"The German Rhine"

Another poem, long more or less forgotten, that has been revived by the war is Alfred de Musset's "The German Rhine" (Le Rhin Allemand). Les Annales of Paris informs us that a great number of its readers have written to ask for the republication of Musset's famous verses. Here is the story of that poem. About the middle of the reign of Louis Philippe, a secret treaty having been drawn up between Prussia and Turkey against France regarding the Egyptian question, French public opinion ran high. War sentiment was rife in Paris. The

Germans felt themselves seriously threatened, and prepared to take up arms, urged on by a belligerent press. A poet of Bonn, by name Nicolas Becker, fed the flame with certain verses that passed from mouth to mouth and brought him the personal compliments of the Prussian King. Becker capped his efforts by dedicating the poem to Lamartine. Lamartine replied with the "Marseillaise of Peace," verses composed in an altruistic and paternal spirit that pleased neither the Germans nor the French. It was not the moment, thought the latter, for a French poet to write in denunciation of conquerors and armed hosts, and to bestow metrical caresses on visions of eternal gentleness and brotherhood. "The Marseillaise of Peace" was received with hostile murmurs. It jostled the national pride. The French, ticklish on the point of honour, did not like retreats. It exasperated them that the finest poet of the century opposed only this cloudy and Utopian protest to Becker's vindictive thrust. No more than the crowd did the men of letters and the artists approve of Lamartine's verses. They admired the form, but not the spirit. Madame de Girardin relates that in the course of one of her evenings the conversation turned to the subject. Each guest said his say. They read the "Rheinlied" of Becker: they read the "Marseillaise of Peace." "There was another reply to send to that gentleman," cried the hostess. "My dear Musset, write it for us." She locked him in a

room with paper, pens, and two cigars. When she released him, half an hour later, the cigars had been smoked and the verses beginning "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand," written.

The new novel by Robert W. Service is called The Pretender, and is a story of the Latin Quarter of Robert W. Paris. The English reService views are curiously unanimous in assigning a dual personality to the author, with the statement that the first hundred pages seem to have been written by another Service differing from the author of the remaining chapters of the book. It is the first time that Mr. Service has deserted the land of his and is accounted for probably by the literary fame-the Canadian Northwest fact that he has made Paris his home for impressed with its life. Service himself the last year or two and has been deeply is a Scotchman of some thirty-eight years -years crowded with more vicissitudes ordinary man. and struggles than fall to the lot of the After a dispiriting experience with the drab life of a bank clerk in Glasgow, at the age of twentyone he emigrated to Canada and, travelling steerage, landed in Vancouver with a scant five dollars in his pocket. Picking stones, chopping trees, driving reaping machines through the great wheat fields, were some of the casual "jobs" that kept him alive until, in a spirit of adventure and restlessness, he worked his way down toward Mexico, travelling "light," generally with little more than a spare blanket for baggage. Then came less primitive occupationsa little school-teaching, newspaper reporting, Indian trading with, as he says, "much idleness in between."

Tiring finally of being kicked about from pillar to post, Mr. Service once again sought a bank position, and after

little time in the West he was sent north to the Yukon at the time of the gold rush and remained there in the branch bank for eight years. These years of frontier life made a great im

pression that finally expressed itself in Songs of a Sourdough, a book that reached its seventh edition before the date of publication. So it came about that the grubbing bank clerk began to receive cheques in four figures and soon gave up his banking to see more of the world, but in a quite different manner from his earlier experiences. Turkey at the time of the Balkan war attracted him, and after that he drifted to Paris, his present home and the inspiration of his new novel.

Naturally much has been written about Joseph Conrad's connection with

the sea. Here is a picture Conrad's of his first command, the First Ship barque Otago, of which

Conrad was skipper from 1887 to 1889, made from a drawing by G. F. W. Hope, an old sea friend of the novelist. The Otago was Clyde built, and of iron, and was registered as from Port Adelaide, South Australia. The drawing

was made according to a minute description given by Conrad. Hope himself did not sail in the Otago, but in the Duke of Sutherland. He tells that in the early days of their friendship Conrad, having just given up the sea, was in the habit of visiting the Hope home and reading portions of the manuscript he was just completing (Almayer's Folly). Lord Jim was dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Hope. The Otago is in all probability the boat that figures in "The Secret Sharer," a tale in 'Twixt Land and Sea. It will be recalled that the story deals with the hazardous navigating of a captain in his first command. The scene is the head of the Gulf of Siam. All these details correspond with Conrad's account of his own adventures on his first cruise as master as told in The Mirror of the Sea. Conrad enthusiasts will find it interesting to compare the first chapter of The Mirror of the Sea with the tale "The Secret Sharer."

