Books
O'Sheel, Shaemas & Shuster, George N. & Vernon, Grenville & Gilligan, Francis J.
BOOKS Individuals The Adams Family, by James Truslow Adams. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. $4.00. f I "* HERE will be few thoughtful men able to come away A from this unusually able study...
...moreover the amount of ability in the four generations showed extraordinarily little dimunition, and yet politically minded as all the Adamses have been, their public influence declined in direct ratio to the increase of democracy...
...The word accessible, though, does not adequately describe his service...
...The missionary followed the explorer...
...The Church met the challenge...
...Some readers will want, after awhile, the relief of a shadow, a heartbeat, a swelling tone...
...By these citizen or slave made his living first of all, and then expressed both himself and the civilization which encompassed him...
...and in a tribute to the late Harry Houdini he exclaims "How could a dead magician Put it over a live mortician...
...But Ezra Pound himself could not more ruthlessly cut off all excrescences of simile, all tropic luxuriances from the direct metaphor that fuses the thought and the word indissolubly, with the finality and hard glitter of a gem...
...direct in statement, spare in imagery, thin of music...
...John Truslow Adams has written a book worthy of his subject...
...Many things in this new collection of poems by Melville Cane seem to call for obligati on the flute...
...No Adams has ever assented to the deliquescence of the individual, and the result was the tragedy of the fourth generation...
...Without reference to school or tendency, the contents of this book might be described as poems generally quite brief, in lines of irregular length, generally short, in free rhythm, and usually tipped with rhyme...
...2.00...
...Neuburger's book reduces whole ponds and lakes of this information to the dimensions of one rippling and swift moving stream, down which one can swim or sail with extraordinary pleasure...
...George N. Shuster...
...You may simply sit and watch the magnificent panorama go by—the arts of mining and smelting, of tanning and baking bread, of pottery and spinning, of making clocks and stoves, of baths, bridges, sewers, ships and a thousand other things...
...The virtues of such a volume are numerous...
...The accusation has even been made that Catholics have done nothing for the Negroes...
...Neuburger has written one of these rare volumes, which I commend to the professor and the farmer, to Mr...
...Shaemas O'Sheel...
...The contents of this book would endure no richer accompaniment...
...The best of it is, one need not bother with the kind of question which perennially accompanies reading of this sort— is it accurate ? We who have neither time nor ability to consult the reports of Dioscorides or to meditate upon the mural paintings of Pompeii may simply take the author's word, conscious that with genuinely Teutonic diligence he has weighed one point against another and buttressed every assertion upon tenable evidence...
...His courage deserves every commendation for it should induce others who are engaged in the work to commit themselves...
...In the United States, however, conditions exist which indicate the absence of a similar solicitude for the American Negroes...
...His nameless hero—destined to rest beneath the London Cenotaph—is kept well within the ranks of the average British soldier...
...1 HE Unknown Soldier is merely another war novel...
...They possessed character, stability, balance of mind, independence of action...
...Of all the Adamses Henry possessed the most original intellect...
...Songs for a Flute Behind Dark Spaces, by Melville Cane...
...content with etching a scene or stating some unthought-of relationship...
...But his treatment of such questions is unhappy both in phrase and spirit...
...and men have demanded a great deal more than its faint tones...
...Shepherding the Negro The Catholic Church and the American Negro, by John T. Gillard, S.SJ...
...Cane freely turns to contemporary themes and employs, when it serves him, colloquial phrases...
...Nevertheless, Princess Bibesco's book probably will be widely read in a kindly spirit, and still kinder admiration, by the hundreds of people who trail royalty and its doings...
...It became a roar by the fourth generation of Adamses, who have never been able to say it because they have not felt it...
...We have always realized in a vague way that the ancients made any number of useful or ornamental objects...
...Neuburger is careful to assert that the Greeks and Romans had few "secrets" and that their mechanical equipment was decidedly limited...
...The number of researches out of which a new insight into the actual life of long since vanished peoples could be gleaned is so vast that the mere process of cataloguing would be interminable...
...and the flute should have a rather metallic tone...
...Chesterton and Senator Hiram Johnson, without a qualm...
...Bartlett has arraigned the usual horrors and purposelessness of war with a restraint which was absent from such books as All Quiet on the Western Front and with a considerable lack of originality...
...without harmonics even where there are undertones ; drawings in line without chiaroscuro, without shadows, with little mass and bulk...
