BOOKS:

...But not unmotivated, because from the beginning Rodman is bulldoggishly out to snap at fame in the person of his subject...

...But the democratic leveling he so detested and feared never got much beyond the realm of speech and manners...

...but we can't speak of sufficient conditions...

...The happy kingdoms of revolutionary prophecy look suspiciously like secularized versions of the visions of the religious...

...Samuel Sewall, Jr...

...All the elegant speech and manners in the world couldn't put that Humpty Dumpty together again...

...Lewy speaks of "the Greek view of the world in which everything reoccurs (sic...

...He was a contemporary or near-contemporary of Bach, Handel, Newton, and Locke...

...Sewall began his diary December 3, 1673 at the age of twenty-one, a few years before he became a citizen of Boston and married Hannah Hull...

...I asked him where he'd acquired English good enough to appreciate it...

...That is not a political slogan...

...but the earlier movements show that such a religious system as Mahayana Buddhism will, despite all the a priori unlikeliness of it, under certain conditions nerve men to resist the misery and oppression for which a given order seems responsible...

...I believe in nonviolent revolution...

...Michael's College in Toronto...

...Higgins: Oh no...

...I don't think so...

...the 972 pages of this printed edition also give us a considerable amount of information (annotated and indexed) about the social, political, and economic life of Boston and New England, all those delicious tidbits of insight and information that now go by the name of social history...

...God-fearing, conscientious, judicious, hard-working-a not untypical member of the ruling class in seventeenth-century Boston- Sewall was loving to his wife, children, servants, neighbors, relatives, and friends...

...Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, have at times mounted attacks upon the societies they have earlier striven to conserve...

...They specifically excluded proletarians from the franchise...

...with the Note "Cf...

...Certainly his Brahmin sensibilities would be offended by the speech and morals of contemporary American women...

...Lewy repeats the story that the Levelers "aimed at political equality for all Englishmen...

...Lewy quotes Ellul's sharp criticism that "Christian intellectuals have made a practice of arriving on the stroke of midnight . . . 'joining struggles that are virtually over...

...The interest of tone is the interest of morals, and the interest of morals is the interest of civilization...

...Farrar, Straus, $30 Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Samuel Sewall was born in England in 1652, arrived in the colonies at the age of nine, spent his adolescence at Newberry and his college years at Harvard...

...The pupil of the left eye is very small and a little off center...

...Similarly, in Sharp's words, "Nonviolent action means that submission and passivity are cast off...

...For example, "millenarianism" (or "chili-asm") begins life as a term restricted in its function to the designation of Christian groups such as the Anabaptists and the Fifth Monarchy men...

...But he is there, never letting us fail to take satisfaction (if we can) in his satisfaction at talking to the biggies about Art...

...Sewall's puritan conscience, honed by prayer and fasting, and dedicated to searching for God's will in his own life, underlay the faithful keeping of his diary...

...Anyone unfamiliar with this history will probably be astonished at the numerous instances where non-violence accomplished specific goals under extraordinarily repressive regimes (the Roman plebeians against the consuls in 494 B.C...

...After establishing a theoretical base, Sharp explores the basic characteristics of nonviolence by pointing to specific episodes in history...

...If you're a train conductor you can at least act the part with a bit of aplomb...

...There is no evidence that the doctrine of eternal recurrence was generally held even among educated Greeks...

...blacks in South Africa), and at the wide range of nonviolent actions against undemocratic rule in ancient and modern times...

...So we find embarrassing accounts, such as the following, where Rodman introduces himself, using one of his earlier books as a calling card, to the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes: "My passport was South America of the Poets...

...I knew their work, but only vaguely...

...Small wonder James was distressed...

...A group of upper-class school girls James encountered near the Boston Common, for example, demonstrated through their lack of refined speech, the ill-effects of the American social climate, particularly its tendencies towards "social equality...

...And throughout there is the figure of Rodman-energetic, blunt, manipulating, often obnoxious, always professionally unsophisticated...

...The method comes from Max Weber- two memorable examples are "charismatic leadership" and "bureaucracy"- and there can be no doubt that it has enlivened our knowledge of the past...

...For the unnamed theme running through the diary- striking to any twentieth-century reader-is life in the midst of death...

...He surveys great tracts of evidence, notes similarities and dissimilarities, sorts out into "kinds," looks at causal and logical connections, and in the end achieves generalizations that help us to articulate clearly and, one hopes, correctly our thinking about religion, society, revolution...

