Books
Baring, Maurice & Dwyer, James L. & Walsh, Thomas & Crowley, Paul & Stuart, Henry Longan
BOOKS A PREFACE TO LADY LOVATS BOOK* A LTHOUGH someone once said that to launch a book -**-without a preface was like going out for a walk without a hat, an anthology which presents a gleaning...
...no wordy eloquence or "fine writing" smothers her narrative...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...So after the fashion of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, he immediately led his followers off into the uncharted wilderness of the Sertao, and in the autumn of 1893 he began to build his city of Canudos, far from the haunts of civilized men...
...whereas other charters, such as that of Massachusetts in 1691, further required submission to the crown for its possible veto, so that the local government had not final jurisdiction...
...However, the work seems mature enough, although it has a few obvious defects...
...He was brought before a judge on a trumped-up charge, but asking his followers to refrain from violence, he replied to the accusation of murdering his wife and mother, both of whom were easily shown to be alive...
...Quixote...
...Of particular interest is the paper entitled Studies in Julius Caesar, which makes a valuable and rather novel point to the effect that this great historical play suffers from Shakespeare's lack of concern with the Roman republic as such...
...The compiler had vast stores at her disposal, touching every side of life, European culture and experience...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The result of this attitude on the Governor's part was to bring the early colony into close similarity with present United States conditions...
...In order to set them forth adequately here, I shall depart somewhat from Mr...
...All that the writer of such a preface can do is to take off his hat, and, in admiring silence, indicate the door of the rich cavern, where there are "infinite riches in a little room," to the reader...
...It is edifying to read this analysis of a great English Protestant hero and note how exactly it corresponds to the conception of - "the Jesuit" prevalent at the time Baxter wrote, and not quite superseded today...
...schoolmasters...
...One day he assaults this worthy, and believing he has killed him he flees the house and in desperation joins a band of highwaymen...
...and Sumner, evidently a take-off on a despicable type of Palm Beach-comber and decorator, are extremely well drawn figures, although it is hard to see anything more than irony in Mr...
...In 1858 he was unfortunate enough to contract marriage with a loose, ungovernable woman, who caused him to wander from place to place and finally abandoned him, leaving him to face a violent mental crisis of shame and the wild elements inherited in his blood...
...T. W. BRIEFER MENTION Falstaff and Other Shakespearean Topics, by Albert H. Tolman...
...with general suffrage...
...wedding garments...
...Sulky, suspicious and over-proud, he has a dog-like affection for those who are kind to him, and a mute, pathetic desire to do the right thing, without ever quite doing it...
...My censures of the Papists," he admitted in his self-analysis, written late in life, "do much differ from what they were at first...
...moblaw...
...Therefore the objective, impersonal character of Mr...
...There have been many attempts to delineate the peculiar character of vulgarity, display and disorder that mark this southern playground, but none that can surpass Mr...
...Shakespeare's Second Marriage, by Dr...
...her use of this device is rather too frequent...
...Tolman also deals illuminatingly with the question of Shakespeare's repudiation of democracy...
...ham, the prisoner of...
...Her highwaymen, in particular, are well drawn...
...She chose a more limited range (not of authors but of subjects) of which the dominant theme, as she looked back on the woven records, the long, many-colored tapestry of her mental adventures, seemed to her to be most fittingly expressed in the name she has chosen for the title...
...Thomas Walsh...
...Appleton's theory is correct, we owe sixteen of the world's greatest dramas to the fact that Shakespeare's successor to the affection of Anne Hathwey remembered that they were an asset...
...1 HE critic must call for his sandals and India silk dressing gown before venturing into the butterfly nuances of this little volume of Nargas...
...but in the English version of Puran Singh, they are harmonious and visionary, so far away and exotic that it is only by a strain on the imagination that we can picture men and a human society so remote, so superfine, and so different from the European and American civic and intellectual order...
...Mutatis mutandis," it is the language the broad-minded Catholic loves to use when speaking of separated brethren...
