Books

...A golden sentence and again one worthy of suspension over the desks of those who compile scientific "explanations" for the instruction of the less informed...

...Bertram C. A. Windle...

...The lines At Night, show an exquisite mood exquisitely suggested— "With your oar touch the lake Quietly, or it will break, See the little ripples spread...

...3.00...

...Then there is the most interesting article on zoology, by Professor MacBride...

...Miss Thayer seems to us a poet of unusual distinction, and of a high promise already achieving itself nobly in this, her second volume of poetry...

...Philadelphia-' Dorrance and Company...

...The names of the writers, with perhaps one exception, spring to the mind as representatives of the branches of science which they represent, and the work is one which claims careful attention...

...Spearman would have us think that Selwood in the end burned his gambling palace, as a concession to Christie's scruples...

...U NDER the charming title of Balcony Stories, Miss Grace King has gathered together a number of characteristic sketches of New Orleans types, the episodes of a changing period after the Civil War, in the Louisiana capital, that renew the delightful impression of her earlier books on this, her home country...

...What we love to remember is Selwood, the invincible...

...QOMEWHERE about the year 1000, there was a lady of *^5 the Japanese court, who was not very different from the ladies of our present day...

...Siddons...

...Waley...

...The writer does not put forward or endorse any particular theory...

...Her poems have had a wide circulation in the magazines, have aroused the interest and admiration of the judicious, and gained an enviable niche in the anthologies of careful critics and readers wherever clean, high, sensitive singing is appreciated and cherished...

...All of which relevant or irrelevant reflections come circling about the head of that amiable and fortunate bibliophile, Mr...

...One final piece of criticism must by no means go unnoted...

...Selwood, of Gargantuan audacity, bidding a thousand dollars a pair, in that unforgettable auctionduel to a finish, for a dozen "Queen of Sheba" stockings...

...Its character would come as a great surprise to many readers...

...Now we are told that he is in the habit of showing his friends the picture of the Creator shaping Adam from clay which appears in that quaint collection of folk-lore, the Nuremberg Chronicle, and describing it as representing "the orthodoxy of the whole Church" at and after the time of its printing...

...If he had read his Saint Augustine he would know that the idea in question was described by that doctor of the Church as nimis puerilis cogitatio and that it never was included in the "orthodoxy" of the Catholic Church...

...Frederick Taber Cooper...

...And now comes a new volume, almost as good as the first and very much more satisfying than the Johnson drama which was sandwiched in between...

...We find a certain Homeric joy in Selwood...

...But when will the day dawn when some clear-sighted publisher will ask a Catholic theologian to contribute an article on this subject to a book of this kind...

...See the mountains and trees float Upside down under the boat...

...There are very divergent ideas as to the topics of, for example, the heredity of acquired conditions and the bearing of the Mendelian discoveries...

...The graceful translation adds immeasurably to the charm of the text...

...But only Tooley Street would describe these bodies as "the Church...

...New York: The Macmillan Company...

...This is the first connected Japanese novel, of added interest in that it is the work of a woman...

...It was the idea of Milton and of the Calvinists and Puritans, doubtless, and very probably of the less learned members of the Church of England...

...Now, in the building of novels, equally with One-Hoss Shays, there is always somewhere a weakest spot...

...Newton has skirted a highly controversial subject with rare detachment and good temper...

...Do not speak...

...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...

...He draws them with an unsparing, almost brutal frankness...

...Throw your head back and just stare Up and up—for worlds are there— Millions of them—dipped in sun When God make such things for fun...

...We are told that the "Church" or "Christendom" has abandoned the Anselmic idea of the atone ment and upholds the claim "that Jesus was the manifestation, the revelation of God in humanity, such as none other has been...

...But that Christie, whose own special type of New England conscience recoiled from playing cards and roulette wheels as from so many rattlesHakes, should have known Selwood for many weeks, learned the man's sterling gold and almost surrendered to him, without discovering, in that small, gossipy, wide-awake Sleepy Cat town, that his reputation as prince of gamblers was state-wide, is just one of those things that couldn't happen, short of the heroine being deaf, dumb and blind...

...Well, let us be grateful for small things—we might quite well have had Bishop Barnes...

...I'll understand...

...A. Edward Newton, of whose Amenities of Book Collecting one likes to remember not so much that it won him an immediate public, as that it lived delectably up to its title...

