Books
Anderson, Walter V. & Engels, Vincent & Brunini, John Gilland & Larsson, R. Ellsworth & Zabel, Morton Dauwen & C, T. & McMullen, Mary F.
May 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL BOOKS The Substance of Stories The Philosophy of Fiction, by Grant Overton. New York: D. Appleton and Company. $3.00. MR. OVERTON has had a long practical...
...The physician is a victim of the town councilors' admiration for youth, and will have nothing to do the rest of his days but criticize his successor...
...It is difficult to anneal the two characteristics solidly while journeying through Greece, because the murky present is sadly dissonant from the glorious, sunlit ages which are gone...
...has no doubt that his audience wishes him to do it...
...Doubtless the publication of Everyman's Library first suggested the possibilities latent in this kind of venture, but the field is now much wider and the diggings therein are more elaborate...
...This standard work on a major aspect of civics has been revised and brought up to date once again...
...Each chapter, after the first three, is given over to the discussion of method...
...she even sees Violet Caine through, though it was Violet who stole her husband and broke up her home...
...By far the best chapters, however, are those which follow...
...It is this impersonality of judgment that makes his position among contemporary critics a major one...
...The Captain has made the imperialism of Rhodes the object of his bitterest condemnation, but for the Boers, who were losing their war at the time of his travels, he has no kinder words...
...ONFIDENCE is one distinguishing mark in the writing ^^ of G. Martinez Sierra...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Professor Adams may be emphasizing a little too strongly the influences of the stage upon Shakespearean writing...
...He is dead sure about his materials...
...Not only was the house falling to ruin but the hill itself was subject to erosion from rain and river current...
...Its rhythm also escapes capture on staff paper...
...However, the history of fiction proves to be, not a summary of dates and types, but a useful outline of the problems and duties the story undertook to fulfil in different periods of man's social development...
...THE line of demarkation between Mr...
...Eliot has at last definitely identified himself with easily-recognized labels...
...The Kingdom of God and Other Plays, by G. Martinez Sierra...
...After having given thirty hard years to his parish, Don Antonio has failed to pass a diocesan examination in theology, and has been assigned to the chaplaincy of an almshouse for old women, less in need of sound doctrine than the villagers...
...At the end there is the promise of compensation for Sally in success as a singer, and perhaps in religion...
...The present book manages fairly well, especially when the smaller cities are under consideration...
...The rest of these eight essays treat of Machiavelli, of Francis Herbert Bradley, of Mr...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...The sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, of John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry under Charles I, of John Donne: in appreciation of these, his reasonable faith finds utterance...
...Norman Douglas...
...the third does not rest with me to define...
...his abomination, the misdirection of a creative talent that results in a Walter Pater...
...2.00...
...The persistent and intelligent efforts of the Association to trace and collect Washington relics is also told with meticulous care...
...4.00...
...Considered from the nationalistic standpoint he is correct, and his efforts to coalesce nations of varying customs, moralities and religions was destined to go the way of all arbitrary unions...
...This may explain, too, why he seldom yields in situations which inevitably present the temptation to sentimentalize...
...We have just been looking at one— Lang's prose translation of the Iliad, edited by Mr...
...A preface appears to have been lost...
...She sees her father, the railroaded politician, through...
...The play itself, of a more popular nature than most, may be cited as one example of the hard-headed gentility which is Sierra's manner of telling a story that another would design to excite great weeping in the gallery...
...neither should it be classed as a text-book (to which use, however, it will probably be put) for it is unencumbered by extracts, outlines, study programs and charts...
...Hamlet, the first volume, offers a text which differs in many details—notably punctuation—from those established by other collations...
...Nevertheless the dream of a Negro nation, like the dream of Zion, persists, and hence the tale of Captain Harry Dean and Sterling North, The Pedro Gorino, will be read with intenser interest...
...Thii volume offers what is probably the best and most readable account in English of the "mysterious fraternity" which, by dint of rites and symbols, greatly influenced modern European habits...
...It is, incidentally, on us...
...2.00...
...but it is an almost indispensable document to one who is trying to study the Romantic movement...
...On the other hand, it is a veritable strike for the musicologist, as the subject of Irish music has engaged the attention of only a small group of musical scholars and, to my knowledge, no philologist...
...Miss Roberts has gone on an intellectual spree...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...T. C. May 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 55 Briefer Mention A Glimpse of Greece, by Edward Hutton...
