Books

...The peace of age, The freedom from worn-edged domination, The quiet dusk dream— Are so safely mine...

...Old age and renunciations are favorite subjects of Miss Ryan...

...Captain Thomason's is a curiously objective view of war, a positive tour-de-force of impressionism, which we owe to the happy accident that, like Baron Gros during the Napoleonic campaigns, a professional soldier with a keen relish for his calling was "doubled" (as the French would say) with a very efficient black-and-white artist...

...Even the abominable Sylvia found that dull—for she cried out in Some Do Not: "Isn't there something thrilling about chastity...

...After this I need hardly say that I do not consider No More Parades to be "as great as anything produced in English during the past twenty-five years," or Mr...

...The third is that interesting figure, the philosopher and student-in-arms...

...I never hear any criticism...

...In what I think is the most powerful and exact phrase ever used, General Bullard describes the famous line from the Channel to the Alps as something that "writhed like a wounded snake for three years...

...Suppose we leave it at that...

...McClure, and the third was written to Stedman, a brief and bitter line...

...and tragic they are, wherever the blame may lie...

...but I must confess to having felt a little overawed by the number and forthrightness of the opinions expressed by the reviewers and marshaled by Messrs...

...Cheney's chapter on organization and management...

...To General Allenby fell the happy destiny of being withdrawn, at a critical moment, from the terrible anonymity of the western front and put in charge of a spectacular and sweeping campaign whidh reproduced the flame and color of crusades in the twentieth century and which might have broken the power of Islam once and for all had not the jealousies and rivalries of the "great" powers put it back in its place as the secular menace to Europe...

...He remained at a serious price...

...Those who read this volume, and they should be many, will look with anxiety for the second which is to complete the biography and which will form the most satisfactory account of the Saint yet written...

...The young lieutenant is musing by the side of his men, asleep in their glistening slickers under the pouring rain, as the sky is paling in the East and the guns are beginning their prelude for another bloody day...

...In his diary, under date of September 30, the General is forced to note that "our French allies will become, indeed have already become, critical...

...he had fallen out as quickly with New York...

...He noticed, as he fell sideways, that all his men were tumbling over like duck-pins...

...General Bullard's reminiscences are probably the frankest war record we have ever had from an officer of his rank...

...She reminds you continually of a man—a bright, gentle, lovable, philosophical man—without being a bit masculine...

...1.50...

...They were there, and the Germans, and there was nothing else in the clanging world...

...Then comes the advent of the art theatre in America with a detailed account of such new, but already well-known institutions as the Theatre Guild, the Actors' Guild, the Provincetown and Greenwich Village Players, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and certain of the better-known community theatres of the Middle:West and the Pacific Coast...

...I particularly recommend this chapter of Mr...

...It is written by his military secretary, a frank hero-worshipper, and with a hero worthy of worship...

...One of them is a distinguished American general whose reputation was already made in his own country before the entry of the United States into the world war tested it, in the eyes of the world, literally with fire...

...Many of the finest plays, and much of the finest work in production, which we now see in the commercial theatre, have been deliberately taken over from the art theatres...

...The faces of a sleeping army are wonderful...

...His story is a record, amazing in its stark reality, of the soldier in close, hand-to-hand, "ding-dong" fighting, when staff arrangements have been disarranged by the necessity to first kill men anxious, above all, to kill you...

...While before me, through the darkening halls of this old house, The little breeze will carry All the salt, the tang, the freshness of the sea...

...LSINETEEN lessons or meditations on the History of The Most Wonderful Promise Ever Made, for the use of mothers and teachers of Christian Doctrine^is an admirable adaptation of true pedagogical principles to be applied to that most important subject, the formation and instruction of the Christian child...

...General Allenby's story falls somewhat outside the category of personal experience...

...It is also arguable that it would have dragged on indefinitely...

...The standing of the religious of the Cenacle and the approbation of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York are evidences of the zeal and ability that have gone to the creation of this really valuable handbook of catechetics which should prove a necessary vade-mecum in every religious grammar and high school, in every parish Sunday school, and in every Catholic home...

...During the crisis of preparation for the Somme attack: "The general went out, purchased some pastries, and went down for a little chat by the bedside of his protegee...