...The desolate region, the desperate character of Conselheiro's followers, the superstitious dread aroused even in the republican army by the marvels related of Conselheiro, the ghost of the national hero, Dom Sebastian of Portugal, that hovered over the towers of Canudos, were responsible for the failures and delays in its destruction...
...CONTEMPORARY interest in the constitutional governV> ment of the United States justifies the appearance of this volume by the assistant Secretary of State during Mr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Besides sympathizing with the colonists in their representative desires, Lord Baltimore guided them in their regulation of religious liberty...
...The passage of a bill by its legislature and signature by its governor were the only conditions precedent to validity...
...with a representative lower branch of the legislature elected from prescribed areas...
...needlessly cruel to their victims and without honor among themselves, they are exhibited as the vicious, wholly unromantic brutes they undoubtedly were...
...with an executive independent of the other arms of government—with their judiciary, though not independent of proprietarial influence, yet differentiated from the executive and legislative offices—we have many elements in colonial Maryland of our constitutional system...
...Starbrace, by Sheila Kaye-Smith...
...You need only glance at the index of authors at the end to see that the reading of the compiler must have been exceptionally wide and deep...
...In 1882 the Archbishop of Bahia issued a circular to his parish priests, in which he said: "It having come to my notice that one Antonio Conselheiro has begun preaching to the people, exhorting them to an excessively rigid morality, thus troubling men's consciences and weakening the authority of the priesthood, we call upon you to prohibit all your flock from listening to the preaching of this man...
...a fourth who was "a common drunkard and who tippled himself into so great poverty that he had no other way to live," and finally "near a dozen more ministers that were near eighty years old apiece . . . most of them of scandalous lives...
...that the fathers learned quite as much from them as from the older, abstract theories about what federalism might conceivably be...
...Negroes, and outcasts, criminals and degenerates, the lawless and disorderly, as wild in their sins and as wild in their repentance: for them all Conselheiro was the leader, merely following his own simple life, and probably without any fixed ideas at all on any subject or upon the activities that were about to be forced upon him...
...faustus...
...Or turn to the index of subjects, and the variety and versatility of her mind will be still more apparent...
...Told with simple skill, it is worth reading...
...Lastly, one feels that Miss Kaye-Smith could have relied less on coincidence...
...In any case, he was dealing with a man who, behind the bluff and rugged mask that looks out upon us from Robert Walker's famous portrait, concealed one of the subtlest and least scrupulous minds of his generation...
...Long's reasonableness and honesty...
...Appleton believes, thus taking issue with Lee and Adams, that there were two women in the case—Miss Hathwey and Miss Whateley...
...Catholics will always keep a warm spot in their hearts for Baxter, the Controversialist...
...Written at a period some fifty years after the great religious change in England, when reforming fervor might have been expected to be at its height, the record is an interesting side-light on the motives and characters of the reformers themselves...
...Conselheiro called the republicans "the spawn of Satan" who were trying to paganize the land...
...My purpose," he says in his own account of his ministry, "was to have done my best to take off that regiment I was with and then to have tried upon the General's . . . and then have joined with others of the same mind (for the other regiments were much less corrupted...
...his heart is "very like an unfinished harp, abandoned by the maker before more than two strings had been strung, the strings to which alone dumb animals responded—fear and love...
...Miss Kaye-Smith's greatest charm is the simplicity of her style...
...Tolman, has reprinted in this volume a variety of studies which attracted attention when published in learned journals...
...At first I thought that Mr...
...Shakespeare married again, and that upon her death the second husband, being in need of funds, proceeded to arrange for the publication of the immortal First Folio...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...J Paul Crowley...
...In the same year, 1876, his followers were amazed at his sudden arrest...
...He preaches and gives advice to the crowds that follow him, where the parish priests allow him to hold forth...
...On this point Mr...
