General Gossip of Authors and Writers Jeremiah Curtin, translator of Sienkiewicz, now in Russia, sends word that the Polish novelist's life-work dealing with Sobieski is progressing. After its completion, Sienkiewicz will enter upon a ten-volume series in which Napoleon will be the central figure. A correspondent of the London Daily News has interviewed Sienkiewicz and sends the most interesting account of the author that has been given. Faultlessly dressed, and for his age-he is fiftythree years old-remarkably well-preserved, Henryk Sienkiewicz presents the perfect type of the Polish gentleman, of that aristocracy which is inferior to none in Europe. His manner is languid; he speaks slowly and without volubility, and though he has done most of the things which this world offers for a rich man to do, he seems to take little interest in anything outside of literature. This languor and indifference may possibly result in some degree from the state of his health-a fever which he contracted during a six months' hunting expedition in Africa in 1891 has left him with chronic dyspepsia -as well as from his habit of constantly smoking the strongest cigars. There has also been a great grief in his life. Sienkiewicz began to write, and has written ever since, purely from love of the art. Indeed, in Poland, authorship, unless combined with journalism, is a luxury which none but the rich can afford. Authors there are the hacks of the book-sellers, and the payment for a sheet of sixteen pages falls below what even a moderately popular author in England receives for his thousand words. Fortunately for modern literature, Sienkiewicz is a man of fortune. "I began to write," he said, "when I was 20 years old. At that time I was a student of history at the University of Warsaw. My first book was a novel called ‘In Vain.' It was accepted and printed, That is all that I can say as to its success. I work with great regularity, and am at my writing table every day from 9 a. m. till 2 p. m. After that hour I do not write any more, but spend much time in reading. When I was preparing for 'Quo Vadis' I read a quantity of books of all kinds and in various languages. My daily output is most irregular. Zola, I understand, produces a fixed daily quantum. I often on one day write more pages than I write lines on another day.' Referring to Daudet's practice of correcting his manuscripts over and over again, Sienkiewicz said: "That is hardly my practice. I correct enormously in my head, but little on the text. I am a great walker. I correct as I walk." A curious particularity about Sienkiewicz's method of work is that he invariably uses red ink. His red ink is as much his fetich as the golden drying sand in Zola's or the little Nuremberg figurines are Ibsen's. He has no sympathy with the novel "a these," the didactic novel. "The novel," he said, "should above all things be a work of art." His favorite English novel is "David Copperfield." Renan appeared to be his favorite French author. Among the novel ists, he spoke mainly about Daudet, whose "Froment Jeune et Risler Ainé" he considers by far his best work. "It gets so near to nature," he said. He is a great traveler and a lover of sport and adventure. He has held his own against pirates, he has shot lions, he has fought with crocodiles on the banks of the Kingarzi Wami, and has been attacked by an infuriated hippopotamus. "I organized an expedition," he said, "in 1891. Count Tyshexicz was my companion. We went via Zanzibar and thence into the German possessions. We traveled on foot, of course, camping in tents. No literary work was possible. But we had many adventures, the most exciting of which was, perhaps, when a hippopotamus attacked our boat and tried to upset it. The boat, however, was too big. It was all very pleasant until the fever took me. I had two bad attacks, and so determined to return home and avoid a third attack, which would have been fatal. As I lay in my tent one night and listened to the roaring of the lions, the scenes in the amphi theatre in 'Quo Vadis' rose up before my eyes. This," he added, "confirmed me in a resolution I had made many years previously-to write a book about Rome. I have always loved Rome. I have visited Rome nine times. I know it very well. It was as quite a little boy that the ambition first took me to write a book about Rome. I was reading Tacitus at the time with great enjoyment. He has always interested me-particularly his annals. There is so much of the gentleman, of the aristocrat, about Tacitus. "I began ‘Quo Vadis' in Warsaw, at my house, in Ulica Spolna. The actual writing of it took me one year. But I had made great preparations and had filled many note-books from the pile of books I had read. Tacitus was my great source of