...Fortunately, there always have been and always will be people of sufficient means and sufficient artistic enlightenment to sustain deficits of this description...

...WHETHER you call them little theatres, or experimental theatres, or art theatres, the chief difference between the kind of theatre which Mr...

...His letters have been generally described as tragic...

...Lewes's eyes are grey and sympathetic, but neither large nor beautiful...

...It has been, I understand, the experience of theatres of this type that if they can demonstrate the wise expenditure of available funds from season to season, they have little or no difficulty in finding groups of people willing to make up a slight annual deficit in much the same way as the annual deficits of operas or many of the great symphony orchestras have been met...

...At fifty he lost his post...

...They were sleeping like the dead, literally...

...Cheney makes clear in just which directions we should look for this sound business management of art theatres, thus giving us a standard by which we can distinguish the failures occurring through business inefficiency from those which arise through lack of popular support of some of the more advanced and unusual types of plays...

...His fame blazed up in the West...

...Another is a soldier by profession and temperament with a keen relish for his calling, an authentic appetite for the rough and tumble of hand-to-hand fighting, and, by a happy accident, a draftsman of talent...

...It is almost inevitable when presenting new forms of drama from time to time, that these art theatres should find themselves several years in advance of the growth of popular taste...

...And so he remained to the end...

...One passage, almost Greek in its spectral beauty, cries for quotation...

...It goes without saying that these letters record many alleviating adventures...

...I grind out the old tunes on the old organ and gather up the coppers, but I never know whether my audience behind the window blinds are wishing me to 'move on' or not...

...726 THE COMMONWEAL May 5, 1926 No More Parades, by Ford Madox Ford...

...The recent action of the Holy Father in declaring the Saint the patron of Catholic journalists and all writers on behalf of the Church, has called the attention of the non-Catholic world to a man who has never lacked clients within the Church...

...Be thankful," he says, referring to one of his poems, "that I have found time to copy the enclosed...

...The only household in which for years he seems to have been an intimate was that of the Belgian Van de Veldes...

...Henry Longan Stuart...

...I cannot get acclimated," he says of the latter...

...There is reason to expect that she will yet acquire it...

...He has that thing, rare among soldiers, an open mind...

...and of his early episcopate...

...2.00...

...Cheney's, to remember that he is not discussing an abstract or highbrow theory of the theatre, but is setting before us a romantic story of the growth and increasing vitality and power of a new idea...

...I am longing," he says, "for the freshness, the newness, the youthfulness of my own country...

...They are only repeating in drama the experiences of great musicians, or of such a composer as Wagner in the early days of the music drama...

...He returned to headquarters at the exact moment that the guns were to lift, ready to deal with each report as it was telephoned back and to give orders accordingly...

...After the first thrill of deliverance at a development that put victory . within reach, it is plain that a sort of dismay settled upon the French staff at the deliberation of the American effort...

...The commercial theatre, as its name indicates, furnishes its commodity, entertainment, in the hope of an immediate and large financial return...

...No excitement, no worry or despair on their faces, only calm, a look not of determination but of resignation to go on and face whatever lay before them...

...3.50...

...Thereafter he was reduced to living by his literary work alone...

...1 HIS little book of Impressions and Portraits reveals in the author a natural gift of vision and character quite without the attitude of the professional poet or the aroma of the studio...

...Then, at several points during the reading of it, I was all but overpowered by boredom...

...Where General Bullard's story is particularly valuable is in the evidence it contains as to the state of mind that had descended upon France after two and a half years of war and devastation...

...The Portraits are stronger, and more interesting in character than in merely aesthetical quality...

...I hear some question already among the weak-hearted as to why the United States puts its soldiers in the railroad shops and leaves the Frenchmen on the fighting line...

...Anyone who reads that account must wonder how the war was won...

...And a few months later the shrewd leader comments thus on the tendency observed to break up large American units: "The French staff and general officers certainly never for a long time believed, and even finally unwillingly accepted, that the American staff was capable of directing the operation of its troops...

...He tried to draw upon other sources, the English character and American life in general, but California remained his stock-in-trade, a California that grew dim and confused in his mind, a memory unrenewed...

...But Krefeld in Germany suited him no better...

...Quite logically, Mr...

...I sometimes wonder," he says, "what kind of work I am doing...