...Poor westerners that we are, our human grossnesses protrude themselves in the presence of these lotusblossom orientals, whose dreams seem to be spun behind goldensilk curtains to the breath of aromatic woods and the sound of the one-stringed rebek...
...At nineteen he is taken from squalor and starvation into the household of Sir John Starbrace, his grandfather, where he conceives an impossible love for the daughter of a neighboring squire, nd where a belated attempt is made to teach him the ways of the gentry...
...If Dr...
...The Genesis of the Constitution of the United States of America, by Breckinridge Long...
...This anthology differs from such in that, although its range is wide, it presents only one small facet of a captain jewel of culture, experience, and thought—one beam of a large revolving lamp from a high and lonely lighthouse...
...What he has to say of both is interesting, if not wholly convincing...
...Frederick K. Powicke, reviewed in The Commonweal for September 30, 1925, was largely an enquiry into the grounds and fortunes of the religious opinions of the argumentative divine, who bequeathed to posterity, besides the immortal Saints' Everlasting Rest, no less than 160 volumes, large and small, of controversial literature...
...2.00...
...boredom...
...James L. Dwyer...
...In a somewhat deprecatory foreword, the author states that it was written by "a very young girl, whose experience of life was small, though her appetite for it was immense...
...Whereupon he again runs away, joins the dragoons under an assumed name, and welcomes death in battle against the Jacobite troops...
...As soon as I was come to the army, Oliver Cromwell coldly bid me welcome and never spake one word more to me while I was there...
...He proceeds to surmise that the well-known Mrs...
...One doubts, however, that there was sufficient reason for making a book out of papers so random in character...
...the zenith...
...Long ts valuably explicit...
...This is the speech of inherent tolerance, the outward sign of that indwelling charity which, as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we are promised shall "soften what is rigid...
...Most anthologies and commonplace books, even when they are slight and restricted in range, nevertheless present as a rule a complete harvest...
...March 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 529 The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, being the Reliquiae Baxterianae, abridged from the folio (1696) with appendices and notes, by J. M. Lloyd-Thomas...
...with tax bills, though not originating in the lower House, yet necessarily passing through it...
...Appleton, during many years president of the New York Shakespeare Society, is to be congratulated upon a monograph so lively and stimulating in character...
...This attempt fails, due partly to his own untameable nature, and partly to an unbearably sanctimonious tutor...
...Graham's attempt to align Conselheiro with the Gnostics and ancient Carpocratians will fall unconvincingly on ears attuned to the shouts of camp-meetings and fanatical revivals of more modern days: the opposition of the Church and the friars of Brazil is to be well understood in what he tells us of Conselheiro's teaching in regard to chastity and child-birth, and the interpretation put upon his teaching by the generality of his followers: "Good works, pursued for their own sake alone, induce arrogance and a self-satisfaction that shrivels up the soul...
...Long's sequence, but shall incorporate as much as possible of his own language...
...IF IT were only for its remarkable picture of life at Palm Beach, Mr...
...joy, of little things...
...Followers gathered about him quite unsolicited—women in the greater part—to join him in living on alms, bearing the whips and insults of the proud, sleeping in the open hills, fasting and praying, rejoicing in their sufferings and penances...
...The result is the tropical adventure into Palm Beach, the mecca of the cheap and vulgar ambitions of hundreds of thousands of Main Street celebrities, with the vices of the old world intensified by the excesses and juvenile barbarities of our new country...
...Lottie Van Anders, the social buccaneer of a good social position, plucking her fortunes from the ignorant social climbers...
...In 1855 his father's death left him with three sisters depending upon him...
...What were the real circumstances of Shakespeare's marriage and domestic life...
...Appleton's book is delightful and educative...
...Mr...
...Logic remains: but, then, again, the followers of Antonio Conselheiro who engaged in pious orgies were surely logical enough, for if the world is to end directly, it is best to get what we can out of it, whilst our life still remains...
...Though the historian might quarrel with certain conclusions here and there in the volume, it would be with full recognition of Mr...
...2.00...