As the accompanying map indicates, following Joseph Conrad's many men and occasional women takes the reader pretty well all over the world. His European settings include London, for The Secret Agent and for much of Chance; Petrograd and Geneva, for Under Western Eyes; Strassburg, for "The Dual"; Naples, for "Il Conde," and Paris for "An Anarchist." Here also are indicated the course taken by the Judea as described in Youth, the course described

E. F. BENSON SKATING IN SWITZERLAND. THE LATEST BOOK FROM THE AUTHOR OF "DODO" IS "ARUNDEL"

in Heart of Darkness, and that taken by the Narcissus in The Nigger of the Narcissus, the book that brought Conrad. his first recognition. Problematical identifications of backgrounds are those of "Gaspar Ruiz" and of Nostromo, of which Arnold Bennett has said that he reads it without fail once a year.

To compare H. G. Wells with Matthew Arnold may seem at first glance a ludicrous effort, and yet "The World of Mr. Van Wycke Brooks

H. G. Wells"

opens his critical study called The World of H. G. Wells with just this supposed parallelism:

Grotesque and violent as it may at first appear, I believe that in the future Wells will be thought of as having played toward his own epoch a part very similar to that played by Matthew Arnold. . . . In reality the entire trend of Arnold's social criticism was anti-individualistic and in a straight line with socialism.

Arnold himself has said, "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter century"; and of Wells Brooks writes, "Seen retrospectively, the main work of Wells has not been to promote any intellectual or economic doctrine, but to alter the English frame of mind."

Wells's origin and early life are especially interesting, as they seem almost to have predetermined the character of his later work. As he himself once wrote, "I am, by a sort of predestination, a socialist." Wells was born in the English "middle class," the child of the daughter of an innkeeper and of the son of a head gardener. His father kept a shop in a London suburb and eked out the family's resources at professional cricket. His shop was unsuccessful, and his mother, who had been a lady's maid, became a housekeeper in a large country house. Wells was destined to be a shopkeeper, and at the age of thirteen was apprenticed first to a chemist and then to a draper. At this point one of those inexplicable wells of ardour and ambition. must have sprung up in the 'prentice boy's heart to enable him to break through the age-old crust of prejudice about the middle-class London shopkeeper, and to struggle and study so as to obtain eventually, with the aid of various grants and scholarships, a degree in science from the University of London. He taught biology for two or three years

and then entered journalism. Beginning with literary articles and criticisms, he soon entered the field of imaginative, scientific stories, continuing the rest of his life in literary pursuits.

to

So Wells's personal life may be seen to be an ever-pressing upward from the moss-grown shop-keeping world. higher though equally transient levels, with a growing degree of personal and mental freedom-a "progressive shedding of personalities," as Brooks calls it. It is a process that calls for "a certain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shed customs and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations which mark each grade in that closely defined hierarchy . . . to become a rolling stone, a drifting and unsettled, a detached and acutely personal individual." Is it any wonder, then, that his mind roves freely through space and time, that he has obtained an impersonal, extraneous conception of human society as a living whole, a per sonality in itself? From this point of view Wells seems almost determined by his environment-as much a function of environment as genius can ever be.

Wells's frank statement of his own literary activities is thoroughly characteristic:

The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure. Success with a bookeven such a commercially modest success as mine has been-means in the English-speaking work not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds himself no longer reading in books and papers but hearing and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men, the initiatives that shape hu

man affairs.

H. G. WELLS

To be a literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and filled me with ideas and associations I want to present again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual, fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and abandon that work of observing and writing which is my proper business in it.

Van Wycke Brooks, the author of this study of Wells, is himself an interesting