Books

...MlSS SCOLLARD has produced a charming little collection of poems under the title of Candle and Cross...

...Never even in the fine edged portrait of A Lost Lady has IVIiss Cather more profoundly sounded the depths of a lonely soul receiving the last kaleidescopic flash of its youthful ego as the curtain of life falls away from it...

...In the Augustinian, Fray Pedro Malon de Chaide, "the metaphysician of love, the modest author of exquisite sonnets, we find the trained literary instinct that shows profusely in the pages of his Conversion of the Magdalene, which includes a discourse upon divine love that is an anthology of the greatest things which have been said upon it by the inspired writers and by the fathers...

...Memory holds him in a fastness...

...Wilkinson, gathered out of the poet's stores of the past and present and arranged deftly and effectively under the Christmas boughs to gladden the hearts of young and old with a glint of the Bethlehem Star and the Christmas cedars of the north...

...Thomas Walsh...

...The Saint of Avila—"Blessed Theresia, his ghostly child"—is among the witnesses to his popularity...

...25.00...

...My thoughts shall soar like meadow-larks in spring Up and away, no more shall grief remain, But like the joy of sunlight after rain My recollections shall sweet solace bring...

...They appear and reappear with military precision until the risen ghost of Outland scatters them as papers are scattered before a fresh wind...

...Saint Peter of Alcantara is reputed to have declared—"My body and I have made a compact: while I live in this world it is to suffer without intermission, but when I reach heaven I will give it eternal rest...

...His single aim was to lead souls to heaven," and Vaughn echoes his spirit in the lines— "Grant I may so Thy steps track here below, That in these masques and shadows I may see Thy sacred way: And by those hid ascents climb to that day Which breaks from Thee Who art in all things, though invisibly...

...Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, it is true, are accessible in English to all...

...But they are as puppets beside that adventurous memory, symbolizing the pioneer America that civilization has strangled...

...In a word, they are less old-fashioned than perennial...

...If the apostle of the Indies is the supreme example of the missionary, the great bishop of Geneva the patron par excellence of Christians who must live among the turmoil and distractions of the world—then the saint of Assisi may well be considered the eternal friend and advocate of those to whom, temperamentally, the world means little or nothing, and to whom, because their hearts are free of covetousness and the itching to possess, its beauty is given in fee...

...his significant work accomplished...

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

...It has given our churches robust Magdalens mooning over skulls in an attitude of sentimental abandon...

...It holds an element that is unexpectedly illuminating...

...Of all artists who have sought for the secret of the great primitive painters at its source, Dom Pedro Subercaseaux seems to be the one who has learned it easiest and with least conscious effort to regain the spirit through the form...

...The Professors House, by Willa Gather...

...Mrs...

...Boston: Marshall Jones Company...

...Sister Mary Angelita's work shows the correct strong drawings of a greater art: the proper skeleton structure of logic and the strong durable wings of Catholic piety that soar above the sentimental rhapsodies of the average modern poet...

...E. Allison Peers seems to indicate when he confines his chapters on Spanish mysticism to such saintly figure as Hernando de Zarate, Alonso de Orozco, Francisco de Osuna> Bernadino de Laredo, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Juan de Avila, Luis de Granada, Pedro Malon de Chaide, Juan de los Angeles, Diego de Estrella and Luis de Leon—only a small if distinguished representation of the great schools of mystics presided over by Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross...

...The little beauties of the common day— These are enough, these make my faint heart glad: The moonbeams glancing on the garden walls, The silvery symphony of waterfalls, The lilac scent borne on the winds of May, Thinking upon these things who could be sad...

...THIS book is a singularly constructed building...

...Fray Bernadino de Laredo was a famous physician from the University of Seville, and his great book, The Ascent of Mount Sion by the Contemplative Pathway was published anonymously after his entry into the Franciscan order...

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...In Pedro Subercaseaux, who, like Saint Luke, the painter of legend, heard the call and answered it, the life of Francis has found a chronicler who answered the poignancy of its message, not in mere terms of aesthetic perception but by the dedication to its ideals of the one life that all of us, skilled or unskilled, wise or simple in our generation, have to give...

...His magnificent series of aquarelles of the life of Saint Francis, as given the public by the Marshall Jones Company of Boston, makes a book which, in color, type and general form, will come as the realization of a dream to numberless souls, within and without the Catholic communion, for whom the "little poor man of Assisi" keeps a place that hardly another recorded saintly soul can fill...