...While as for the ancient history of Selwood's mysterious past, the doubtful marriage of his parents, the question of his own legitimacy, one feels that it detracts rather than adds anything of real importance...

...But Selwood reformed is as colorless as a cat in the dark...

...It is rather in the reminiscent chapters already mentioned, or in his praise of Dickens's Christmas Carol as "the greatest little book in the world/1 or in his fanciful possession of the old Johnson house on Gough Street, furnishing its bedroom walls with portraits of all the women ever held dear by the somewhat philandering Doctor—Mrs...

...And this is not merely a matter of the singer keeping within his range, although that is much...

...Spearman also visualizes his chosen place and people in the right ethical perspective that Selwood of Sleepy Cat is a story to be taken with some degree of seriousness...

...The writer is of the nebulous school November i8, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL S3 which calls itself "modern" churchmen, and in other ways betrays itself as lineally descended from those three heroes of myth, the tailors of Tooley Street who postured as "we, the people of England...

...We accept him as a human bird of prey, but with this difference, that he is an eagle among buzzards, and from his serene height he disdains to concern himself with their foul traffic, until something happens to touch him personally—and then we have an epic battle, a hectic one-night Iliad, around the blazing walk of Sleepy Cat—a wonderful rough-and-tumble fight to a finish, glimpsed murkily through smoke and darkness...

...Of course a large part of the article is devoted to expounding the Professor's favorite doctrines as to the diffusion of all cultures and their original seat of discovery in Egypt...

...Our student will certainly see only one face of a many-sided edifice in this as in other articles...

...If a man sets himself to write on so great a subject as this he ought at least to make sure of his facts...

...IN NOVELS picturing strange, remote times and peoples, and especially primitive or frontier phases of life, a true sense of local morals and ethics, of rough-and-ready codes and hasty justice, carries more conviction than any amount of scenic color and atmosphere...

...The main point of interest is, aside from the story itself, the escape from the style of the folk-tale...

...Selwood of Sleepy Cat, by Frank H. Spearman...

...Balcony Stories, by Grace King...

...Here the name of the author by no means leaps to the mind and apparently he has been chosen because of the fact that he was actually the teacher of science at Rugby School in the year that Darwin's Origin of Species appeared...

...Two philosophical articles must not pass unnoticed—that of Professor Lloyd Morgan on biology—really an abridgment of his recent book on Emergent Evolution and not, we should imagine, very readily comprehensible to those who have not studied that very interesting and suggestive work—and Professor Taylor's article on philosophy which is like a breath of fresh air after the thick atmosphere of theory in which the reader, for the most part, wanders...

...It was because Bret Harte instinctively recognized this truth that his inimitable tales of the gold-rush days remain perennially fresh and green, when many a modern best-seller of the wild west type is already turning a bit sear and yellow...

...In it he has given us a score or more of types whose merit is that they are delightfully, unmistakably real...

...More especially is this the case in the article on The Religious Effect of the Doctrine of Evolution...

...In Mr...

...The Greatest Book in the World is full of pleasant literary gossip, and of delightful dilettante and antiquarian information...

...The Greatest Book in the World and Other Papers, by A. Edward Newton...

...She was wearied with the useless life that court ladies were compelled to lead, and sought in her leisure moments, to gain surcease from boredom by composing a tale of a courtier of her own time...

...One i$ preoccupied, it is his business to be preoccupied, with the soul of the book...

...Only, one is a little astounded to come upon his assertion that "the English Bible (i.e., the King James or 'authorized' version) is the Bible of the world...

...And when we get it, only too rarely, we care little whether the hero of the moment, be an Ajax, or a D'Artagnan or a Selwood of Sleepy Cat, bears a bar sinister or not...

...M. H. H. THE COMMONWEAL BRIEFER MENTION New York and Other Poems, by Mary Dixon Thayer...

...There is a lightness of touch in Miss Thayer's best work that often eludes the first reading and only on reconsideration displays the solid bases of her enthusiasm and the lofty philosophy that is embodied in a very fervent soul, singing with a clear and unaffected beauty of tone...

...Newton writes as a fond and familiar grandson, and of the old sporting books and prints through which his English enthusiasms run riotously, and where he rejoices robustly in "a world in which everything was wrong but everyone seemed happy...

...But Mr...

...But then other men of great authority have other views and we do not get them...

...5.00...