...Something took the kneecap off the lieutenant's right knee and his leg buckled under him...

...You will perhaps smile and remember," he writes to his wife, apropos of his dislike of Germany, whither he had gone as consul, "how you used to accuse me of making the like charges against every place where I have lived...

...The art theatre produces plays which its management believes worth while without any particular expectation of financial profit, and for the sake of doing a worthwhile thing well...

...No More Parades is worth reading for one thing, which, after all, occupies about four-fifths of it: its account of a base-camp in the war...

...The incident," comments his staff-captain, "aptly illustrates the cool detachment of Allenby's mind...

...Her face lights up when she smiles and shows her large white teeth, and all thought of heaviness vanishes...

...What can one think of Americans who worship this sort of thing...

...New York: The New Door...

...Embittered and disappointed as a man, he never lacked courage as a writer...

...For Allenby's war is the war of which young soldiers dream, and so long as it is possible, just so long will it continue to throw its glamor over the drab mechanics of gas, and barbed wire and killing at long distance, and go on making "ambition virtue...

...Just a few will give some idea of Captain Thomason's quality: "Sweating, hot and angry with a cold, bleak anger, the Marines worked forward...

...His book is at once a record of dramatic accomplishment, an outline of present conditions and problems, and an important guide to future developments...

...His experiences in California, in the gold country at first and later as messenger of the Wells, Fargo Express, were his only inspiration...

...The Letters of Bret Harte, assembled and edited by Geoffrey Bret Harte...

...It is written in the style consecrated by Napier and Kinglake...

...On the day of his death, from cancer of the throat, he was still at his desk, grinding out his "600 words...

...He had quickly fallen out with California...

...All the lines are relaxed, all the pettinesses, weaknesses, vices, stand out...

...But the quite general knowledge that theatres of this type frequently have to appeal to special groups for continued support of their work, and the impression which this conveys of careless management, give a very special and practical importance to Mr...

...Like Napoleon he hates (one feels it) a poor soldier or a scamped job, but he hates them because he believes that discipline and character lie at the rock-bottom of the profession of arms, or, to put it another way that war is the add test of manhood...

...Beside such intimate and moving chronicles, Mr...

...Moreover its clear and forceful style makes it a valuable contribution to any library of the theatre...

...The weak jaws and chins fall open and droop, the lines on both sides of the nose grow deeper^-only on a few, mostly the very young, there comes a calm and a sweetness, a light grace in the sleeping attitude that justifies the worship of youth...

...I cannot help feeling that I am living by gaslight in a damp cellar with an occasional whiff from a drain, from a coal-heap, from a mouldy potato-bin, and from dirty washtubs...

...Perhaps there is a kind of sympathy," he remarks, "in the fact that they are intensely un-English, and Madame as a girl thirty years ago visited America with her father, and loved it...

...She said many fine things to me about my work, and asked me to come again to see her, which was a better compliment, as she May 5, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 725 has since Lewes's death received no one...

...Toward the Flame, by Hervey Allen...

...But there have been other art theatres whose management of the funds made available to them in the early season has been unwise and even reckless...

...The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in the art theatre movement throughout the United States, with the highly interesting result that commercial managers have been brought to a sudden realization that certain types of plays and certain methods of production which they had despised as being highbrow contain many lively and strenuous germs of popular success...

...For the doubts and questionings which arise in the mind of a philosopher on active service we turn to the very remarkable recor^ by Mr...

...Ford merely tells us about that conviction while he actually exhibits the general incompetence of the officers who made the complaint...

...It gives us an opportunity to compare and contrast the views and judgments upon war which four men, differing widely in temperament, in functions and character, feel called upon to pronounce seven years after the struggle has entered into history...

...Unable to make a living by writing and lecturing, he had applied for a consular post...

...He was out of touch with any world he knew...

...But "Germany is no place for me," he says...

...Allen has not to draw upon imagination to understand how the fighting man feels at the moment that the stroke falls for which the long months of preparation, fleets of transports, long convoys of commissariat and ordnance, staff conferences, and councils of war were only the preparation...

...Volume 1, $6.00...

...The deficit in such cases must simply be charged off to missionary work in the art of the theatre...