...made willingly every sacrifice—save that of feeling and saying, 'we.'" The individualism of the Adamses was never conquered...
...Thus he writes very realistically of sheep in a train rolling to death and the effect of their bleating on men and women, children and nurses and policemen, sailors and tramps...
...There is danger that the unwarranted generalizations which those sections contain may antagonize the group that the author is serving so generously...
...and there has been a widespread demand for the facts...
...That casual and very personal instrument could match their brief wayward rhythms and somewhat fragmentary character...
...Melville Cane, then, is a craftsman who asks no indulgence in his chosen manner...
...served her as faithfully and ably...
...Of the four brothers, John Quincy alone had thrown himself into the arena, waging for years a hopeless struggle as the leader of a minority party in Massachusetts against the greed, dishonesty and self-satisfaction of the Republican majority...
...One can vision those burdened with the immediate obligation of directing such missionary work using his graphs as war maps to study the gains and losses...
...The leaders begin to toss it carelessly among the people in this decade...
...And, the biographer adds, "around 1850 the Puritan God evaporated, leaving only the New England conscience...
...They are pretty sketches, but that is all...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...1 HERE are useless lives, and useless books, useless inasmuch as they teach us nothing new, and entertain us but moderately, although they are what many would call well written...
...One should not, perhaps, ask the fashioner of a delicate vase to paint big canvases of the human scene, full of warmth and color...
...During these thousands of years man was not an animal fumbling about for useful accidents, but a creature guided by inward light and hunger...
...IT IS told that Dorothy Parker thought of calling one of her books, Songs for the Nearest Harmonica...
...Asquith, later the Earl of Oxford, the famous British Prime Minister...
...The exploration of the west coast of Africa, however, raised the task of Christianizing the Negro from the realm of art to that of reality...
...At heart Henry like every Adams was publicminded, but he lived in an era when character, independence of mind and originality had become the reverse of assets in the political world...
...Everything is explained to the minutest detail, there are hundreds of lucid and appropriate illustrations, and the author communicates his love of the subject without obtrusively attempting to do so...
...But beyond admiring the Greeks for the excellent taste which characterizes their public building, or wondering how the Egyptians preserved their mummies, no great attention has been paid to the actual handicraft upon which all this achievement reposed...
...The Adamses were never "mixers" and they had as James Russell Lowell said, "a genius for saying a gracious thing in an ungracious way...
...It is proclaimed to the world in 1776...
...While the social system of antiquity was often grossly indifferent to human rights, slavery in the mines being especially shocking, the measure of inventive intelligence, graceful individuality and exact science brought to bear upon countless tasks is nevertheless something which might well render us of a technological era more than usually humble...
...The reverence for facts which characterized other sections of the work is there conquered by a loyalty to the attitudes of a former generation...
...John and John Quincy had religion to support them, while to Charles Francis there remained only a tepid Unitarianism, becoming with Henry a tortured agnosticism...
...The flute sometimes magically sums up all that need be said, in a self-sufficient utterance that needs no harmonic development...
...This was necessary to Mr...
...Henry would have liked to have made a place for himself in public life but, lacking the heroic quality of his brother John Quincy, was unable to bring himself to fight what his keen mind knew must be a battle which he could not win, at least with honor...
...It rolls from the West like an Indian war-whoop behind the lean figure of Jackson in 1828...
...He alone was able to write books which have entered into our literary heritage, though every Adams has attempted it...
...The most intellectual, and to the modern mind, the most interesting of the Adamses, he was yet the most completely defeated in his desire...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...The only two chapters which are not commonplace are the description of the accession of little King Michael of Rumania, and the pages in which the author relates the incidents of her acquaintance with Mr...
...NOW and then a book appears which ought not to be interesting, which at first sight seems intended for persons with very special minds and hobbies, but which turns out to be as absorbing as the latest gossip about royal ladies...
...3.00...
...That consciousness probably explains the traditional practice of artists representing one of the Magi as a black man...
...Father Gillard, a member of a society that has heroically labored for generations to minister to the American Negroes, has met the demand by a frank and scholarly statement of what has been done, what is being done, and what should be done by Catholics...
...10.00...
...Cane is a poet very much of his time...
...That is as close as he comes, however, to the acid irony for which Pound, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings, in their several ways, have found the imagist technique effective...
...We", writes James Truslow Adams, "is a rare word in the Adams vocabulary...