...These 3,000 authors have slumbered in the archives of old monasteries and libraries for several hundred years, until today, with the revival of interest in the .religious spirit of literature, they are gradually being brought to light with the appreciation their vital spirit and beautiful inspiration have merited...

...But without the long draught of Lillian, Louie, Rosamond and the others, would we so keenly appreciate Augusta, earthbound, faithful to the end, the professor, eternal romanticist, and behind them, tall and lonely, a boy of twenty with a handful of unset turquoises ? Laura Benet...

...A mysticism without Christ is therefore an imperfect mysticism, as Mr...

...The hero of such an atmosphere could never have been the author of a great invention, the bequeathing of which makes his friends' fortune...

...Liverpool: 1843...

...He was the most famous popularizer of mystic theology and his book, The Third Spiritual Abcedario, enjoyed a wide diffusion in Spain and in the Spanish empire in America...

...It was red in color, even on that grey day...

...So that neglect of the present and a desire for the future causes the soul to be, as it were, mortified, asleep and suspended midway between two domains—to wit, this present death and the life which is to come...

...Peers's really valuable collection of texts and comment presents these mystics in their literary character, a character, however, which cannot obviate their religious fervors—for those who live for Christ alone can write for Christ alone, and their literary and art quality are merely emanations of Christianity and in these Spanish ecstatics only another evidence of that fundamentally mystical element which, as Mr...

...As we watch the incidents that pass within the walls of Saint Peter's Basilica, we are looking upon a reconstitution, as nearly accurate as research could ensure, of the basilica built by Constantine, which was standing, practically intact when Francis lived...

...His mystical interpretation and love of nature were shown in pictures of smiling countrysides and storm-lashed seas...

...Sacred art has never been a "hortus conclusus...

...No one today regards the conventions of ancient hagiography, with its naive symbols and "legends" of the saints, its lighthearted disregard of archaeology (in which it would be an affectation today to follow it) the formulas of its gesture and draperies, as any evidence that creative skill was lacking or amiss...

...We are not birds, nor may we fly from earth to heaven, and hence it is needful that we mount step by step as on a ladder, by the stages and degrees of love...

...The mystical period began in Spain, generally speaking, in the first years of the sixteenth century...

...The mere technique of the paintings, in its sufficiency and confidence of line, is unerring, and becomes still more admirable when we remember that the Benedictine painter has used the most exacting medium known to art— pure water color-wash, without the adventitious aid of body white that so many aquarellists use to soften its rigor...

...Peter this summer was not a scholar...

...They are not only speaking to the eyes— they are speaking to the soul...

...In Pax et Bonum, the welter of knights and men-at-arms, bristling weapons, rearing horses and flaunting banners amid which the Saint intervenes, with arms outstretched cross-wise, recall the fact that the young painter, long before he took robe and tonsure, found the first inspiration for his brushy in the turbulent scenes of his own Chilean history...

...Saint Francis of Assist, by Dom Pedro Subercaseaux Errazuriz...

...Menendez y Pelayo, in his Ensayo Sobre la Poesia Mistica, disposes of these questions in a way that proves conclusively that Christian mysticism as revealed in the greater Spanish mystics is based and pivots solely on the coming of Christ to the soul, and has little if anything in common with the Greek, Hebrew or Arab forms of what, he concedes to be nevertheless, a real but different form of the same mystical state...

...In My Antonia, the heroine accomplishes her destiny in a setting which fits her...

...The story of the discovery of the remote mesa and the cliff city is as pure gold unrefined—"On that morning through a veil of lightly fallen snow . . . far up above me a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone asleep . . . The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together...

...Star shine and Candlelight, by Sister Mary Angelita, B.V.M* New York: D. Appleton and Company...

...2.50...

...Many of the drawings reduce composition to its bare essentials...

...We pity him as we pity our own lost selves striving to return to us as old and valued friends—"The boy who had come back to St...

...2.00...

...But if sacred art has shared with profane the degeneracy of skill into technical "cleverality" (to use a word coined by Charlotte Bronte) it is a pleasure to note that it is also sharing in its recovery towards frugality and static quality...

...Wilkinson's book is representative of much of the best of Catholic poetry ranging from Gerard Hopkins to John B. Tabb, Alice Meynell, Louise Imogene Guiney, Joyce Kilmer, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and Katherine Tynan...

...In sunlight it was the color of winter oak leaves...

...One may pass over Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross to consider other mystics less known to the general reader...