...Nevertheless he did establish a foundation for an empire, which, had he received the proper cooperation from his brothers in America, might possibly have been a flourishing and independent country today...
...it is on the villagers who are enthralled, for the moment, at the young man's graces...
...He is dealing with visions which leave no excuse for fumbling, and ideals which of themselves lend largely the strength of sustenance...
...The book has been delayed since 1916, when the Reverend Richard Henebry died, for the accumulation of the subscriptions and contributions necessary to the publication of purely scholastic works...
...Overton's book is one of the best of its kind, but it will probably do little to remove the dubious effects of a stultifying professionalism...
...the verbosity, for instance, of the second act in The Kingdom of God...
...Henebry was a devotee of Irish traditional culture, to which more than to music, the book is an exhaustive, one fears even exhausting, contribution...
...Eliot—but this might be construed as carping...
...It has not succeeded because of a multiplicity of circumstances, but most importantly because the American Negro had no desire to leave the country of his adoption...
...Symons's translation of Baudelaire...
...History of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, by Grace King...
...A series of charming illustrations, many of them fairly novel, compensate for one's disappointment...
...In his objection to the word "Negro" the whole fallacy of his idea can be traced...
...And so the joke, after all, is on authority, and on youth...
...His criticism is comparative, not interpretive: his master, Matthew Arnold...
...It is possibly more suited to the general reader than to the class-room student, but has been written in a genuinely critical and understanding spirit...
...The epilogue to Wife to a Famous Man, for instance, starts out to invite pathos, ends by provoking laughter...
...Here is a great book in an adequate form...
...She utilizes the love story of two rainmakers, Tulip McAfee and Jeremy, from some unidentifiable region which she calls Kentucky, as a frame for an unrelated and delectable jumble of wit, slyness, drollery, poetry and wisdom...
...GRACE KING has shown great industry and enormous patience in tracing the development of the Mount Vernon Association from its conception in the brain of Ann Pamela Cunningham, the invalid lady from South Carolina, to the highly developed, smoothly-functioning organization of the present day...
...otherwise the work is as it left the author's hand...
...An African's Lost Hope The Pedro Gorino, by Harry Dean and Sterling North...
...Classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and AngloCatholic in religion": such he now names himself, once and for all making further conjecture concerning his principles and policies superfluous...
...56 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 The Adams Shakespeare: Hamlet...
...As it is, she skips all the earlier decades, opening her history in 1853, the year in which Miss Cunningham began the work she was to carry to a well-earned success over tremendous obstacles...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...1.75...
...Of the last one can say only that it seems by far the most acute criticism of Professor Babbitt's work that has been written...
...The version was made from the original Spanish by a Benedictine of Stanbrook, and has been competently edited by the Reverend C. Lattey, S.J...
...Some of the views expressed in the book are quite original and thereby controversial...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company...
...For Captain Dean imaged an Ethiopian empire and spent a sizeable fortune and many years in his efforts to realize his vision...
...6.00...
...The clarity, the precision of the unmetaphorical style he has perfected, could be called nothing else...
...The Pedro Gorino is not destined to have the sensational appeal of the books brought out of Africa by Trader Horn, but whatever success it enjoys will be thoroughly deserved...
...Overton's statements shows that he would be the first to disclaim any remarkable originality for his main arguments...
...It is an uncomplicated little story, human enough to absorb us, yet not bearing so heavily upon our sympathies that it passes beyond the realm of entertainment...
...dead sure that his arrangement of them is good theatre...
...Nor is it anything but consciousness that the order he has arrived at finds only distorted and wavering reflection in others that makes him add, "I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to claptrap...
...The O.Henry Memorial stories, or the authors laureated by Mr...
...The conversations with him are carefully transcribed, but they strengthen one's conviction that he is, in real life, quite definitely monotonous-minded...
...Vincent Engbls...
...the latter had named it for Admiral Vernon, under whom he had served as a young man...
...It is, I suppose, the privilege of every writer on music to redefine the subject after his own heart...
...Eliot's prose and verse is squarely drawn...
...The mastery of atmosphere and of apparently simple yet really compelling detail which years of short-story writing have given Miss Synon are employed effectively in this story of the defeat and victory of Sally Burt...
