Search results

Poets trooped off on an unmapped path, noisy for quite a time over their audacity. The jocund shouts of the coterie echoed in the wilderness, gradually growing indistinct. For it turned out that they did not discover a new highway for the pageantry of the century tofollow. And the priestess they bore off with them has stolen back, forlorn and much bedraggled by the thickets. She, who was so proudly at the forefront, creeps into the ruck, hardly recognised in the press, a hapless struggler in the rabble of camp‐followers.

LIKE all forms of journalism, book reviewing has shown new tendencies since the War. What we see may be a wayward phase or a stage in evolution. If one were to presume that it is evolution, it would be with a certain trepidation that one confronted the future. When an organ fugue or a sonata has been altered to a tumult of trombones in my generation, I share the feelings of a musician who shudders at the prospect of Bach being supplanted by Stravinsky's successor.

BY mid‐September when these words appear there may be the first touch of frost in the mornings : summer is irrecoverably over. There is yet, a week ahead, the Library Association Conference and not a few older librarians, who have a life‐long memory of Autumn conferences, are happy that we no longer hold them in May, that adolescent, variable month, but are able to catch again in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness the pleasures we have had in our summer holidays this perfect year. The irony of it lies in the fact that there is precious little holiday in today's conference week ; we do not even have an excursion on the Friday. Such frivolities are beyond the great gatherings of multilateral interests that assemble. Time, too, has become almost sordidly precious.

Librarians are aware of the fact that for some years the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees have had in view the time when the Scottish Central Library would be given official recognition and find its home in the setting of Edinburgh. The premises at Dunfermline were just good enough for a slowly developing scheme, but as the years passed it became obvious that other arrangements would have to be made, and the capital city was looked upon as the natural setting for the extending enterprise.

THE young man who loves books and has literary aspirations generally tries for a post on a newspaper staff. He is duly warned by the veterans:—“Daily journalism is no more the road to literature than a county attorneyship is the road to the English Woolsack. You will dissipate in small change the talents you require for writing books. This is not a sculptor's studio, but a machine bakery. The art you lavish on the daily cakes will vanish when they are eaten. Why not stay in a steady routine job that does not compromise your imagination, and write in your spare time the things you want to write?”

THE name is arresting, like the personality for which it stands. Cunninghame Graham: Lavery's equestrian portrait of him conveys the essential man as revealed in his writings, though the other one (somewhat reminiscent of Raeburn's Sir John Sinclair), which presents him to us afoot, lacks nothing save a horse for company. He has a passion for horses and has written many an essay in which they are leading characters and one book devoted to them—The Horses of the Conquest. William Rothenstein has recorded him in lithograph and in oils and in Men and Memories includes a reproduction of a painting of him in fencer's garb. Belcher did a charcoal drawing of him—it appeared in Punch—with a lightly indicated background of Hyde Park Corner and a horse or two, in a dexterous mere line or two, clipping past. There is a word‐picture of him in the epilogue to Bernard Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion and another in George Moore's Conversations in Ebury Street. Writer, Scots laird, Spanish hidalgo, South American ranch‐owner, he has ridden and bivouaced in Texas and Patagonia and may be found this month in Morocco, next month in London, or in Venezuela, or enjoying a braw day (or a snell day for that matter) in Perthshire.

Our Editorial in the Autumn number in which certain aspects of library educational policy were discussed, was based, as was indicated, on a Memorandum prepared by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee which received some notice in the press. The Memorandum appeared quite portentous, but now we are informed on authority that “the ‘Parliamentary and Scientific Committee’ is a quite unofficial body—a mixed group of Parliamentarians and scientists, who try, quite usefully, to promote the interests of science. There is, therefore, no question of Government ‘accepting’ their recommendations. The Committee does not report to the Government, but to the world at large. But it is unlikely that any Government would think of setting up 20 degree‐granting technical colleges. It is also true that the Government has announced its intention to make further grants to a considerable number of Universities and also to some technical colleges, in order to encourage the development of technical education”.

ONCE the shyest and most elusive of mortals—member of no trade union or craft—a lonely figure in drawing‐rooms and in the quietness of the London Library—the Reviewer (like some defaulting country parson) finds himself suddenly dragged into court and starred for attention. The public is looking on! The press are there, sniffing out a scandal! “This wretched man,” the prosecution begins. Alas (it soon appears), he's a bad lot: he belongs to the Monstrous Regiment of Reviewers.