...And best of all, in these annals of an outlaw world, is the figure of Selwood himself, "Gentleman John" Selwood, invincible gamester with a code of his own, whose boast is that he upholds "the honor of a dishonarable profession...

...No, Sleepy Cat straggles uphill and down, an ungainly whim of fate, in all its native crudity, a rough diamond of collective lawlessness, worthy of a niche in fame, somewhere between Slumgullion, Poker Flat and Jackass Hill...

...but was there ever such a star...

...How far will it meet the needs of the student who seems to have been its "onlie begetter...

...As in Songs of Youth, so in the selections of New York and Other Poems, we have poems to be treasured not only by the bibliophile but by any soulful wanderer on the roads of our modern day...

...There is a brief, passing reference to the Douay version...

...But it is not when animadverting upon the Athanasian creed, 54 THE COMMONWEAL November 18, 1925 or berating France, or petting the British lion, or writing about Valley Forge with a candid Tory delight in the Meschianza and distaste for the Declaration of Independence, that most readers will prefer to remember Mr...

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

...and aside from a few cliches—such as the "Bloody Mary," which became obsolete when students learned the true story of Elizabeth and the Tyburn persecutions—Mr...

...Perhaps this is especially the case with the article on anthropology, by Professor Elliot Smith, whom no one ever accused of not knowing his own mind, nor making his views known...

...Sleepy Cat itself, which gives the lie to its name by its extreme wide-awakeness at the first promise of a real, live fight—cat-fight, dog-fight or man-fight—is a small miracle of sordid actuality...

...That we are left to surmise...

...Professor MacBride has very definite ideas about these and other things and we get them...

...Parts of the book he will find difficult...

...It is because Mr...

...Lady Murasaki gives a vivid impression of the times with her descriptions of court functions and ceremonials...

...so personal that a few years ago it would probably have been published privately for a few friends rather than in this sumptuously illustrated edition for the public...

...Precisely what differentiates the psychology of the book lover, the book collector, from the humble or peradventure haughty litterateur—the man or woman whose "trade is words"—is not always easy to define...

...Selwood, a law unto himself...

...It is good, virile, breathless hand-to-hand fighting, the kind of fighting that distinguishes the true soldier-of-fortune fiction from the spurious...

...BIBLIOPHILES are, as a rule, charming people, whose pet enthusiasm—and whose affluence—set them apart from the workaday routine of the world and the world's wife, opening up a thousand lively contacts with past or present genius...

...Spearman has not made the mistake of idealizing it, of adding that halo of picturesqueness, which is the stigma of the typical photoplay frontier town...

...He has succeeded in presenting the book as it should be, in proper and delightful English of our day, leaving the "quaintness" to discover itself only occasionally in some of the quotations...

...nor can the article on Space and Time—admittedly as difficult a topic as can well come under discussion—be said to be written for the instruction of tyros...

...1*75...

...but he does give a series of cautions which should be printed large, framed, and hung up in every laboratory...

...Because the foundation stone of human relations in those pioneer days was to take a man for his intrinsic worth, and ask no awkward questions about his past...

...If one did come, no doubt it might produce the effects described...

...Not knowing if any will come to nurture the tender leaf whereon it lies, how loath is the dewdrop to vanish in the sunny air," is the exclamation of Genji upon seeing for the first time, the child whom he later adopted...

...Jeans's theory depends on the passage of a great star through space at the appropriate moment, a rare occurrence...

...Katherine Bregy...

...Then we become aware in some mysterious way that one has approached literature from the outside, the other from within...

...Those of us who have yawned through wearisome epics purported to be translations, marred by the labored intricacies of "pidgin-English," will be grateful to Mr...

...That is an interesting fact, but scarcely warrant enough for his selection as the one to write on so important a topic...

...Boston'- Houghton-Mifflin Company...

...It is equally because of the mysterious law which decrees that we shall all be more attractive and more authentic, too, in our preferences than in our prejudices...

...If he confines himself to this book he will certainly have a very one-sided idea of what scientific men are thinking...

...A REQUEST on the part of a student for information as to how the theory of evolution stood after the Sturm und drang of the discoveries of recent years, radio-activity, Mendelism and the like, seems to have been the origin of this handsome and interesting volume...

...It is most happy in its reminiscences of Gilbert and Sullivan and of London in the 'eighties, of Shakespeare as seen upon the stage of the "Old Vic," of that eighteenth-century Johnsonian milieu of which Mr...