...1 HE bricks here mentioned are the physical constituents of the turbulent yet somehow local and intimate Chicago of the nineties...
...It is a description of much of Spanish literature, as it is almost a definition of the Spanish people...
...To recognize discipline and the regard for tradition that is contained in the larger sense of that word as the core of his classicism is not difficult...
...When he comes to think of his kind as a race it is only with those thoughts which have been engendered by the history of his contact with the white man...
...His prose is classical...
...In Praise of Discipline For Lancelot Andrewes, by T. S. Eliot...
...The establishment and history of the republic of Liberia has been a sad answer to the proponents of the plan...
...At first sight this may seem merely an account of various unsavory amours...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...She gets her code mostly from men of the track, men of the ward, men of the ring, and it turns out to be a fairly good one...
...Hargrave Jennings's eminently serious (but perhaps not less nonsensical) account of The Rosicrutians ($4.00...
...Miss King spares herself no pains in following every step of the first years of struggle to raise the purchase money and to preserve the place from the wear and tear of thousands of visitors...
...Every American should be grateful to Miss Cunningham for saving the home of Washington from the complete obliteration that threatened it...
...George Gissing has likewise been impressed into new clothes, although these—good bindinp but exceedingly small type— do not seem to fit perfectly...
...it is on the young priest who has been sent to take Antonio's place and who will eat his heart out for the niceties of Madrid...
...It does not belong among the essays which have tried to make an original contribution to the theory of art, like The Craft of Fiction, and Aspects of the Novel...
...Even so it is a pleasure to see such representative books as New Grub Street and Thyrza going the rounds again...
...The whole attitude of the white man to the natives comes in for the fiercest of arraignments and it is certain that a true history of South and Central Africa will have to be written in different terms than those which were given the world at the time of Africa's initial colonization...
...L HE well-known American biographer of Shakespeare, Professor Joseph Quincy Adams, has projected a new edition of the plays...
...Jingling in the Wind, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts...
...At the time of his death and for many years previous, the author held the chair of Irish at University College, Cork...
...Reprints 'TpHE writer's index to immortality is the number of edi¦*- tions...
...It is an ungrateful task to indicate preferences in a design where all is rich and brilliant...
...Napoleon: The Man, by Dmitri S. Merezhkovsky...
...Her work should prove valuable as a book of reference, all the information it contains being authentic and above all accurate...
...George Washington inherited the place from his brother Lawrence...
...3-50...
...she sees her husband, the prize-fighter who should have been a doctor, through...
...The Good Red Bricks, by Mary Synon...
...Pelunis...
...Sally is a blossom growing on a deceptively tough stem...
...The two laboratory demonstrations give the beginner some idea of the patience and rigorous training his new work requires...
...To assist in this good work is one of the ambitions of E. P. Dutton and Company, acting with the collaboration of the worthy old firm of J. M. Dent and Sons...
...2.00...
...OVERTON has had a long practical experience in the publishing world which is so well aware of the hopes and dreams of young writers, and his new book, which is somewhat exalted by its title The Philosophy of Fiction, is written on the basis of an elaborate knowledge of the mechanics and routine of narration...
...Tara's Repertory A Handbook of Irish Music, by Richard Henebry...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...With his estimates of Andrewes and of Bramhall one is in accord, but one wonders if, in his devotion to austerity, he has not erred in seeking of Donne's full-hearted faith a more austere utterance...
...The authenticity of his account one must leave to the trustworthiness of his publishers, but his achievement is a matter of history, since he accomplished nothing...
...ALTHOUGH the present biographical style is diametrically opposed to the principle of unreasoned hero-worship, Dmitri Merezhkovsky stops little short of deification...
...Let others grope in a blind alley...
...but I doubt if it is not really the lesser of two evils, after reading a "tonometric examination" of Irish music (done with the "Appun" tonometer, apparently not to be confused with the tonometer of Scheibler, well known to musicians) in which we are brought into a bizarre pasture of logarithms to find the equations necessary to transcribe the old tunes of Ireland upon music paper...
...THE creation of a nation for the Negro on his native continent has figured largely in the schemes for the solution of what has come to be known as "the Negro problem...
...The major portion of the work is forbiddingly technical for the music lover, and, as musical knowledge goes, impracticable for the professional musician...
...Just what part Mr...
...of Middleton's plays, Richard Crashaw's poems, and the humanism of Professor Babbitt...
