The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920Various
General
The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920
Various
English literature -- Periodicals; London (England) -- Periodicals
Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and
comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on
the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that
given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many
of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a
self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached
in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no
translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always
smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what
is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of
Thermopylæ.
NOVELS
JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net.
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net.
POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net.
SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net.
The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms
of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who
have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail.
The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers
concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is
within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose.
Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good
deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are
they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up
to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a
popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd
of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in
time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening
to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?
It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development
or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate
one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned
by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its
extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his
hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion,
conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final
medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_
is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why
he should have written it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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