...He is preeminently the saint of common sense and many have found guidance in his Letters though they were written long ago to people who have been years in their graves...

...His friendship with Froude was warmly satisfactory...

...T*HE latter years of Bret Harte have always been enA veloped, in American eyes, in a kind of shadow...

...A man can stand just so much of that...

...He continued to write to the last day of his death, but his fame grew dimmer and dimmer...

...Cheney starts out with a general discussion of present conditions in the American theatre, showing how the need for the small independent theatres was forced by the conditions of commercial monopoly existing under the older regime...

...Thus we have the account of his heroic struggle for the Faith against the Genevan Calvinist$, that dour and dreadful herd...

...The air snapped and crackled all around...

...R. Dana Skinner...

...For if it was the settled conviction of the army that the war was being fought for the glory of politicians, and impeded by newspaper proprietors and other laymen powerful enough to impose their fads upon an incompetent and venal government, Mr...

...It follows that certain plays fail to attract large enough audiences completely to cover the cost of production...

...This book is a very concise and interesting guide to anyone who wishes to heighten his enjoyment of the average theatrical performance by coming in closer touch with the currents and changes in the theatrical world throughout the last decade...

...he had some semblance of a dwelling-place in England...

...Boni upon the cover of this book...

...Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company...

...Theodore Maynard...

...but he never really liked or approved of England...

...When conclusions come his way he makes them without caring much what prejudices they collide with...

...I never see anybody whose opinion I value...

...Meanwhile, to the left a little group of men lay in the wheat under the very muzzle of a gun that clipped the stalks around their ears...

...The authors have been concerned with such topics as "the soul, the angels, our first parents, God the Creator, and the Holy Trinity...

...A slightly firmer handling of her subjects would place Anne Ryan in an enviable position among the singers of today...

...The exportation of Krefeld silk to America "was increased," his grandson says, "by over two hundred thousand dollars quarterly, or eight hundred thousand dollars a year under his administration, and this by reason of the great simplification introduced by him into the previously existing methods regarding invoices, etc...

...It will receive a warm welcome for up to now we have had to our hand only the small and rather dull life by the late Mr...

...Van Wyck Brooks...

...no ambition— no endeavor—but of the most pitiable, trivial kind...

...there was one fellow that spun around twice, and went over backward with his arms up...

...2.50...

...They got in, cursing and stabbing...

...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...

...He knows just how it feels to lie for hours exposed to shell-fire and can tell you bluntly that it is "the worst thing in the world...

...He was "heartsick" for America...

...The final lines of her poem, From a Spinster, reveal the general scope of The Lost Hills: "So cloistered, locked away my real self lies, In days grown ordered and austere...

...Cheney gives of what they have done is perhaps sufficient comment on this phase of their work...

...Fix Bayonets, by Captain John W. Thomason, Jr., is a record of the part played in it by the men who are "soldiers and sailors too," the famous "leathernecks" whose everyday field of operations is anywhere a landing party can be put ashore...

...His youth was meteoric...

...He is always on the point of returning home, for a long visit at least...

...But the record of his life, as the letters disclose it, is that of a man who fought a long, hard fight and who simply never found his "pied a terre...

...Cheney's book to all those lovers of the theatre who are interested in supporting the art theatre movement, and who are seeking some guide to help them in the wise use of the money they are willing to contribute for this cause...

...Ford (ne Hueffer) to be the astounding genius that the New York literary coteries have decided, for some reason, that he is...

...In numerous quotations of a day-to-day diary kept during the war, he confesses his disillusionments, his expectations that were not realized—apprehensions that happily came to nought...

...It expresses elevation of thought, kindness, power, and humor...

...The Impressions are evidently derived directly from* nature, expressed in a harmonious Celtic style and animated by a lofty sense of the beauty of creation...

...He had quarreled with all his friends at home...

...Miles and miles of them passed in column [it is the French army going up to meet the worst of all the German drives, that of March, 1918] steadily marching toward battle, deliberate, self-possessed, quietly smoking, silently gazing at me and other passers...

...Unlike many of the "emotional reporters" of the war, Mr...

...Of George Eliot he gives a pleasant picture: "I have seldom seen a grander face...

...The Art Theatre, by Sheldon Cheney...