...He sees clearly enough what he wishes to do...
...it is on the archbishop who questioned the fitness of experienced shepherds...
...Often he flirts with this peril, but the dexterity with which he avoids any contact more direct comes, one may be fairly cerMay 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 53 tain, not as the result of deliberation, but from a familiarity with his problem, and contempt, or ease, born of that...
...The reviewer can dismiss Napoleon: The Man with Merezhkovsky's own analysis of Leon Bloy's The Soul of Napoleon...
...It is something which a Spaniard comes by naturally, as a birthright, and which the peoples we are most familiar with—because we are most familiar with their literature—English, French, German, Scandinavian and Russian, do not have in any marked degree...
...I do not find the comparison of Donne and Andrewes as apt as it seems to Mr...
...How far does this training in plot structure, character methods and motivation go in producing great books...
...Overton has a habit of casting large quantities of thought into the nutshells of aphorism which may easily mislead the student and confuse the beginner through the cloudy immensities such statements suggest...
...In laying before the reader the mechanics of the good novel, and in applying the principles he has laid bare to two laboratory experiments of his own making, he shows himself an expert in the manufacture of successful books...
...What a chance for tears...
...2.00...
...To say that Miss Cunningham "was almost divinely appointed for her mission," and that "the vision of rescuing the home of Washington from decay was like the vision of the Cross that appeared to Saint Helena," gives a touch of exaggeration that is not pleasing...
...Captain Dean feels that there is "no 'Negro race,' only many African races...
...This may explain, on the one hand, certain lapses...
...Overton takes time to rehearse such matters as the relation of fiction to truth, the history of fiction, the material of fiction, etc...
...and one is frequently reassured as to the value of his critical remarks by his references to E. M. Forster, Stevenson, Lubbock, and other original critics...
...But this book, like many others, leaves with us a knotty problem...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...It relates the supplanting of a village priest and a village physician by two younger men...
...It is all authentic Chicago, and Miss Synon has utilized well her opportunities for blocking in the garish scene...
...R. Ellsworth Larsson...
...Hutton is lucid and visionary enough when he treats of the wheat-fields of Boeotia, or the lovely site of Daulis...
...He has never been impressed with the ideal of racial autonomy, nor is he innately 52 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 conscious of race, in the manner in which the Italians, the Germans, the English, the Irish or the Jews are conscious of race...
...With royalism these essays have little to do...
...The temper of Mr...
...But while we are sorry for the priest and the doctor, we know that they are wise enough, good-natured enough, and stout enough to rise above this present tribulation...
...Walter V. Anderson...
...This is just the form in which to enjoy Sense and Sensibility, or Mansfield Park...
...2.00...
...He is motivated and writes on music from the springboard of philology, but alas we are a long way from Nietzsche...
...Among the new offerings is a set of Jane Austen, with illustrations in color by C. E. Brock ($2.00...
...What more could the lover of books and the confirmed reader demand...
...In this age when revolutions have dislodged the individual ego from the polarizing influence of a common inheritance of disciplined experience, his is the prodigious task of calling to order once more the remnants, the fragments of an ordered past...
...The fragments gleam with the high finish of an accomplished writer's art...
...and the other introductory sections are distinctly useful in developing in the student some of the enthusiasm and prejudices without which the business of authorship is always a woful drudgery...
...The bestseller standard prevails in our narrative art to such an extent that we almost deify the Katherine Mansfields and Thornton Wilders who sometimes appear with their unconventional but superior works...
...The most important part of the book, is, however, a commentary which follows the action closely and explains all problematic matters...
...7.00...
...Henebry "puts the writing of Irish music in terms of the modern scale entirely out of the question...
...The songs tonometricized with the Appun instrument are highly ornamental in melodic line, are full of "slides," and usually end with a complicated ornament...
...Appropriate glossary notes are affixed to every page, and may be commended for brevity and sense...
...New York: E. P. Button and Company...
...Another is afforded by The Two Shepherds, in many respects the best of these plays...
...in a word, they are as freely decorative as the designs of a Persian rug...
...O'Brien every year, offer slight assurance that mechanical and structural perfection yields much worthy art...
...Even in the face of subjugation and discrimination he has shown little inclination to unite in any movement that could be characterized as racial...
...Hard-Headed Gentility The Cradle Song and Other Plays, by G. Martinez Sierra...
