Publishers Par Excellence.

Away back in the early ‘eighties of last century, when the writer was beginning to make his first collection of books, he found that a great many of the volumes which he read and placed aside “for keeps” were published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus. Despite the passing of years and the multiplicity of publishers that have sprung into being during the last half-century, the old firm of Chatto and Windus still holds its place in the sun. Among the writers of to-day who approach the public through Messrs. Chatto and Windus are Prof. J. B. S. Haldane, Edward Garrett, T. F. Pows, S. T. Warner, R. H. Mottram, Wyndham Lewis, Lytton Strachey, Luigi Pirandello, Norman Douglas, Julian and Aldous Huxley, and others equally well known. I am reminded of these things by a perusal of “A Chatto and Windus Miscellany,” in which I found much far above the ordinary of such publications, not only as to literary merit, which is really outstanding, not to say remarkable, but as being all a book should be in type, illustrations, paper, binding—and all for half-a-crown. From among the many splendid articles let me quote the following in reference to a writer's use of “slang,” from the pen of the late C. E. Montague, which, I feeel sure, will find an echo in the heart of many an Australasian journalist:—

Is it beyond hope that in this matter a quite respectable job may be found for those who ply the homely, slighted trade of the journalist? Not, of course, at the heart of the Empire of letters, but somewhere on the shady borderlands of its demesne, where language may be corrupt and uncouth and yet commendably alive… . Like the nimble groom who holds the halter and runs, the pressman can assist at the trial of an aspiring idiom. He can use it experimentally in his own fugitive pieces, for the learned world to see how it looks.

Why Mr. Montague should have excepted “the heart of the Empire of letters” from being subjected to such trials may puzzle the uninitiated; but Mr. Montague was speaking from experience, his own, or that of others. Some sceptics may ask: “What of C. J. Dennis? His ‘Sentimental Bloke’ was hailed as a work of genius ‘at the heart of the Empire of letters'—London!” But Dennis anticipated Montague's advice by experimenting first on what the latter terms “the shady borderlands”—if one may dare thus to refer to our Big Brother, the Commonwealth. It is also well to remember that a greater poet than Dennis failed to anticipate Montague's advice, and came to grief. He wrote the same slang in the form of ballads and other verses, but the critics did not damn them with faint praise—they simply ignored them; while his “In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms,” and “Life and Death”—in the last of which his “Out of the Night that Covers Me” first appeared—written in the purest and choicest of English, caused him to be placed by these same critics in the forefront of Victorian lyrical poets.

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