...Maurice Baring...
...violets...
...Napoleon...
...Up to this point he s>tirs our pity, if not our sympathy—at least we can understand him...
...The inhabitants of Bahia were of the sort to recognize at once any strange devotee that entered their community...
...4.00...
...In fact, the charter was granted to him, ostensibly at least, because of his desire to ad53O THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 vance the standards of Christianity and extend the limits of the English dominion, and he proceeded to administer his trust and to proclaim religious liberty—the first example in any government...
...3.00...
...Towne's graphic outline, corrosive irony and instinctively dramatic seizure of the salient points of the Florida question...
...and that the Constitution is a clearly discernible development out of earlier forms...
...Conselheiro recognized the necessity for flight as he knew the powers in Bahia would only send a stronger force against him...
...incompatibilities...
...Because of the topics it discusses, Dr...
...nor once all that time vouchsafed me an opportunity to come to the headquarters...
...2.00...
...528 THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 A Brazilian Mystic, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham...
...The spiritual aridity of the era in which Baxter grew up may be gauged from his own brief account of his adolescence, at Rowton, in Shropshire, one of the English counties that border upon Wales...
...Unable to overtake the successful lover of his wife, he lay in wait and assaulted a relative who had sheltered the pair, and as a result was committed to prison, from which in a short time he made his escape and disappeared into the wilderness where he remained for ten years...
...Here is an alphabetic list, in which I have selected one author, and one only from many, for each letter of the alphabet: Aeschylus, Baudelaire, Claudel, Dryden, Epictetus, Foch, Hardy, Inge, Saint John of the Cross, Kipling, Lao-tsze, Middleton Murry, Napoleon III, King Oscar of Sweden, Plotinus, Reynolds, Soloviev, the Talmud, Voltaire, Arnold White and Yeats...
...Perkins well proved that a Papist cannot go beyond a reprobate, but now I doubt not that God hath many sanctified ones among them, who have received the true doctrine of Christianity so practically that their contradictory errors avail not to hinder their love of God and their salvation...
...Towne not only grasps the outer details of his characters, but sees deep into the very miserable depths of the vital principles—not to debase the word soul—of his personages...
...In matters of faith he concluded that misrepresentation had made the differences "much greater than they are, and that in some of them there is next to none at all...
...Much of the contention in which Richard Baxter found himself involved all his life must be laid at the door of a singularly individual and intransigeant character...
...petroleum...
...His absolute honesty debarred him from the prejudices and bigotry of his generation in their regard...
...This limitation would have a greater significance today than it had in 1632 and there is some doubt that the restriction was meant exactly as expressed, but the fact remains that perfect liberty of 'Christian* worship was decreed in Maryland before it was decreed anywhere else—even before the colonists whose object in emigrating had been freedom of worship—and decreed, not by a Protestant, nor in a Protestant colony, but by a Catholic nobleman in a colony in which the predominating membership was Catholic...
...The plot, laid in early eighteenth-century England, is reminiscent...
...toys...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...colonial expansion...
...He was an old man of thirty years...
...THE life of Antonio Conselheiro is one of the tragedies of our own times...
...Miles Starbrace, son of an aristocrat and a tavern chambermaid, reaches young manhood a Sussex yokel, ignorant of his ancestry—and of nearly everything else...
...That it was employed by this honest and ardent Anglican divine three centuries ago is one more proof that the elect whom God's finger has touched continue to speak to one another in an idiom that is mutually intelligible across all the barriers of time, distance, dogma, and racial misunderstanding...
...From early years, his life was peaceful and devout: he attended the neighboring churches, the missions and novenas, never forgetting the Rosary before he went to sleep...
...Not content that his break with the ecclesiastics was becoming more and more declared, Conselheiro took his stand against the secular government in 1893, whom, after the addication of the emperor, Don Pedro, the new republic was establishing itself throughout the country...
...Towne's first novel would call for special commendation...