...Peers of the University of Liverpool selects for this volume on Spanish mysticism which deserves the highest commendation for its broad spirit and excellent judgment and taste...

...his disillusionment, as regards his family, complete...

...Her fancy is truly lyrical in the most modern sense of the word, and she plays deftly with the faintly tinted beauties and the gentle joys and griefs that fill the hearts of American poets of today...

...The destiny of saintly lives, left in the hands of artists who have no feeling for anything save the pictorial value of each episode, is scarcely less hard...

...Yule Fire, by Marguerite Wilkinson...

...He is the author of several little books on prayer," she says, "written in the vernacular and now in common use, for as one who has had long practice in prayer he wrote very profitably for those who are given to it...

...They are the concentration of some literary expert like Mrs...

...This love has its beginnings upon earth and in the earthly foundations of self-love, and rises by stages and degrees even to the excellence and perfection of Thy holy love, "que es lo celestial, acendrado y mas esmerado y puro...

...In England," states Mr...

...Fray Juan de los Angeles was one of the few Spaniards of his age to show foreign influence in his work...

...It is not too imaginative to see in three Francises whom the Church commemorates representatives of all three types...

...In La Folie de la Croix, the wicked children pursue poor Francis up a flight of steps and through a dark arch into the limpid Tuscan sunlight, with a rare effect of light and shadow...

...virgins and martyrs pirouetting on the altars of late renaissance churches in the postures of the Italian ballet...

...There is really more candle than cross in her moods...

...Works such as those," says the Danish author Johannes Jorgenson, referring to the pictures, "are not only expressions of art—they are expressions of life...

...Of the Degrees of Divine Love, he writes the charming paragraph—"When Jacob left his parents' home and went into Mesopotamia, and slept with a stone for his pillow, he saw in a vision a ladder with one end upon earth and the other in heaven, and Thou, our Lord and God, wert reclining thereon...

...There is about all the drawings a rapturous quality which is less a recovery of old frankness than a liberation from all sophistries, old and new...

...He was earth and would return to earth...

...Even his shoulders are not broad enough for the load...

...Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press...

...The professor who has become part and parcel of his ancient and uncomfortable study is, with Augusta, the sewing woman, the only other significantly human element...

...beefy seraphs tumbling out of fleecy skies...

...in her sonnet, I Will Remember No Unlovely Thing, we catch what is perhaps the purest character note of her volume— "I will remember no unlovely thing, The trust betrayed, the days when faith seemed vain, The friend who proffered me a cup of pain, All these shall be forgotten, I will sing...

...IT HAS been said of the saints that their crowning humiliation, no less an actual because it is a posthumous trial, is to have their lives written by the merely devout...

...A Golden Treatise is the title given to the English editions of his book (Brussels: 1632...

...He was a mystical organizer, a friend and defender of Saint Teresa, whose reforms he paralleled in the Franciscan order, restoring the strictest practices of Saint Francis himself...

...Next in beauty to the translucent image of the city, cut in the rock's face to challenge sun, wind and eternity, is the poignant description of the professor's dreaming...

...New York'- The Macmillan Company...

...Death for him, in the war is natural—but not commercialization...

...So in this book, we happen upon less art and modernity than in Miss Scollard's work, but more repose, more soul and more eternal beauties...

...The story could have been better told, the material more artistically arranged...

...The disposal of Outland is false, especially in the pathetic, forgotten shadow of Doctor Crane...

...So sleep means here that suspension and quiet silence...

...Peers in his introductory chapter, "where 300 years ago one great Spanish mystic (Luis de Granada in fourteen English translations) was read, translated and adapted for general use, little more is known now than then of the great company to which he belonged...

...IT WAS the Spanish scholar, Menendez y Pelayo, who pointed out that there existed a whole Spanish school of mystical authors neglected and unknown for the most part even to his Spanish brethren...

...The most sincere among our artists besiege them for the secret of their cryptic perfection, or at least regard them with a wistful affection amid the vagaries of their own mad quest for something that will clothe the dead bones of the false tradition with new flesh...

...ULE FIRE is one of those Christmas publications that come in flocks to the fore some weeks before the holidays...

...As the story sweeps on, we realize Tom Outland's spiritual companionship is at one with the professor's forgotten self...

...Such things are recognized now as being due to a healthy discipline which went out of art when the return of paganism laid waste one world without re-creating another...

...The romance that smouldered in his histories was kindled to living fire by the coming of a pupil who swept like a tropical rainbow across his narrow horizon...