...Sewall was the guardian for a number of boys and young men, a widespread custom-adolescent swapping-that deserves further study since its purpose seems to have been to separate parents and adolescent children...

...Why, one might ask, was Henry James so exercised...

...And finally the saddest pages in the whole diary tell of Hannah's death in 1717 after forty-two years of marriage...

...and how, because of habit, fear, self-interest, and indifference, the many obey the few...

...Everything hangs together, I say, and there's no isolated question of speech, no isolated application of taste, no isolated damnation of delicacy...

...Violence should be understood in this context as harm to persons, not to property...

...For all the unexpected deaths, the cruel accidents, the slow and tortured dying of a child, a woman in labor, an old person, there is little railing against the deity, or fate, or the hardness of life...

...American women, he declared, were boisterous, loud, roughly hewn and ill-mannered...

...Sewall's diary in its artless and wholly unselfconscious manner reveals a rich and worthy life, not the least because it is a life that embodies so many attitudes, motives, and ideas that we now find so incredible, but which once formed the building blocks of a remarkable human existence...

...One knew a lady by her speech and decorum...

...it was in Sewall's time clearly a condition of life...

...Sharp conscientiously and specifically defines his terms...

...And by and large there is a saner and healthier attitude toward the subject than we can muster given the relative absence of suffering and death in our own lives...

...No such operation has so far been contrived...

...Shocking...

...Ranging from the brief sections on Garcia Marquez and Hemingway to longer pieces on well-known writers like Mailer and lesser known figures as Jao Cabral de Melo Neto, the book offers a varying glimpse of twelve significant writers...

...The Politics of Nonviolent Action GENE SHARP Porter Sargent, $24.95 MICHAEL TRUE The reader is likely to take up this volume with considerable impatience: no book should have to be that long (700 pages of text, over 50 pages of index and another 150 pages of notes and bibliography), or that expensive ($24.95...

...The miseries of this world (in any case, like the visitations of food fortune, distributed with a fine impartiality) are, it is suggested, as nothing compared with what may be feared or hoped for in the world to come, whether this be conceived as eternal pleasure or pain or as an escape from the cycles of human existence...

...More than fifteen years ago, Rodman's Conversations with Artists took up a battling position which his present volume re-assumes: 'Then, as now," Rodman explains, "I didn't ask prepared questions or use a tape recorder...

...he continued it until October 13, 1729, three months before his death at the age of seventy-eight...

...It makes some sense to speak of necessary conditions for the rise of e.g...

...The Sewalls' feelings at the time of each of these deaths should put to rest the idea that only with the Victorian age did parents began to weep over the deaths of their children...

...As a circuit court judge, Sewall faithfully made his rounds and wrote down his observations...

...This means the responsibility is ours...

...Professor Lewy has studied a great variety of these movements, some of them, as revolutionary Anabaptism, familiar, others, at least to this reviewer, new and surprising, as the long history of revolutionary or at least rebellious religious movements in China...

...He wrote several essays on the subject which, together with a series of articles on manners, originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1906 and 1907 and are now reprinted in a single volume as The Speech and Manners of American Women...

...Gene Sharp's statement is not meant to dismiss the work of organizations such as the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service Committee, . the Catholic Worker, or other groups long devoted to the use of nonviolent direct action, but simply to call attention to the relative absence of serious study of nonviolence...

...it is truly Janus-faced...

...Too many simple and incontrovertible statements are given quite unnecessary buttressing in the Notes...

...Simon & Schuster...

...to keep on the straight and narrow path...

...Most of all, though, the book is just-as we love to say the English like to say-a good read...

...And Samuel Sewall, too...

...When in Boston, there was the assembly to attend, the King's governors to counter, peaches to pick, a house to build, Sam Sewall, Jr...

...No doubt there are thirty other categories by which to analyze such a rich document, but to me three characterize Sewall's life: death, patriarchy, and religion...

...You were saying-" Coupled with this thickheaded plugging of his books and his friendships is a verbal obtuseness which leads Rodman into absurdities such as a glass coffee table that "contained" nothing but an ash tray and a rift that healed "irrevocably...

...In fact, there was until recently so little awareness of the tradition and history of nonviolent struggle that nonviolent activists have, by and large, improvised their responses independently of past practice...

...Sewall's diary not only tells us much about the man...

...Of Derek Walcott comments on Walt Disney: "His morality was Franciscan, because it imbued every creature with reverence...