...He saw much of Froude and the half-dozen other "nice people" to whom he once refers, who "have always been very polite to me...

...There is religion here also, not obviously approached but rather sensed in the quality of the appreciation...

...I cannot think that they believed that they could stem the awful tide of German victory...

...He is always contrasting the "effeteness" of the Europeans with the fresh, frank freedom of his own countrymen...

...they seemed only to feel that they could face it...

...But at least I did manage to read it, which is more than I can say of its predecessor, Some Do Not...

...Yet in spite of Ford's use of glittering cynicism and affectation to conceal his incurable sentimentality (a common trick in these days) in spite of his book being a rather tedious nightmare, I will admit that No More Parades is worth reading...

...And now, in a moment, I'll go in to supper, frugal, solitary— Contentment in its accustomed groove...

...It is interesting to speculate what would have happened had those responsible yielded to what there is not the slightest doubt was a general, if unexpressed wish on the part of the Allies, and been content to furnish man-power, leaving direction and material in French and British hands...

...I have read somewhere that she looked like a horse—a great mistake, as, although her face is long and narrow, it is only as Dante's was...

...2.00...

...One of the brusquest comments of the frank and fighting commander of the Third Corps is made upon the press despatch which allowed the world to think that at the battle of Belleau Wood "there was nothing but Marines and, of course, dead Germans, their victims and theirs alone...

...Over and over again, filled with admiration as he is for the courage and devotion of his French allies, the American general notes an absence of the traditional "elan" born of hope and confidence which wins victories...

...Certainly not for its factitious eroticism...

...That is, I was a little overawed until I read the book...

...Hervey Allen of his experiences as a platoon leader in the Twenty-eighth or "Iron" Division during the fighting around Chateau-Thierry and the drive for the Argonne* Toward the Flame, I think, is destined to take its place in the category of Le Feu and Mensch im Krieg as one of the most intimate and vital studies of war psychology that has ever been penned...

...Where he made a mistake as to men or events he is quite honest in admitting it...

...Raymond Savage's Allenby of Armageddon stacks up as only one military history the more...

...Its record is worth considering with the others...

...Ornsby, and that has been long out of print...

...But the characters of the book from Lord Campion to Tietjens, its central figure, are all fools...

...He made a very efficient consul...

...He then compares with our own conditions the European system and gives a brief outline of the start of the art theatre idea in France, Germany, and Russia...

...of the reestablishment of the Faith in the Chablais...

...He can describe, from first-hand experience, the strange automatism that descends upon a marching column, just able to put one aching leg before another—literally stumbling along the road to death, and with what an icy chill at the heart the deeds that make history are done...

...Boston: Hougkton Mifflin Company...

...then he went abroad, never to return...

...But the note that recurs, the note that remains in one's mind, is that of a man who had never found his natural place in the world...

...Bayonets flashed in and a rifle-butt rose and fell...

...New York: George H. Doran Company...

...New York: P. J. Kenedy Sons...

...He had left her behind with his family in America and saw her only once in the remaining twenty-five years...

...Cheney discusses in his book and the standardized Broadway type of theatre lies in the purpose for which they are founded and run...

...Then the wheat shut him in and he heard cries and a moaning...

...He remained in the East for half a dozen years, lecturing and trying to gain some solid foothold...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Ridiculous show, vulgar ostentation...

...Meditations from Holy Scripture, prepared and issued by The Cenacle of Saint Regis...

...Too d------A comfortable," he says of the upper classes...

...New York: Charles Scribners Sons...

...And there are many amusing notes about his hobbies, his visits to country-houses, his brief vacations...

...For what the American arrival upon the scene did, first and foremost, was to break up a stalemate that had descended upon the fighting front—a dead-lock that only a dead lift could loosen...

...1HAVE read too many publishers' blurbs to be easily impressed by them...

...I have no 'home* in this country," he wrote in 1882, "beyond a hotel in Glasgow or the house of a friend in London...

...From a wealth of first-hand experience, Mr...

...And again: "I am paid in America less than half what I get here, and while I am there I should lose all that I am able to get here...

...There is a soft, feminine quality about the poems of Lost Hills which sometimes slips into a misty lack of thought that suddenly startles the reader to question the intent of the poet...

...Having lost his natural terrain, he never again succeeded in touching the earth...