...Anyone is a professional today whose work is good enough to stand on its own merit, without handicap—anyone is an artist who is able to capture or to create some phase of lasting beauty...

...but not so great a leap when one finds that he is concerned chiefly with printed versions of the English Bible from Tyndale to King James, although one interesting illustration from the great Gutenberg Vulgate is given...

...That Gentleman John should lose his heart to demure, sensitive, ultra-feminine Christie Felder is no more unlikely than that Owen Wister's highly idealized Virginian should lose his to New England Mollie...

...The old aristocrat types, the gentleman and lady, the intermediate generation between the old world splendors and the new world progresses are deftly delineated by a pen that possesses all the magic of George Washington Cable, with a fine romantic quality all Miss King's own...

...2.00...

...2.00...

...He talks for his own delight, chiefly—as all men do when they have a chance—and has great sport airing those "preferences" which Lionel Johnson used to say were permissible joys of literature, and also those "prejudices" which he held anathema...

...Newton's work is frankly, at moments even fiercely personal...

...Newton: in fact, it is not in any of his reflections upon politics or sociology or religion...

...Referring to the bitterness which is so often to be met with in evolutionary discussions, he remarks that this might probably have been avoided "if both parties to the dispute had been careful to remember that you neither explain a thing by saying how it has come to be there, nor explain how it has come to be there by saying what it is...

...Here we do get a hint that there are other opinions—as indeed there are— but mostly along the lines of belittling the contrary views...

...Professor Bower's erudite article cannot be understood by anyone who has not a really considerable knowledge of botany, nor properly appreciated save by a specialist in ferns...

...Egan, when he declared that it should mean "one who loves men a little better than books...

...It is rather a leap from all this to the Bible—which is, of course, the subject of the title essay...

...But there is not a word about Chamberlin's "planetesimal" theory which yet has its supporters...

...Again, when he dreams wistfully of the "fifteen hundred years" of Christian scholarship which have gone into the making of the Book of Common Prayer, one wishes the statement might more directly refer to those volumes which alone furnish its truth—those precious sources, priceless even from the collector's viewpoint, the Roman Missal, the Breviary and the various Books of Hours...

...The old distinction between professional and amateur has very largely disappeared, in both the theatre and the library...

...cardsharps and hold-up men, cutthroats, knaves and thieves, dyedin-the-wool outlaws, such as might have stepped straight from the private diaries of genuine forty-niners...

...Spearman's story that weakest spot is his plot structure, as no doubt he is aware...

...The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaku Translated by Arthur Waley...

...Even the word "book lover" was magnificently magnified by the genial Dr...

...We have the usual dogmatic statements as to chronology, the nature and relationships of certain skulls, set down for the acceptance of our ingenuous and enquiring student without the least suggestion that there are others who have different opinions...

...Of many other articles there is this to be said—they are excellent and clear expositions of what their several writers think of the topics with which they are dealing—but is that exactly what the student wanted...

...and it is the business of the other to be preoccupied with its body, even with that body's genealogy...

...Spiritual message and authenticity apart, that book has in truth been one of the great landmarks and inspirations of English speech: but "the world" is rather a large order...

...JxMONG our younger poets Mary Dixon Thayer is a singer who can show all the best qualities in modern poetry and a large endowment of the spirituality, and profound common sense, of the classic authors...

...Tonight I know What love is and why, and so You need only touch my hand Silently...

...This tale has survived, and as The Tale of Genji, is presented in translation, by Arthur Waley...

...Those who attribute man's mental outfit to a heritage from lower animals should read the criticism of that view in this article and ponder over its writer's remark that "the scholastic doctrine of the direct creation of each 'rational soul' by God seems to embody a principle which psychology cannot afford to overlook...

...For example, Professor Jeans deals fairly completely with the now discarded nebular theory of Kant and Laplace, and, very naturally, at considerable length with his own great star hypothesis, now certainly in the ascendant...

...That the first novel known to Japanese literature is so real, so truly human, so quaint, and yet so modern, would indicate that the Japanese have much yet unearthed, to contribute toward the classics of the world...

...Thrale and Fanny Burney, the varied shades of Blue Stockings, and those "shameful, shameless ladies" of the stage who were contemporaries of the austere Mrs...

...At least, it is not easy until both write a book...