inspiration. He gave me my Nero. Suetonius's gossip was useful. Details were gleaned here and there. Thus, it was in Sallust that I found the description of the eyeglass made of an emerald. I read up the 'Early Days of Christianity,' by Dean Farrar, whom I consider a man of great science. I studied Baumeister and Mommsen, and I found Renan's 'Anti-Christ' most useful." Although millions of copies of "Quo Vadis" have been sold in the United States, the author, we are informed, has received little in the shape of royalties from this country. It is a circumstance which leaves him calm. "I know nothing about business, I don't admire business," he said, when speaking of a nine months' tour which he took in America in 1877. Much of this time was spent in California, and. apropos of this, he said: "What I most admire in America is the scenery, the splendid nature. This is what so pleased me in California. The people in the country there are delightful, so different from the people in San Francisco, all business men. And I don't admire business." His American tour is described in his "Lettres de Voyage," "Listy z Podrózy." Madam Sarah Grand was born in Ireland, though her parents are English, her father being an officer of the navy. She was married very young to Lieutenant Colonel McFall. The first five years after her marriage she traveled in the East, visiting China, India and Japan. Young as she was, the agony of woman's lot in the East, as she saw it with her own eyes, deeply affected her, and this experience in the Orient has always colored her views on the position of woman in the Occident. It was the galling sense of outrage induced by the sight of the sufferings of the women of the East rather than any unhappiness in her own marriage that gave her earlier work its vehement and vindictive character. More recently Madam Grand's sense of humor has come to her rescue. The author of the Heavenly Twins and of Bab gained fame only through hard work, long eating out her soul in weary expectation. She is a lady to the finger tips-accomplished, clever and charming. She talks brilliantly, is a delightful musician and lectures with easy grace. Madam Grand lives in her country house at Langton, near Tunbridge Wells. She goes only occasionally to London, though she is a member of the Pioneer, the principle woman's club in London. She takes a keen delight in country life, enjoys the wheel, and is vice-president of a cycling association. The room in which General Lew Wallace does his work is probably one of the most finely-appointed "author's dens" in the world. General Wallace has built near his residence in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a rather unique, and in some respects a magnificent, structure of brick and stone, with a tower and dome, and surrounded by a moat. The interior is one great room; the light enters through glasses in the dome; at night scores of electric lamps of rich design shed brilliant illumination. The ceiling of the dome is frescoed in ivory; the walls down to the bookcases in silver-green. In the center stands a great table littered with books, manuscripts and letters, and about the room are statuary, engravings, paintings and Oriental relics. A huge fireplace occupies one end of the study. General Wallace thus describes his working methods: I begin to write at about 9 a. m., keep at work till noon, resume about 1.30 p. m., and leave my studio at about four. I then take exercise for two hours. I walk, or ride, according to the weather. When it rains, I put on a pair of heavy boots, and trudge five or seven miles across the country. I usually ride a dozen miles. To this habit of taking regular exercise I attribute my good health. I eat just what I want, and as much as I want. When night comes I lie down and sleep like a child, never once waking till morning. I usually retire at 9.30 and rise at 7.30, aiming to secure nine hours' sleep. I smoke at pleasure a pipe or cigar, but never a cigarette, which I consider the deadliest thing a. person can put into his mouth. The amount of work I produce daily varies greatly. What I write today in the rough, to-morrow morning I will revise; perhaps reducing it to twenty words, or perhaps striking out all the day's work and beginning at the same point once more. That constitutes my second copy. When the proofs come from the publisher another revision takes place. It consists chiefly of condensation and expurgation. The new Canadian writer, Ralph Connor by signature, the Reverend Charles W. Gordon by name, is the pastor of a church in Winnipeg. He was born in 1860 in the heart of the Canadian woods and schooled at Toronto University. The author of The Habitant, Doctor William Henry Drummond, though master of the most intimate