...Toward the end of his life he had gathered a circle about him...

...One fellow seized the spitting muzzle and upended it on the gunner...

...and one notes, as very significant, that, aside from his family, only three letters in this whole voluminous collection are addressed to American correspondents...

...From then on the book devotes itself more particularly to a discussion of the various problems faced by the small independent theatre, beginning with the need of sound business organization, the finding of an artist-director, the finding of actors willing to undergo immediate sacrifices for the sake of this new idea, the choice of suitable plays, the matter of scenic design and stage settings at sufficiently low cost, the organization of community support, different types of building and equipment, and a brief suggestion or prophecy of future development...

...though she got, in neither book, any very great number of thrills...

...Then he feels behind him the resentment of America: "Everything tells me how utterly alien I and my writings have become in my own country...

...Perhaps the tragic impression one gets of the book is unduly emphasized because most of the letters were written to his wife...

...It is arguable (the writer has heard it argued) that the war would have been over sooner...

...It made him "nervous and sick," and so did Glasgow, when he arranged to be transferred...

...The accomplishments of the art theatres in this country speak so eloquently of their artistic and even practical commercial value, that the outline which Mr...

...He was even pursued by malignant newspaper articles, describing him as a "played-out" and "broken-down hack" and alleging, as he says in one of his letters, "that I was a ruined spendthrift living in England 'on money I borrowed from my English friends.'" His fame grew dim and malodorous...

...The figure of the victor in the war's one spectacular campaign and late governor of Egypt stands out as true to type, a little glum and aloof, dependable to a hair, with strange and disarming little idiosyncracies, such as 724 THE COMMONWEAL May 5, 1926 his love of children, and visits to them in hospitals...

...THE issue of four war books of first importance within a few months does more than register a growing interest in a subject off which ambitious writers and dramatists were being warned only a year ago...

...The Life of Saint Francis de Sales, by Harold Burton...

...BRIEFER MENTION Lost Hills, by Anne Ryan...

...Allenby of Armageddon: A Record of the Career and Campaigns of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, with a Preface by David Lloyd George...

...Two are business letters to Mr...

...We hear overmuch, in consequence, of his money difficulties, overmuch, perhaps, of his ailments, overmuch of his loneliness and his ill-success, for these letters home are undoubtedly tinged by a need to justify his own existence...

...And the exhibition is all the more effective because it is not labeled with the denunciatory phrases of the man who is trying to make out a case, but comes in at all times casually as if it were taken for granted...

...and when he left California his eastward journey was reported in the press throughout the country like the tour of some visiting potentate...

...3.50...

...The sergeant beside the lieutenant stopped, looked at him with a frozen, foolish smile, and crumpled into a heap of old clothes...

...The first volume does not bring us much further than his coming into contact with that great woman whom we know of today as Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, the founder of the Visitation Order if, indeed, we should not assign Saint Francis to that position...

...1 HIS work, of which the first volume alone appears at present, is an adaptation of the great work of the Abbe Hamon...

...Arriving as he did with the first contingent of May 5, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 7*3 troops, he had unique opportunity to form a judgment...

...There are evidently readers who have found them interesting: speaking for myself I must confess to having no concern about their histories or their destinies...

...No one will grudge the Marine captain his preoccupation with the deeds of his own corps, the more so as he pays generous tribute to the other units composing the Second (or U. S. Regular) Division, nor his preference, in a tight corner, for the soldier by profession...

...So it is well, in reading a book like Mr...

...And there is no reason for charging failure against an art theatre whose insufficient revenues can be traced solely to a bold missionary spirit...

...Cheney's association with the art theatres in this country has been so intimate and has extended from such an early period in their development, that he is in many respects one of the best qualified men to write with authority and that quality of interest which springs from direct personal devotion to a work...

...But he had felt himself an exile from the outset...

...That is Glasgow for me, and that is all it has ever been since I have been here...

...He knows (for he ha$ been a part of it) that the real business without which all these things are waste, is done by sick, half-starved, and footsore men, from whom everything has fallen away except the iron ration of endurance and sacrifice...

...I think—indeed, I fear —that, if I returned, as if to earn my bread among them once more, the value of my work would be lessened because the publishers would think I was dependent upon them...