln's America. It enlarged the view from the nursery by presenting a world of children who spoke English and who yet lived in a place entirely different from England Iwith a difference that did not consist, as one understood that foreigness usually did, of palms and a climate salubrious for pirates. This world had a tart and pleasant flavour like the cranberries that its inhabitants were so constantly gathering. It was a world less easeful than the one we knew, and lacking in its sentimental furniture. Here there was no big house," no vast the P nor, book when to th luxur turne with luxu land differ with some nice mor abse but clev with nat piti insi the sleek parks, no young heirs riding about on ponies, no heiresses with golden curls and mobs of nurses and governesses, no saintly children doubly gilded with piety and the inheritance of great possessions. Here children were brought up in a uniform atmosphere of comfortable thrift by grown-ups who seemed to have a prejudice against expenditure on moral grounds; who would refuse to buy a child an expensive doll, not, lik see nea rel to ch N Se af al b t the parents of real life, because they could not afford it, nor, like the parents in "Rosamund" and that order of book, because they felt it their duty to thwart children whenever possible, nor because the money ought to go to the mission-box, but because they had a feeling that luxuries like dolls ought not to be expensive. But they turned the children out in their plain merino gowns with the most tremendous gifts of the more precious luxury of liberty into the unenclosed New England woodlands, where one couldn't help observing other attractive differences. They never came to the old parish church with the lych gate where (in English children's books) some member of the virtuous poor lay in wait for the nice child's pocket-money. Indeed, there was nothing more delightful in this other continent than the total absence of the virtuous poor. Certainly there was poverty, but it was relieved summarily, dealt with quickly and cleverly as these sober efficient people would have dealt with a case of sickness; and as to there being a class of naturally inferior people over whose sufferings the child's pitiless and egotistical mind should be taught to droop insincerely there was never a whisper. Yet morally these American children did not have an easy time. They seemed to find the formula of truth and obedience not nearly adequate to solve all the problems of personal relationships and they were always setting their consciences to work. But they were bright-eyed and adventurous children all the same, who had the jolliest larks in the New England woodlands, and were not without more serious ambitions. "Little Women continues decade after decade to triumph over the modern story about girls' boarding-school life with its pothers about hockey matches and German governesses simply because Miss Alcott gave a proper place in her picture to the ambitions of adolescence. Children will never get tired of these New England story-tellers. Of course they could not talk nonsense. It took an Englishman to write "Alice in Wonderland and if a New Englander had written "The Water Babies it would have ended with the disappearance of the little chimney-sweep into the stream. But they gave children the happiest picture of a Golden Age in which there was too much of nothing and enough of everything-in which Puritanism mellowed by prosperity kept the world bare and simple for children, yet warmed it well with kindness. And when one grows up and realizes that that Age has passed for ever, one's knowledge of it constantly shows itself relevant to the affairs of to-day. It cannot give us any pleasure that Periwinkle's appetite for moral homiletics was the first threat that a continent would arise that would submit to the oratory of William Jennings Bryan; but after all it was also a sign that when she and her playfellows grew up they would become characters in the Novel of Conscience. An enthusiasm for the works of Henry James is so often a characteristic of a disagreeable mind that one hesitates to recommend anything that prepares the child mind for its development; but indeed the reading of these children's stories is the very best preparation for the understanding of Mr. James's International Situation, with its conflict between honest, unsophisticated America and lax, sophisticated Europe, as well as for the full enjoyment of the angular grace of Mr. William Dean Howells' early works. Periwinkle's descendants indeed have peopled most of the best work in American fiction down to to-day, when Edith Wharton seems to have worked the tradition to a close. And American history is only an attempt to explain how others of Periwinkle's descendants suffered an alarming change, and became the characters of Mr. Robert W. Chambers' novels and the neighbours of Mr. Upton Sinclair's Jimmie Higgins." Yes, it is a pity to have robbed Tanglewood Tales" of its New England setting. 66 But how good the stories are even without it! The classical legends must be introduced somehow into the infant mind if it is not to spend the rest of its life tripping up over literary allusions. And Hawthorne was the very man to do it. He was a great artist, although he was sodden with the didacticism which made him sketch the plot of a fantasy in his notebook and add to it "the whole to be made symbolical of something"; and that failing does not matter here, for children love an honest prig. There could not be invented a prettier story nor a more persuasive lesson in manners than his "Philemon and Baucis." And "the Gothic or romantic guise" which he admits having given to the legends, and which turns Proserpina's playmates into sea-nymphs plainly out of Hans Andersen, is the very thing for children, who still love colour more than form, and fancy more than imagination. He was on the right lines too in refusing to mitigate altogether the horrors of his originals, and giving children, who always love the terror that has to be braved and the monster that has to be slain, the shuddering joy of the Gorgon's head and the Minotaur. In every way he is a lesson to the modern writer of "juvenile fiction" who works under the delusion that his business is to peptonize the world for the child mind. WR By Elsie Oxenham. (Chambers, RITERS for girls may justly, this year, cast reproachful eyes on destiny; for the Christmas season has brought with it the apotheosis of a masterpiece among girls' books. Louisa Alcott's "Little Women is at present being acted with immense success at the New Theatre, and is shortly to be filmed at one of the big picture-houses. This is the masterpiece of which I speak. Comparisons are odorous, or odious, as you like; but sometimes they are something more besides-inevitable. As one reads this book again, and watches it for the first time in action, there is no way to burke the question: "Will the books now appearing be, in fifty years, still read, and newly shown us in two ways, and found, as this is being found, delightful? Frankly, that this should be the fate of any of the other girls' books, in all their bravery of wrappers and bright covers, marshalled on my desk, is not conceivable. They will be given this year, and they will be read this year; next year they will be given away without a sigh; in 1921 they will be lost to memory. Yet all are capable; and one is, in its way, a classic "--but a classic of the schools, that "Sans Famille" of Hector Malot which does mitigate a good deal the French lesson, but keeps evermore about it the dank atmosphere of dictionary and of duty. It is here translated into English and American; and its pallid charm survives the dual process. To such base uses as the schoolroom lesson "Little Women" could not come. The book was written from the heart, and to the heart immutably belongs. Let us grow up, let us grow old, we still love "Little Women"; and the modern girl (for I have made inquiry) loves it too, which is considerably more astounding. Upon these pages ridicule is now let loose; and there are things to laugh at, every now and then-mild moments of absurdity and naïveté; Meg's twins, for instance, in the later "Little Women Married," which is bound together in our memories (and in the play) with the first book. But both books |