knowledge of French Canada, was born in Ireland, County Leitrim, going to Montreal when he was ten years old. Mr. H. W. Bell, writing in the Pall Mall Magazine, gives an unpublished chapter in the life of Stevenson: Late in December (1879) Stevenson arrived in San Francisco, and in the spring of the following year he was given a "job"-the transaction did not even rise to the dignity of "obtaining a position"in the city department of the San Francisco Chronicle. With this he began a brief but hardly promising career, which was to be numbered by days. His first assignment was to "cover" a holiday jollification arranged by the Salvation Army for the entertainment of the very poor and their children. Stevenson wrote a gorgeous story, in which all the information bearing on the local aspect of the festival was carefully ignored. It treated of the theory of giving and of the blessedness of giving to children, it was a special pleading for the virtue of unselfishness, it was a rhapsody on the Beatitudes, it was everything desirable, but it was not "a newspaper story." It was a hopeless tissue of platitudes, so far as the requirements of the city editor were concerned; and that proverbially fretful person acrimoniously asked his new reporter, who stood before him, long, gangling, ill-dressed, starved-looking, if he knew where the festi 1 had been held, who the committee men in charge ere, and if he had a list of the merchants who had provided the presents for the children. To these reasonable questions Stevenson replied that he had not thought such details at all worth while. A brisk young police reporter was hurriedly sent out for a few facts concerning the matter, and Stevenson was told that his "copy" would probably prove available for a Sunday special. The first literary work of Mr. Edward W. Townsend, whose book, Days Like These, we reviewed last month, was done for the San Francisco Argonaut. Mr. Townsend is a native of Cleveland; he went to California when his school days were ended, with the purpose of becoming a mining engineer. But writing possessed a greater attraction for him, and after a year in the mines he took up newspaper work in San Francisco, and in 1892 came to New York for a place on the Sun. Charles Hemstreet has resigned as night manager of the New York Society Press Bureau, and will devote his time to literature. ning with an historical novel. He is begin Mr. J. M. Barrie is at work upon a new novel concerning which great secrecy is observed as to title, scenes and purpose. Mr. Barrie began writing when he was a school boy at Dumfries Academy; at Edinburgh University he remained an unrecognized genius, making very little impression on his fellow-students, who in point of fact voted him dull. Barrie is still very shy and nervous; he speaks hesitatingly, and with a strong Scotch accent. He may usually be seen with his hands buried in his trouser pockets. His wife, who was Miss Mary Anstey, an actress, is a perfect complement to her husband, being a vivacious conversationalist and fond of society. The St. Petersburg Gazette publishes the decree by which the Holy Synod excommunicates Count Leo Tolstoi from the Russian Orthodox Church. Its wording is as follows: In his works and letters, which are circulated by himself and his disciples all over the world, but especially within the borders of our dear Fatherland, he preaches with the zeal of a fanatic the abrogation of all dogmas of the Orthodox Church and of the real existence of the Christian faith, of a personal God, who is worshiped in the Holy Trinity, the Creator and Upholder of the universe, denies the Lord Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the Saviour and Redeemer of the world, who suffered for us men and for our salvation and rose from the dead, denies the immaculate conception at the incarnation of Christ the Lord and the pure virginity of the holy mother of God, the Holy Virgin Mary, before and after birth, does not believe in the life after death and in a judgment, rejects all the sacraments of the Church and the abundantly blessed operation of the Holy Spirit in them, and has not feared, since he has scorned the most holy articles of the belief of orthodox people, to take upon himself to mock at the greatest of sacraments, the holy sacrament of the Mass. Leo Tolstoi continually preaches in words and writAll this Count ings to the scandal and abhorrence of the whole Orthodox world; and has thereby not secretly but openly before all knowingly and purposely fallen away from all communion with the Orthodox Church. Attempts that have been made for his conversion remained without effect. Therefore the Church does not recognize him as a member and cannot recognize him as such until he repents and renews his