...It is perhaps supererogatory to add that women are the traditional bearers of culture and the moral guardians of society...

...especially pertinent, since it contrasts nonviolence with violence as a method of action in conflict situations and distinguishes the two, as they relate to the basic nature and roots of political power...

...Sharp has helped to reclaim a lost history which, like the history of blacks, Indians, and women, is crucial to understanding our past...

...Whether this inability is a necessary consequence of a necessary ignorance or comes from something fundamental, the essential freedom, spontaneity, creativity of man, is not something for sociologists to worry over...

...but there is no assurance that men with other cares will make the inference or, making the inference, will pass from theory to practice...

...The second fascinating thread the attentive reader can follow in this diary is the story of Sewall's family life...

...This could be true...

...The creation of the 'lady' was, after all, the culmination of centuries of European civilization-a tradition James' "shouting, flouncing, romping, uproariously jesting" countrywomen seemed determined to flaunt...

...In a period of social and economic unrest, of labor strife and the fight for women's suffrage in America, the one "great truth" which loomed "so portentously" for Henry James was that of the "non-existence of any approach to manners on the part of the nation at large...

...Second of all, the book is full of insights and revelations of the small, novelistic sort you only find in interviews...

...The predominant mode of speech, particularly the speech of the women of a given society, conveyed the entire mood, all the subtle textures and finely woven tapestries of a civilization...

...The conductor replied to James, his social 'better,' in a brusque monosyllable...

...Spock did not invent permissiveness...

...Stoicism, which, at least in its later and perhaps eclectic form, made much of the distinction between the beauty of nature and the dreariness of convention, was notoriously the Rotarianism of the ancient world...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS is the author of Who's Minding the Children...

...Speech and manners appropriate to one's station in life were indices of a system of stratification in equilibrium and harmonious balance...

...It was undoubtedly a risky and time-consuming undertaking for both editor and publisher whom I enthusiastically congratulate for their persistence as well as their achievement...

...and by blacks and anti-war activists since 1954...

...My oxymoronic irony is intended: South America and the Caribbean are seldom thought of as part of our hemisphere, let alone of our cosmos...

...and Catholic revolutionaries in contemporary South America...

...Not any feelings that we need bother about...

...To commend religion as consolation is today commonly thought to be ignoble, and so it is, on certain assumptions...

...To borrow a twentieth-century phrase, these three realities were major axes of his social construction of reality...

...Undaunted and fully appreciative of the pleasures of married life Sewall began his second courtship at the age of sixty-six...

...to put in a good word for a promising courtship...

...In a concluding note, he issues a challenge that may help the reader relate his theoretical study to daily life: "If deliberate efforts are made to apply nonviolent action in place of violence in the crucial conflicts of today and tomorrow, then the responsibility must fall on all of us who see these tasks which need to be accomplished...

...The ground of argument is there, built into the very foundations of the religion...

...The Tai-ping Rebellion in the nineteenth century grew out of a Christian infection...

...Thus James is hurt, genuinely disturbed, by the curtness of a response he received when he made a simple query of a train conductor...

...From the sacred monarchies of the great river valleys to Catholicism or Lutheranism in modern Europe the practice of religion and the moral principles that attend upon it have excited reverence for political authority and contentment with the unequal distribution of power and riches...

...Sharp includes references to nonviolent resistance movements on every continent during the last two centuries and especially in the United States, by religious groups in New England during Colonial times...

...in the end we see there is some ground for broadening the type to include Jewish Zealots, Taoist revolutionaries, followers of the Mahdi (was their great enemy, General Gordon, a frustrated millenarian...

...Religion integrates and also disrupts society...

...J. m. cameron teaches at St...

...In a more serious and touching vein Sewall recounts the deaths of his daughters, both young women, married and the mothers of several children...

...This should surely be "a Greek view...

...I know of no other book with such generous, hemispheric cosmopolitanism...

...And now, as then, Rodman believes in treating creative people as people first and artists second...

...The European class system dictated to individuals how they should act and guided them as to what they ought to do...

...the use of mock funerals as political protest in the American colonies in 1764, against the Stamp Act...

...jean bethke elshtain is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...The best society for James was one in which there was a place for everyone and everyone knew his (and her) place...

...Nonviolence offers another way, and Professor Sharp has provided a useful record of its past achievements and future possibilities...

...In many ways, the book is a success story, not for what is in the interviews but because there were these interviews at all...

...He finally married Rebecca Dudley, the governor's daughter...