...Classicist, too, is his insistence upon order and well-reasoned, substantial argument, his continuous discipline of the present with the past...
...and like all authors not professionally interested in music, he is very copious in shallow and lengthy soliloquy on the heavenly art...
...The analyses of Moby Dick, A Lost Lady, and Nostromo are, from the craftsman's angle, particularly felicitous...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...His models are excellent: Willa Cather, the earlier Arnold Bennett, Jane Austen, R. H. Mottram, Conrad, Melville, Bojer and Emily Bronte...
...One misses what might well have been put at the beginning of the first chapter, a brief history of the building itself and the origin of the name...
...No better book of the kind is available...
...These songs have been preserved through the agency of the human voice alone, much after the fashion of the folk-songs of other countries, and such material is the very fabric of a people's cultural heritage...
...It is to be regretted that Miss King did not mention the chivalrous action, in 1814, of Captain Gordon who, instead of demolishing Mount Vernon with his guns, saluted it...
...Finally Dutton offers a new edition of George Sand and Her Lovers, by Francis Gribble ($5.00...
...I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than claptrap, I mean conservatism...
...The descriptive passages are particularly fine...
...In the first three chapters Mr...
...The same firm has reissued in attractive form Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, with pleasant additions from the frivolous writings of others ($1.50) and Mr...
...The story of his trading in Africa, his visits to Lorenc.0 Marques where he was offered Portuguese East Africa for a ridiculously small sum, his parleys with Segow Faku, king of the Pondos, his reconciliation of the Pondos with the Pondo Mesis, his antagonistic reception by the British of South Africa and his final ruin by trickery provide reading made more glamorous by the pathos of a lost cause...
...He has really attempted a biography of Napoleon's "soul," of which he asks "where is the soul that possesses scales for bearing the weight of Napoleon...
...This tender irony of Sierra's is a characteristic lent him by his race...
...Morton Dauwen Zabel...
...Had all this been told swiftly and succinctly 54 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 it would have made interesting reading, but Miss King's style is overburdened with adjectives and marred by hyperbole...
...Unfortunately a traveling companion is introduced—none other than Mr...
...it will explain also why the simple outline of types in the first act of the same play should create such hilarity, and produce in the third, such a blend of sympathy, indignation, humor and true wisdom...
...In the preface to Lancelot Andrewes, Mr...
...He is profoundly conscious of tradition, and his judgments are impersonal in so far as they give voice always to the past...
...He writes that it is "a book weird, incoherent, boundless, at times almost insane...
...Because he so constantly varies the scene (and the age, too, by romping from Attic days to twentieth-century circumstance) he is almost the ideally entertaining and enlightening guide whom one has always wished for...
...Washington's Homestead Mount Vernon on the Potomac...
...In this he is merely following the spirit of the time, which rejoices in its hard-won knowledge of the technical aspects of Elizabethan drama...
...Henebry is far from an exception to the rule...
...We in America have seen and can bear witness against the flagrant defects and misinformation such a process of teaching opens up...
...The Macmillan Company offers a new edition of American Government and Politics, by Charles A. Beard ($3.75...
...Mary F. McMullen...
...2.00...
...IT IS hardly possible to review this impredicable book, but one can make a sort of approach to its quality by saying that it suggests the madder parts of James Stephens's The DemiGods and The Crock of Gold...
...It is difficult to believe that anyone today remains in ignorance of these elementary problems, and Mr...
...HUTTON has no superior in English as a travel writer both expert and poetic...
...A number of attractive titles have been added recently...
...It is more fittingly described as a laboratory manual, for the upshot of the volume is the putting together of an original novel, Sangre de Cristo...
...The virtue that he praises above all others is discipline, and in the practice of discipline he has outdone even his master...
...North has played in the shaping of the book cannot be determined, but the work is one of a master of smooth and picturesque English...
...VER in Ireland they do not go in for "humanizing" ^~S knowledge...
...The Modern Reader's Series, published by Macmillan, is a sequence of well-bound, convenient blue books priced at $.80 each...
...but there are two scenes, one between Jeremy and a wise spider, the other having as a centre-piece a tall, thin New Thought dyspeptic eating himself into a fit, which will trebly repay the connoisseur of this type of restorative craziness for reading...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...Among many reprints of books devoted to religious themes, we note especially a new translation of The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 2