...professions, promises, and vow9 shall be kept or broken...
...Long believed that the earlier American experiments with corporate government were of distinct educational value...
...The authorities by their unjust and foolish conduct had transformed the poor wanderer into a martyr, and his influence was doubled...
...The savagery of the country revealed itself in the long avenues of skulls leading to the hidden city, and when the body of the fanatic, preacher, and mad prophet who had died alone before his altar was finally discovered, his decapitated head was sent traveling over the land on exhibition in a tent at the country fairs...
...Wilson's administration, which is devoted to the various colonial charters and compacts which may have been of assistance to those who shaped the "greatest document ever conceived by the mind of man...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Maryland did have final authority in legislative as well as executive matters...
...Towne into a foremost place among the satirists of today, presented with that rich and succulent spread of material which the reign of the bounders has brought to us...
...Among the local clergy he lists one, "the excellentest stage-player in the country, and a good gamester...
...Forces were sent against him, a small band which fled after discharging a volley and left the fanatics flushed with a sense of a victory...
...S-TARBRACE, new to this country, but published in Great Britain in 1909, is the second of Sheila Kaye-Smith's ten novels...
...With religious liberty...
...IT IS significant of the interest that is beginning to be taken in Richard Baxter, "the Controversialist," that two volumes upon his life have appeared in twelve months...
...Graham, "of a judicious prophet or of a man superior to men and all their frailties...
...New York: The Shakespeare Society of New York...
...Withal, Starbrace is a colorful tale of adventure in a lusty, turbulent setting...
...this left his followers free to spread reports ac- cording as they saw fit, "after the fashion," says Mr...
...Nargds, Songs of a Sikh, by Bhai Vir Singh...
...The picture of Miles is not so convincing...
...What these songs, that are said to be very important in the modern cenacles of the Punjab, may signify in the original, it is hard to say...
...It was not long before the mania of prophecy came over Conselheiro, and he announced that several years of misfortune would usher in the final destruction of the world...
...riches...
...What makes this collection characteristic, peculiar, and perhaps unique, is that not only is the garland carefully woven after a deliberate and exclusive choice from a large and richly stocked garden, but it is one sheaf, and one sheaf only, from the harvest of a mind now living apart from the world and looking back on the world from the calm and seclusion of the cloister...
...The general debacle, the loss of the Nesbit fortune, the disasters brought upon -her family by Delia's disordered mentality and real vulgarity of soul, all make up a novel which will bring Mr...
...Not mad," jauntily declares Mr...
...two more who obtained orders by forgery, a practice which Baxter hints was pretty general...
...eternity...
...with an upper branch of the legislature elected by the landed proprietorship...
...The Life, by Mr...
...Graham, "and yet not altogether sane, but probably just on the borderland in which dwell saints and visionaries, and all those folk who feel they have a mission to declare, a world to save, and a vague Deity they have to glorify...
...Readers who were attracted by this picture of a lonely apostle of tolerance in an intolerant age will be glad to make his acquaintance again, this time through the medium of his own musings and confessions in The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, edited and abridged by Mr...
...1 HE well-known Shakespearean scholar, Dr...
...Towne's repeated references to their wit and cleverness...
...Here is a short, alphabetic list of subjects, with, again, only one subject for each letter of the alphabet: Air, the spirit of...
...Even his own justification of his mission with the Parliamentarian army, whose chaplain he was for two years, does not quite clear up a suspicion that he was a Royalist, "boring from within...
...The 'liberty* was of a limited sort, applying only to Christians...
...This list . . . testifies to the catholicity of the compiler's taste, and shows that nothing was too old nor too new, too near nor too far, for her insatiable mental curiosity...
...Mrs...
...These conclusions are destined to be quoted widely and discussed at length...
...Delia Nesbit, her matter-of-fact husband, and her son and daughter are carried out of their customary environment into the smart society of interior decorators and the side streets in the regions leading off from Fifth Avenue...
...Then follows a long and terrible story, very well outlined in Mr...