...colors, grey and silver with flashes of grass-green and sky-blue, nothing more luxuriant...
...They have loved their country as nobly as any...
...They were extraordinarily English and in some respects extraordinarily un-Bostonian, though with all their dislike for Boston only Boston, or at least Massachusetts, could have produced them...
...But being not only candid but also courageous Father Gillard was neither content with tabulating statistics nor with describing vividly, as he has done, the tremendous difficulties experienced by the missionary among the colored in the southern states...
...The Education of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres are two of the masterpieces of American literature, and yet each of these works was the output of a man who considered his life a failure and his efforts futile, so much so that he published them privately...
...Briefer Mention Some Royalties and a Prime Minister, by Princess Marthe Bibesco...
...translated by Henry L. Brose...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...f I "* HERE will be few thoughtful men able to come away A from this unusually able study of the ablest family in American history without a profound feeling of depression, and the biographer, who himself is no relation to the family of whom he writes, puts the case most epigramatically in his study of John Adams...
...No part of human experience is closer to the real man of any age than the crafts...
...rarely hinting at anything poignant in life, or that men and beasts suffer, agonize, love, plot, glory, triumph, war and die...
...2.00...
...Scholars have, of course, been resolutely digging out information...
...And yet somehow the feeling will not down that the reason for the success of the first two Adamses, why John the father and John Quincy the son became presidents of the United States, was that unlike their descendents, they believed...
...But it is an undeniably thin music, that easily becomes monotonous...
...The reason for this is evident...
...DURING the early ages of the Church Christians were earnestly conscious of the obligation of preaching the Gospel to all races...
...The volume is lightly written, and travelers will find it pleasant reading...
...And so at the end of his life he burrowed into the middle-ages, trying to find some meaning to life without the aid of faith, flirting with the Stoic philosophy and ending with futility...
...It rumbles resentfully through every village in 1800...
...Charles Francis, despite his lifelong contempt for the business man and the life of business, had become ironically a railroad official, and Brooks a keen but ineffectual commentator on modern life...
...Nor is his device, a story of experiences told as recollections of an officer lying wounded in No Man's Land, very successful...
...To this number belongs the small volume in which Princess Marthe Bibesco has condensed her impressions of the many royal personages she had the opportunity to meet...
...John Truslow Adams writes regarding Charles Francis Adams of the third generation: "After one has lived with John Quincy through the pages of his Diary, heard his agonized prayers and his imprecations on his and God's enemies, one realizes as never before that however more justifiable intellectually a mild deism may be, it is no substitute as a driving force, in a solitary man fighting a nation on what he believed to be a moral principle, for the stronger religious feeling of the earlier generation...
...And the results of his long and tedious researches are ingenuously arranged in graphs and tables which reveal not only an ability to collect statistics but also a penchant for military strategy...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...In this volume he is very strictly an imagist, though like most of the second generation of imagists he avails constantly of rhyme...
...Baltimore: St...
...Forgotten Handicraft The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients, by Alfred Neuburger...
...It is also regrettable that this work, which is a scholarly contribution to the missionary literature of the Church, was not offered while in manuscript to a courageous friend for corrections and criticism...
...He has presented also his personal views about such highly explosive questions as that of a colored clergy and exclusively colored churches...
...The Unknown Soldier, by Vernon Bartlett...
...Its absence, for four generations, though apparently trifling, is of no trifling significance...
...Francis J. Gilligan...
...For he not only published the data but he also collected it...
...Grenville Vernon...
...Since then the Catholics of Europe have constantly strained both their financial and spiritual resources to provide for missionary work among the Negroes of Africa...
...Such reflections and many more are nursed by a book which has the charm of a picaresque novel and the exactness of a painstaking scientific study...
...The principal value of Father Gillard's study is that he has made accessible accurate and detailed data about Catholic missionary work among the colored...
...3.00...
...Joseph's Society Press...
...magnificent leaders as the first two were, and splendid diplomats as were the first three, they were unsuited for the traffic of Democratic politics, and were successful only because they lived in an age when democracy had not yet completely submerged the land...
...These impressions were first published in a magazine, and perhaps it would have been better to leave them there, because there is nothing here that conforms with the idea that a book is permanent...
...Bartlett's idea but it lowers the level of the appeal of his novel...
...Yet their incredible skill in beautifying their lives with the work of their hands gives testimony to the truth that art is quite as normal a human function as any other...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 17