membership. Joseph Conrad, author of Lord Jim, and partauthor of The Inheritors, is a master in the English merchant service. When in England he lives at Kent Farm, Sanford near Hythe, Kent. Maud Howard Peterson, author of The Potter and the Clay, comes of good literary stock. Her grandfather was Charles J. Peterson, editor and chief owner in the '50's and '60's of Peterson's Magazine, and the patron of the literary lights of that period. M. Maurice Maeterlinck's new book, The Life of the Bee, an advance chapter of which appeared in Current Literature for May, is attracting the widest and most favorable notice of the critics in Europe. Katharine de Forest has contributed to Harper's Bazar the report of an interview with M. Maeterlinck, from which the following excerpts may be of interest: Going in to see M. Maurice Maeterlinck the other day, I found him absorbed in his bees, which were apparently just beginning to wake from their winter sleep. M. Maeterlinck lives the life of a recluse in Paris, or rather in Passy, for his habitation is a pavilion looking out over the lovely old gardens of the Rue Reynouard, with the beautiful Florentine view out towards Mount Valerien beyond. "Under my window a nightingale sings every night," said M. Maeterlinck, as he opened wide the windows of his den, to show me the exquisite panorama outside. No impression of being a more simple, healthy, out-ofcould give you the door sort of person than M. Maeterlinck. He does not like to talk about his books, he is fond of bicycling and all sorts of out-door exercise, he hates pose, and particularly objects to most of the things which are written about him, in general by people he has never seen. one The proof-sheets of The Bees, Maeterlinck's latest book, lay scattered over his work table; a great, solid table that he had made himself, with beams and supports painted leaf green, and a top of the purest, brightest scarlet, with a slight glaze. "It is only made of oil-cloth," said its owner, "and painted red by me.' "How did you get this sort of austere Belgian quaintness into this old eighteenthcentury French hotel?" I asked. "By bringing everything I have put into it from my own country," was the answer; and as a matter of fact, even the paint on the cream walls, that on the green blinds, and the touches of scarlet here and there in the bookcases, or a bit of wood-work, were brought from Holland. Maeterlinck's study with its light, its austerity, its simple tones, seems thought. The exquisite neatness of a Dutch intera place for clear, lofty ior reigns there. There are only three colors in the room, leaf green, pure red, and a note of mauve in batiste curtains hanging full over the windows. Between the two long French windows is a hanging Dutch bookcase painted red, filled entirely with volumes bound in red leather of the same shade. Across the top is a row of little scarlet flower-pots, each containing a tiny cactus. In one corner a quaint cupboard has been set in, with doors made of diamond-shaped panes of glass, the leads of which are painted green. There is a break between the top and bottom, before which hangs a scarlet curtain. The floor of polished wood shines so that it might reflect your face. There are no ornaments in the room save books, and, the other day, a single plant of purple heather. On the mantelpiece are exquisite bits of old Dutch glass. The only pictures are framed photographs, which make harmonious spots of gray in the general color scheme of scarlet, green, and mauve. Just outside the window Maeterlinck places his beehive, made with glass sides, where he watches with the absorption of the apiarist that marvellous world from which he has drawn, in his latest book, reflections of such a lofty philosophy that one volume alone would reveal him one of the greatest minds of this earth. No one could know, without talking with its author, what endless detail of observation, for one thing, the book has involved. "I knew that bees could communicate with each other," Maeterlinck said to me. "I knew that one bee could say to another, 'In such and such a place I have found honey. Come with me and I will take you there.' But what I wanted to find out was whether one bee could relate a connected story to another, could say, 'In such and such a place there is honey; to reach it you must first go to the right, then the left, then go along the corridor.' Eh bien! I have found two or three bees who could do that." The following is an outline of the life of Frank Norris, whose work is receiving increased attention. He was born in Chicago in 1870; removed to California in '84; was educated at the University of California and Harvard; from '88-'91, studied art in Paris; from '91-'93 was associate editor of the Weekly Wave; went