...His complaints were accompanied by much family prayer, fasting, discussion, and firm indicators from Hannah Sewall as well as Samuel, Sr...

...He suggests that radical Catholics in Brazil and elsewhere may "have hitched their carriage to a waning star...

...indeed, the "presentabil-ity of the most pleasing specimens of the sex in more mature societies is expensively arrived at . . .; it is at the cost of certain others, at the best, of certain obscured, hindered, sacrificed growths, that the happiest examples of any rich human efflorescence have hitherto managed to bask in the light...

...He was something of a Renaissance Man: an observer of Nature, a farmer, merchant, banker, amateur theologian, avid conversationalist about things religious, a judge (without being a lawyer), an elected representative, writer, linguist, etc...

...My favorite example is: "We are not prepared to apply the maxim 'do not lie' in all conceivable circumstances...

...complained his way through three or four apprenticeships (rather early on having evidenced little inclination or ability to attend Harvard...

...Part II, 'The Methods of Nonviolent Action: Political Jiu-Jitsu at Work," describes the various techniques of nonviolent action: the use of sanctuary, for example, as prescribed by Canon Law and as practiced during the Persian Revolution of 1905-1907...

...Or the following bit of self-service from his conversation with Derek Walcott: "Can I interrupt your raptus, I said, to ask whether you discovered Borges and Neruda after I gave you South America of the Poets...

...But no matter how much Rodman appears the ugly American of the literary interview, we still must credit this book on several accounts...

...The answer emerges quite clearly in these essays...

...There is an interesting discussion of the relations between the Catholic Church and revolutionary movements in Latin America...

...Their development and form, I mean...

...nor is it likely to please Utopians who think an alliance between Church and revolution will soon topple the defenses of international capitalism...

...I don't recall your mentioning them five years ago in Port-of-Spain...

...Hardly a week passes when Sewall does not attend a funeral, or pray and visit with some sick and dying friend, in Paul Ramsey's vivid phrase, "com-panying the dying...

...Her use of speech, mingled with a carefully contrived aesthetics of manner, required that the lady decorously submit to the exigencies of upper-class civil intercourse-a way of life which presumed her pleasing triviality when as it catered to her 'refined' sensibilities...

...The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729 M. HALSEY THOMAS, EDIT...

...Here, if anywhere, the collision of millenarian hopes with ancient laws and modern politics could have been studied with profit...

...Another term for the "social interrelatedness" prized by a James is the "system of inequality and exploitation" condemned by a Marx or a Taw-ney...

...in the first part of this century...

...ronald CHRIST is editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York City...

...This belief in the necessary role of modern technology doesn't seem obviously true and makes slightly sick reading at a time when India has just exploded an atomic device...

...Given this presumption, James was upset-indeed, positively irked-by the "crudity of tone of my countrywomen...

...Far removed from the now classic Paris Review interviews which established the how of the writer's production and separate, say, from Rita Guibert's presentations of the background to the author's work, Rodman's interviews blend where and in what circumstance each conversation took place with what was drunk and what smoked and, of course, some of what was said...

...Even so, the authoritarian patriarch had his problems...

...The Speech and Manners of American Women is the rueful expression of a man of aristocratic sentiment who saw his vision of the future in a life that was already crumbling...

...There leap from these pages incidents, half-conversations, nagging worries, pleasures, picnics, jokes that suggest a life replete with the benefits and drawbacks of an extended family as well as some strikingly modern attitudes toward child-rearing...

...instead, it was the language he heard "in the drawingrooms and ballrooms of the best society the country could show...

...David Riesman wrote, in a foreword to an earlier book about nonviolent alternatives: "Once violence becomes an addiction, the personality changes, other more generous impulses are repressed, people become brutalized and declare that the society has made them that way...

...In discussing the social roots of political power, for example, he identifies the several sources from which political power emerges (authority, human resources, skills...

...For instance, in Taoism, as in the European school of natural law, as indeed in any religious system that allows for a gap between the world that conforms to the pattern of the heavenly powers and the fallen world of men-the age of gold and the age of brass, the age of the pure ius naturale and the age of the actual ius gentium (in the latter private ownership flourishes and the contumacious may be hanged or have their ears cropped)-it is always possible to argue that a given emperor or other authority is no longer the agent of heaven...

...This involves a more extended use of certain categories...

...This seems a fair conclusion at the end of Lewy's survey of almost three thousand years of civilized history...