...He constantly quoted Gerson, Ruysbroeck and Tauler, but in his exquisite sweetness as in his vigorous power he always remains a Spaniard...

...Fray Francisco de Osuna is famous largely for the profound influence his writings produced on the mind of the saintly Doctora of Avila...

...in Louis Marsellus there is even a trace of wistful eagerness...

...with nothing finer, when all is told, than Muna Lee's Sonnet After Reading Saint Teresa, Luis de Leon and Ramon Lull...

...The archaeological detail of houses and churches, simply as it is rendered, represents many years of careful study made on the spot and with the assistance of several Roman authorities...

...BRIEFER MENTION Candle and Cross, by Elisabeth Scollard...

...Her native gifts to song are also considerable: she is a worthy rival of Sister Madaleva, and the student will find the classic quality of a Fray Luis de Leon in her work...

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...Here is a man of middle age, the years of his prime behind him...

...London: 1905) and the influence of his ardent soul is revealed in the description of the Saint himself whose "eies were sparkling tokens of the fire of divine love which was in his soule...

...The web and woof of these timeless singers is oftentimes not of the delicate cambric quality of the Dobsons and De Banvilles: the tapestry behind its colors shows a coarser, more durable web...

...but by almost every modern writer on mysticism in our language they have been treated as the sole representatives in Spain of the literature which they so greatly enriched...

...They are fairly convincing...

...It is too plausible...

...The Professor's House is in parts, though not as a whole, a step forward in her art...

...The reader must walk through many rooms to arrive at its lighted portion—the fantastic story of Tom Outland in the midst of commonplace chapters...

...There are saints who have taken the world by storm—there are saints who have met it almost on its own terms and won it over by a sort of God-given tact in presenting their message—and there are saints for whom it may be said that heaven descended on earth...

...Altamira runs counter to general scholarship in attributing to it a Germanic origin and there are other authorities who find in its oriental character some indication of Moslem influences...

...Henry Longan Stuart...

...He was a primitive...

...Tom Outland is nobody's son, a young cowpuncher who witnessed and absorbed a tremendous experience...

...Peers points out, was to be found in the Spanish temperament for centuries before it found orthodox religious expression in the literary products of the cloister...

...We see the world as it must have been seen through the eyes of the Saint himself, enraptured with its beauty, yet missing all its concupiscences...

...Even the personality of the professor, drawn so keenly and delightfully in those first pages, cannot outweigh the conventional figures of his wife, daughters, and sons-in-law, who, like the furniture of his new house, are always on hand, modern in style and beautifully decorated...

...This beautiful memorial of the saint of Assisi comes at an opportune moment, upon the eve of the seventh centenary of his death, when the attention of the world will be, in a very special sense, directed to the lessons of his life...

...It has suffered, since the far days of the primitives, from all the fashions that have successively afflicted the craft of painting...

...he had never married, never been a father...

...Fray Diego de Estrella enjoyed great vogue with his Vanity of the World throughout the sixteenth arid seventeenth centuries...

...Other parts of the book retreat before this picture...

...and the two landmarks are this transient world and the world that is everlasting...

...In Sister Mary Angelica's volume, Starshine and Candlelight, the western critic, James J. Daly, finely noted that "in seeking for crystal pools of sentiment the Catholic cloister is the most likely place to find our quest...

...The highly literary character of Fray Alonza de Orozco may be seen in the number of his works, such as The Garden of Prayer, The Spiritual Betrothal, The Memorial of Holy Love, and The Mount of Contemplation ; as well as in the mystical History of the Queen of Sheba, and The Nine Names of Christ, which probably influenced Fray Luis de Leon in his famous treatise, Los Nombres de Cristo...

...He was not nearly so cultivated as the old cliff-dwellers must have been—and yet he was terribly wise . . . He seemed to know among other things that he was solitary and must always be so...

...Fray Luis de Granada was a famous figure among early scholars in England, and rays of his light penetrate into many a recondite corner of such poets as Vaughn and Crashaw...

...One could go to much greater length in noting the various mystical authors whom Mr...

...Speaking of the sleep of the soul, he writes—"Neglect of transient things withdraws the soul from all that is transitory, as far as its affections are concerned, and the burning desire for eternal blessings raises it to the level of that world which will endure forever...

...His humility did not prevent a very wide circulation of this able work...

...In others where the scene is more crowded its elaborations are excellently handled...