...He laid no claim to supernatural powers, nor did he yet deny them...
...Appleton Morgan...
...J. M. Lloyd-Thomas...
...The story of Tinsel is concerned with the fortunes of a Northern small-town family of good class—smug, industrial aristocrats grown rich in the manufacture and sale of awnings...
...Antonio Conselheiro—the Counsellor—his real name was Antonio Vincente Mendes Maciel—was born in the highlands of Ceara about 1842...
...The man who thinks for himself and resists classification in any of the categories that the workaday world imposes, can always be sure of being misunderstood...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...He seemed exceeding openhearted by a familiar rusticaffected carriage . . . but he thought secrecy a virtue and dissimulation no vice, and simulation—that is, in plain English, a lie—to be a tolerable fault in case of necessity...
...BOOKS A PREFACE TO LADY LOVATS BOOK* A LTHOUGH someone once said that to launch a book -**-without a preface was like going out for a walk without a hat, an anthology which presents a gleaning of the thought and experience of a long life needs no preface, especially from someone who is not the compiler...
...His chapter dealing with the Articles of Confederation, for instance, is notable for compactness and breadth of treatment...
...Oxford...
...gleanings from every field that has been traversed, samples or memories from every spot that has been visited by the maker of it in the journey of life...
...Baxter's estimate of the Protector is given at some length: "He thinketh that the end being good and necessary, the necessary means cannot be bad...
...Of very great interest are those portions of the book which deal with the legal institutions of the Maryland colony...
...He is subsequently captured, freed through his grandfather's influence, and tearfully refused by his love...
...But the author has seen fit to daub him with a streak of Victorian morality which, whatever its desirability, is certainly incongruous in a hard-riding young roustabout of Tom Jones's day...
...loaves and lilies...
...When he reappeared in the state of Bahia, he was a changed being, worn with fasting, his eyes fixed and staring, his hair and beard waving about him, his sole garment a long blue shirt, and in his hands a staff like the classic pilgrim's, knotted and gnarled, but shiny with long use...
...In a hide bag which dangled by his side he carried only paper, ink and pens, a Mass book, and a Book of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin...
...It is the terrible story of a good man, unbalanced by his wrongs and driven by events into the position of a public menace and national calamity...
...2.SO...
...he giveth his interest and cause leave to tell him how far...
...To a large extent, this liberalism in rule was directly due to the influence of Lord Baltimore...
...Graham's book, of the four campaigns waged against Conselheiro and his followers by the feeble forces of the young Brazilian republic: three disastrous defeats for the republican troops, and a slow and unconvincing demoralization and destruction of Canudos, until November 5, 1897, when the regular troops entered the dead city to slay two boys and two veterans, their faces to the enemy, the sole survivors of Canudos...
...Cunninghame Graham gives the title of Brazilian Mystic to a figure that represents rather the wildest orgiastic type of religious fanaticism, the sensational revivalist and violent victim of superstition, which, while it may be explained in his scholarly studies of the racial frenzies of the Indian and Negro half-breeds of Brazil, can hardly, for all that, be raised to the character of a mysticism properly so-called...
...Maryland," he writes, "was really more autonomous than most of the colonies...
...2.50...
...Long's work is eminently valuable: he presents not a plaidoyer for any single interpretation of colonial government, but a summary of legal and constitutional facts, intelligently arranged and accurately estimated...
...with passage by both branches necessary to the validity of the bill...
...An unkind fate has thrust him into a strange and sometimes terrifying life without equipment for the struggle...
...He was a timid youth employed in his father's storehouses where he acquired a fair education...
...She has elucidated it with a line from Dante, which indeed explains the creation of anything significant, however great or however small: "L'Amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...so that most of my design was thereby frustrated...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...Furthermore, she has avoided, for the most part, the sugary romanticism with which the England of 200 years ago has been swathed by so many modern novelists...
...Tinsel, by Charles Hanson Towne...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 19