...A stormy marriage ensued, with Sam frequently at home with his parents while Rebecca, a formidable lady herself, went the way of Hester Prynne, without suffering the consequences...

...to continue conversations, often theological, from one journey to the next...

...Tongues of Fallen Angels SELDEN RODMAN New Directions, $12 RONALD CHRIST Everybody loves them but nobody knows much about them...

...millenarianism...

...Certain intellectual justifications turn out to be pervasive...

...curious, but consoling too, for these are witnesses to the intellectual unity of mankind...

...For such apercus, then, and not for major esthetic statements or profound revelations of character you can turn to Tongues of Fallen Angels and find yourself satisfied...

...It was with an artfulness in the use of "vocal sounds" that the lady could most affect "the ears of a man...

...Much of Rodman's book is therefore trivial and trivializing...

...Have you, Eliza...

...The Speech and Manner* of American Women HENRY JAMES Lancaster House Press, $3.45 JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Pickering: Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings...

...If the social order loses its cohesion, if the moral authority of institutions is undermined, decay and disorder will manifest themselves first in rude manners and crude speech...

...James writes: ". . . in a difficult and complicated world it is well to have had as many things as possible discriminated and thought out and tried and tested for us...

...After a visit to the land of his birth, James retreated to the greater civility of Europe...

...After a pause, and time for his audience to wonder if Dolci had abandoned his long commitment to the discipline of non-violence, he added: "I believe in nonviolent action...

...This edition is provided with full notes and a complete index by Mr...

...You forced me to read them...

...Speech, for James, was more than a question of human communication or expressions of meaning...

...As James Barr has shown, this kind of generalization has done a lot of harm to biblical studies...

...There are all the same certain moments in the history of the world when bodies of religious men and women set themselves against their societies and dream of the instant destruction or the deep transformation of the social and political order...

...It recognizes the possibility that violence may break out during nonviolent action and discusses the kinds of precautions that people such as Gandhi took to isolate violence when it occurred...

...Once asked what he thought of nonviolence, Danilo Dolci, the Gandhi of Sicily, replied: "I don't believe in nonviolence...

...But there is more than death...

...In a well-written and carefully documented book, he provides a history, an anthology, and a basic reference on the dynamics and methods of nonviolent direct action that belongs in every public and school library, as well as in the hands of any serious student of power, conflict resolution, and social change...

...For instance, Rodman observes of Borges: "No wonder he looks just a little mad...

...Surliness indicates to James, who was by no means impercep-tive in these matters, discontent and discontent is a sure sign that social and political discipline are breaking down, that the fabric is coming unraveled...

...For everything hangs together, and there are certain perceptions and sensibilities that are a key- a key to the inner treasury of consciousness, where all sorts of priceless things abide...

...Thomas and beautifully designed and printed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux...

...The lady (a "rich human efflorescence") feeds on the exploited laundress or textile worker ("sacrificed growths") and for James this is as it should be...

...Part III, "The Dynamics of Nonviolent Action"-the book's final section, gives a realistic account of the risks of nonviolent action, the dangers of defeat, injury, imprisonment, death...

...235-36...

...Like Shaw's Professor Higgins, Henry James was obsessed with speech...

...A strange omission is that of any discussion of the State of Israel...

...There is prayer, there is comforting, there is strengthening in faith...

...instead, James laments, ". . . he might really have been more positive, . . . three or four words more, rightly placed, would have largely amplified and enriched his position...

...The book is a long one and it would be strange if there were no errors or doubtful judgments...

...In the introduction, however, the author justifies his lengthy study, prepared under the auspices of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, in a simple and direct statement and with a logic that is disturbingly obvious: "Although much effort has gone into increasing the efficiency of violent conflict, no comparable efforts have yet gone into making nonviolent action more effective and hence more likely to be substituted for violence...

...His book should occupy a special place beside all those histories of wars and violent revolution, as well as beside similar important general studies, such as Hannah Arendt's On Violence (1970) and Mulford Sibley's The Quiet Battle (1963...

...We are told that Gandhi "was opposed to modern technology which alone can overcome an undeveloped country's grinding misery...

...Manners, he argues, are not so much rules of etiquette as the key to the morals and consciousness of a people...

...Informality, unrehearsed give-and-take seemed more important than being 'covered' against demurrers...

...Unlike them his only claims to a place in "history" are that he was the one judge to recant his role in the Salem witch trials- and that for fifty-six years he kept this remarkable diary...

...michael true is chairman of the English Department at Assumption College and lecturer at Clark University in Massachusetts...