as a correspondent to South Africa where he was at the time of the Jameson Raid; nearly died of fever there, and got into disfavor with the officials who gave him twenty-four hours to leave; in '98 was war correspondent in Cuba; since then he has been engaged upon his Wheat Trilogy. Miss Jean B. Mason has contributed to the press a biography of the Reverend Charles Ferguson, and a study of his life and work, from which we make the following excerpts: One afternoon we found Mr. Ferguson at home in an adobe house which had once been honored by the presence of President Hayes. We entered through a small court shaded by the graceful pepper tree, in the branches of which innumerable blackbirds kept up a loud and constant chatter, the only noise to break the stillness of the place. We had come from Boston with messages from mutual friends and received a cordial welcome. The mesquitewood fire which burned in one corner of the living-room where we sat revealed the slight boyish figure and illumined the face of the man. Mr. Ferguson's personality, shown so strongly throughout his book, has the charm and strength of one who has thought and lived, who is "not afraid to die in his working clothes as a common man"; of one who has loved and experienced all that loving implies of suffering and sorrow-one of the "fearless, free spirits that dare everything for love." Mr. Ferguson is of Scotch parentage far removed. He was educated as a lawyer, and after spending two years at the University of Michigan was admitted to the bar in Buffalo. He afterward went to Germany to fit himself for a consular position, which he had some idea of filling. While in Berlin there befell him that which altered the whole tenor of his thought and life-he met his future wife. It was one of those chance meetings we never understand. Mr. Ferguson had given some little thought to social questions and economics. Mrs. Ferguson had given them her intensest interest, having watched with many questionings the gradual encroachment of the submerged tenth upon the old aristocratic quarter of New York. The socialistic fever was aroused within her. Under her influence Mr. Ferguson was imbued with the spirit of philanthropy. The Church seemed to him to be the medium through which social conditions could be reached and alleviated. He was ordained to the ministry after studying in New York and Buffalo. He filled varous clerical offices until with his family he removed to a farm in Scituate, wishing to get away from things to think out the mysteries of life, still feeling that through the Church was to come the solution of economic problems. The farming experiment had its failures-Mr. Ferguson was not a farmer. It had its successes, too, and what was of greater importance than the pursuit of husbandry was the close and lasting friendships formed with the people. There was also a church in Nebraska, and now Mr. Ferguson holds the position of rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Tucson. Undoubtedly Mr. Ferguson finds much inspiration in this desert land, with nothing between him and the eternal sky, cut off from the world on every side by rugged mountains that answer to all the varying moods of men, now intimate, now far removed, now swathed in an exquisite sapphire hue that reveals every crack and crevice-the beauty that only age and battles and cataclysms can give. According to Miss Mason's account the chapters of The Religion of Democracy were written in several places. The foreword or symbol was written in the Library of Congress at Washington; the first chapter. "The Return to the Concrete," in the Boston Public Library; the second, "The Man of the Modern Spirit," on the farm at Scituate in 1897 and 1898; the third, "The Revolution Absolute," at Washington in 1899; chapter four, "The Discovery of America," at Washington one afternoon, in a field where he had a distant view of the dome of the Capitol; chapter five, "The Discount of Glory," at Washington during the summer of 1898, after the victory in Manila harbor; chapter six, "The Sovereignty of the People," chapter seven, "The World of News," and chapter eight, "The Gate of Goodness," in a Canadian cottage in 1898; chapter nine, "The Rise of a Democratic Catholic Demand," in Nebraska, while riding on a broncho, in the summer of 1899. The last chapter, "The Last Day of the Machine Age," was reprinted from Mind, where it appeared in November 1900. Brief Comment: Literary Sayings and Doings -The report that the Rev. Cyrus Townsend Brady has left the ministry is incorrect. Mr. Brady has been over-working himself, and has felt it best to resign his parish at Overbrook, Pennsylvania, but he retains his orders. -The quintet of books of music which Messrs. Scribner's Sons have been