Arts and Letters [From Our Own Correspondent]
... I have just been reading an American novel which seems to me quite as good as anything our people have done that way for some time and indeed I am not sure that it is not better than anything they have done. The Americans, I hear are buying it by the cartload and I am not surprised for it is Yankee Doodle Dande all the way: it might indeed on that side be bound up with Sir George Trevelyan's amazing book on the American Revolution concerning which I wrote to you earlier in the year - and which by the way gets a handsome dressing in the current number of The Quarterly Review, a capital article which I hereby commend to your notice. But that's all fair in fiction and when it's as well done as it is in this case the man would be a fool who should take umbrage at it.
The name of the book is Richard Carvell, and of the author Winston Churchill. He is not as you will surmise, the Winston Churchill you know, by name at least: Lord Randolph Churchill's son late of the [ ] Hassars and still more lately the rejected Tory candidate for Oldham. That volatile young gentleman is, as you know, also an author. He has written (as you doubtless know) a little book (and a very smart little book) on the Malakand Campaign; he has also written a romance called Savrola now running through Macmillan's Magazine, the scene of which is laid in one of those Cloud-Cuckoo lands which Mr. Anthony Hope affects; and he is shortly to publish two volumes on the Sudan of which he probably knows as much as Goldsmith knew of Natural History but on which I have no doubt he will be very smart, probably dogmatic, and (consciously or otherwise) extremely entertaining. Except that the author of Richard Carvell is an American (which must be obvious to the meanest capacity) and has written other stories, which I have never read, I can tell you nothing about him; but I can tell you something about Richard Carvell which you will possibly thing more to the point.
[...]
Richard Carvell is not the only good thing that has come my way from America lately. You remember Mr. Kipling's versus called The White Man's Burden? Here is a skit on them, or rather on their authors imitators (apparently a numerous class in the United States, though I should not have thought it) which was printed in a magazine called The Baltimore American, and much tickled my fancy when I read it.
"Take up The White Man's Burden--
Then put it down again:
Don't touch it with your pencil
Typewriter, or your pen.
In parodistic manner
Don't fritter time away,
For your won't be as good as
The one by Rudyard K.
Take up The White Man's Burden,
But patiently refrain
From writing verses like it ,
Lest you bring woe and pain
To this who read the paper-
They're weary now you know-
Cause thousands have been at it,
From Main to Mexico.
Lay down The White Man's Burden,
Waste not your stamps and means
On silent sullen peoples
Who run the magazines.
No matter what you send them,
No matter what you do,
The silent sullen peoples
will send it back to you.
The Pioneer. Sunday September 3, 1899. Page 2-3.