...Crombie, "Moral Principles," in Ian T. Ramsey, ed., Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (New York, 1966), pp...

...First of all, Tongues of Fallen Angels is a major book solely by definition of its format which intermingles North American, South American and Caribbean writers with no excuses and no explanations...

...In The Politics of Nonviolence, Sharp has effectively dramatized the fact that violence need not be the only means of bringing about social change...

...and the employment of economic boycott and other acts of citizen noncooperation against established government...

...It isn't calculated to please those who think of the Church as a spiritual police power...

...Seven short years from the time James penned the last of the laments included in this volume, the shots at Sarajevo signaled an end to the complacent acceptance of the world of "upstairs . . . downstairs...

...He is interested in them because they are creative but his interest is importantly focused on their daily lives...

...by the I.W.W...

...Among the authors included will have to be Selden Rodman...

...None of this occurred-nothing in Sewall's life occurred-without its being properly referred to the loving care of an all-powerful God...

...Sewall and his wife, Hannah, had fourteen children, eight of whom died in childhood...

...He explains why obedience rests at the heart of political power...

...People won't know "their places" anymore...

...Any successful campaign for social change requires investigation, preparation, strategy, and discipline...

...the Danes and Norwegians under the Nazis...

...it is therefore the right or even the duty of the ordinary citizen to kill him or to take away his liberty...

...The girls' execrable language was what James would have expected in the "rough world of the tenement, the factory, or the slum, the world unconscious of semitones, of vocal adjustments...

...Still, interviews are one of the foremost modes of biography and criticism we have and someday someone must write their history, listing the major practitioners -going back, at least in English, to Boswell...

...The Sewalls enjoyed the pleasures of household which included not only servants, but visiting cousins, friends and assorted other relatives, all in residence for longer rather than shorter visits...

...His travels were not a mere professional chore, which included visiting, eating, drinking as well as judging, but the opportunity to maintain ties with relatives and friends...

...The closeness of these two institutions is perhaps among the more surprising of the changes that came over Catholicism since the second Vatican Council...

...If religion is, as Marx said, "the heart of a heartless world," it is to be despised if and only if the world can be given another heart...

...It is curious to find Chinese philosophers who lived before the Christian era talking about pretty much the same problems about the right of resistance to a tyrannical ruler as were discussed by John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas...

...For those who dismiss nonviolence as "naive," Part I of The Politics of Nonviolent Action is REVIEWERS Dennis o'brien is author of the forthcoming Hegel on Reason and History (U...

...But whatever has produced a lopsided economic growth and a deepening of the contrast between rich and poor, with their social consequences-small peasant wars, shanty towns, violence and torture-has provoked an evangelical revival, not only among small radical sections of the parish clergy and religious, but also among the bishops...

...They will suffer from the malaise Durkheim called anomie...

...Lewy's method is Baconian, like that of other sociologists handling large topics...

...It falls on each of us, on me and on you...

...This is plain from much of the material Lewy has assembled...

...First of all, there rises from the diary the hard and unremitting fact that physical strength, endurance, good health, and mental and spiritual certainty (possessed in abundance by Sewall) all contributed to the survival of the fittest...

...to conduct business...

...of Chicago Press...

...that he must come to terms with life...

...As Lewy observes, it is a science necessarily confined to retrodiction...

...James not only accepted, he celebrated the Edwardian social hierarchy in which "common figures" were used to "fertilize the ground" for gentlemen and gentlewomen...

...He was even nice to the cranky Mathers...

...and history provides a number of useful examples of how power relationships were altered nonviolently, through conversion, accommodation, or coercion...

...Though his outlook is centuries and worlds separated from those of Virginia Woolf or Andre Gide, and Sewall is neither so artful or self-conscious as they, we finally know Sewall and his world as well as we know these two masters of the modern diary...

...The shining star of the Jamesian hierarchical firmament was the upper-class lady...

...The pupil of the right eye is so enlarged that it almost fills the iris...

...but there seems no reason to suppose that without intense pressure from the masses those Latin American countries that receive such bounty from Washington for the armies and the police are likely to go in for any profound self-transformation...

...The upper-class American women he encountered, who should have been grateful for the fact that a carefully balanced system of stratification relieved them of the onerous responsibility of "extracting a conception of the universe," of becoming moral agents, exhibited instead a lack of the refinement which, given James' litmus paper tests for civilizations, boded ill indeed...

...But the logical possibility is important...