publishing will be complete with the publication in the fall of Mr. H. E. Krehbiel's The Pianoforte and Its Music. -Lafcadio Hearn has been made an honorary member of the London Japan Society. Mr. Howard C. Hillegas' book, With the Boer Forces, has been suppressed by the English authorities in South Africa. -A book from Ellsworth Kelly may be expected soon. Mr. Kelly is a writer of short stories possessing some remarkable characteristics; the sketch, "Pardners," printed in Current Literature for April, is one of his best. Though now a resident of Kansas, where he is a member of the bar and superintendent of the schools of Woodson County, Mr. Kelly had the distinction of being born in Indiana, and his new book will deal with the life of the Wabash Valley. Those who have read anything from the pen of the Right Reverend the Bishop of Peoria, will hear with pleasure that a volume collected from his writings and addresses may be expected soon. Aphorisms and Reflections is the title; the publishers will be Messrs. McClurg & Company. Bishop Spalding's writing is made unique by a singular elevation of tone, a noble vein of meditation, a ripe aphoristic wisdom and charming literary grace. -Mr. Hall Caine's current novel, The Eternal City, running simultaneously in Collier's Weekly and the Ladies' Magazine, has been withdrawn from the English publication. The explanation is that a certain instalment contained matter which Messrs. Pearson were unwilling to lay before their readers. The Pearsons paid ten thousand dollars for the English serial rights of The Eternal City, and have now brought suit against Mr. Caine for the return of this sum and other damages. Signor Salvatore Cortesi, writing from Rome to a Venetian newspaper, L'Adriatico, thus speaks of the pains which Hall Caine took gathering the material for The Eternal City: It will not be uninteresting to you that I should tell you something about Hall Caine, one of the most interesting and genial personalities, as thinker, a literary man, and a student of the social a question. Besides, he deserves our attention because since 1897 he has passed five or six months of each year in Rome-coming in December and staying until the heat compels him to go north again to study our country in its multiform aspects, the sentiments, desires, and passions of our people, not in a superficial or incomplete way, but deeply, making himself master of all the details concerning them. How different he is in this from certain other foreign writers who, after having been only for a few weeks among us, and often surrounded by persons interested in showing only one side of our life, and that not always the best, have afterward given opinions and judgment on men and things with a gravity only to be exceeded by their ignorance! But with Hall Caine it is the reverse. I believe that there is not a corner of Rome that he has not explored, or a class of our citizens with whom he has not mixed, seeking to understand all their most intimate thoughts and aspirations. He has frequented our law courts and the House of Parliament, succeeding by the power of his genius in assimilating even those things which for a stranger must be difficult to understand. He has visited the Vatican and the prisons; he has taken part in the carnival feasts as well as in the miseries of the poor; he has mixed with the highest aristocracy, with the nobility, with the learned, with those who are struggling for a political ideal and the conquest of humanity. A young lady of Venice and her father recently had a difference of notion as to the propriety of her reading a book by M. Zola. Her father wrote to Zola asking for his advice, "to which the contending parties (father and daughter) would bow." Zola made this reply to the question:· I do not write for young ladies, and I do not think that every kind of reading is good for brains which are still in the process of development. You are perfectly right to guide the education and culture of your children as you think right, and they owe you obedience. When they grow older and mix with the world, they will read what they please. -"Basil King," as the author of Griselda signs himself, is believed to be the Rev. William B. King, lately rector of Christ church, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A clever English literary agent is out with a new plan for booming books. He has not yet put it into actual operation, but perhaps now the idea is conceived its realization is not so remote. "Practical demonstration," says our man, in London Black and White, "seems to be one of the things which the public likes." He remembers shop windows showing cigar-makers at work, rug-weavers at their looms, cobblers repairing boots while you wait, hair dressers plying their |