Books
Lapp, John A. & Walsh, Thomas & Bois, Jules & Stuart, Henry Longan & Maynard, Theodore
BOOKS Newman as a Man of Letters, by Joseph J. Reilly. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.SO. IT HAS been the destiny of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, like the Master whom he served all his...
...A few days later, without having paid a penny for the 50,000 shares he has instructed his broker to buy, "Mr...
...But ethers are extraordinarily brilliant and richly humorous...
...he sees through their affectations and poses...
...Belloc has as astonishing an insight into the methods of high finance as into those of corrupt politics...
...But it was one of the great judgments of our time, and has been the basis of law ever since...
...Among these circles, predecessors but not responsible for the Greenwich Village of a later, even if already vanishing celebrity, loomed large and conspicuous a really able man, son of a mixed Hungarian and Irish family, of Philadelphia, whose "books are an education in European culture," says Mr...
...Joseph Reilly has been wise not to concern himself overmuch with a rebuttal of charges to which the gentle prelate's life and writings give the lie...
...On the strength of his supposed wealth the poor bewildered gentleman is pushed into a new deal and, again without actually paying for what he buys, but operating solely upon the credit of his name, he clears just over a million pounds...
...John Clare, is etched with surety, insight and sympathy...
...We leave him in his simplicity wondering "how one can give big money and not give a curse with it...
...A pastoral quality invests the drama of spiritual conflict...
...De Casseres's attempt to see in New York City another French Bohemia: to interpret the clatter of our subways and street traffic with the fantasy of a Sar Paladan and the jargon of a Vargas Villa...
...From the nature of the case, if literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian literature...
...The enforcement of the law would have destroyed property invested in private schools...
...Reilly has to say, the section in which he deals with Newman's attitude to literature and education, profane a$ well as sacred, will be of most general interest...
...Richard Halliburton has chosen the latter road and with a gallant wave at his college and family, fared around the world laughing and beating and fighting his vagabond way into the glamorous lands—dancing from the pinnacle of the Matterhorn to the gardens of Taj Mahal, over the Himalayas and Tibet, down the East Indies and the coast of China, to the tune of "Youth...
...The perfervid tone of Mirrors of New York is quite removed from the deliberateness of real literature...
...His flashing fancies play about the stands of our newspaper and fruit and "hot-dog" vendors: our scaffolds and excavations, our native and alien New Yorkers are but the stuffed marionette figures of a Punch-and-Judy show that is quaint and noisy but not •entirely lifelike...
...The lover of idle gossip whose palate has been vitiated by the Stracheys of biography will not find what he likes best...
...10.00...
...Illustrated by G. K. Chesterton...
...Indeed, Leslie Reid should go far...
...those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations...
...In his opening study of Newman the Man, one cannot but help feeling that Dr...
...2.00...
...He knows them all, even to their 'labyrinthine ways;' their subtleties fail to baffle him...
...In fact, the few fateful words of that amendment declaring that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law" or make or enforce any law "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" were the only words standing between the citizens of Oregon and the law which compelled them to send their children to school and to the public school alone, unless provision were made otherwise within the family...
...Petre" nets a profit of over £70,000...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Yet with all the forbidding appearances of legal forms in transcripts, briefs for appellant and appellee and opinion of the court, which constitute the book, it is a human document—a document of human liberty...
...Reilly does justice to the immense value which this very mental subtlety gave the one-time vicar of Littlemore in his battle with the 162 THE COMMONWEAL December \6S 1925 worldly spirit—always the enemy whom he saw most directly in front of him...
...1.50...
...Chesterton...
...The case is a landmark and every record in the case is essential...
...and generally delighted with the ardent spirit of the author and his desire to be photographed with remarkable scenes, architectural and mountainous, behind him...
...The volume concludes with the decision of the Supreme Court declaring the law unconstitutional...
...And again—"Let a university be what it professes...
...The accident that has brought so many of their projects to naught and left them masters in the intellectual rather than in the material sphere, is not to be ascribed to any softness of mental fibre...
...This case was one of the furthest extensions of its use for the protection of human liberty...
...The real John K. Petre meanwhile has been holiday-making in France...
...This young and brilliant Paris publisher, who comes from a family of scholars and philosophers, has commissioned the same writer to prepare a series of publications on the great monastic orders...
...It was final so far as the state of Oregon was concerned...
...The very subtlety of mind which he employed to meet the sophistry that makes excuses for sin has earned him, on the part of men whose mask of bluff heartiness he pierced, the charge that he was himself a special pleader and splitter of argumentative hairs...
...he takes us into one of the austere cells...
...There Lady Boole, the Lord Chancellor, delivered judgment, and "in a beautifully distinct, silvery articulation spoke, for some hours, words meaningless to mortal man...
...The false Mr...
...and his incidental flings at the hocus pocus of doctors and lawyers are delightfully amusing...
...In writing his fine psychological and literary study of the great cardinal, Dr...
...His success—and he does make a success of a very personal attitude to life and foreign experiences—is somewhat facile for all its authenticity: the author's personality is very agreeable...
...It is the newspaper destroying the book as it destroyed James Gibbons Huneker...
...Within a few weeks he finds himself master of three...
...r I ^HE name of James Gibbons Huneker was one to conjure A with in the days of youth: when in New York the red wine flowed fast and cheap and the marble-topped tables of Joel's and Mouquin's were cleaned by the waiters every morning of the pencil sketches and verses of the bands of inspired and heated artists and Bohemians living in exile from Murger's Vie de Boheme and the alleys of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre...
...It takes only five pages for that court to word its unanimous conclusion, but the 936 other pages make a buttressed foundation which will last for all time...
...In this Huneker was no hypocrite: the crowned and crowing mediocrities around him could hardly blind a man who knew something—even if it were usually limited—of the fantastic mob of geniuses and madman ranging from Nietzsche and Strindberg to the most irregular of the Russians, Germans, Scandinavians and French...
...From those keen grey eyes they can conceal nothing, and the procession passes endlessly, with naked souls whose last hidden secret has been laid open to his gaze . . . Indifference, lukewarmness, complacency, intellectualism without heart, were always objects of his aversion, and when he preaches on them, scorn and irony smolder beneath his cool and measured words...
...Aside from their mission, which according to M. Oilier, the founder of the theological school of Saint-Sulpice, consists in maintaining and constantly renewing the spirit of religion in the Church, the Benedictines are men of letters, historians, and artists...
...Also from its records of quaint local saints and miracles...
...The decision marks out a broader application of the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States than had been previously declared except in the decision shortly preceding this one, which declared unconstitutional a law prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages to elementary school children in whatever school they might be...
...When at last he finds in a newspaper his own name hinted in connection with his impersonator's last and most colossal deal he hurries over to London, institutes enquiries and in great anger brings an action...
...John A. Lapp...
...The single-mindedness, logic, and persistence amounting at times to ruthlessness which men of French blood have shown in putting through their ideals, right or wrong, speak loudly from the pages of history...
...xxr H H y Thomas Walsh...
...With Newman, the happy accident befell literature of having a contemplative, intellectual in essence, who was also master of a prose instrument delicate enough to express every shade and degree of his conjectures and spiritual certainties...
...IT HAS been the destiny of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, like the Master whom he served all his life at the sacrifice of heart and brain, to become a sign "set for contradiction by many...
...It is that sorry thing, a "general impression...
...T ^ Jules Bois...
...Theodore Maynarb...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...Reilly quotes in his chapter on Newman's Idea of a University...
...The chapter upon the Gregorian chants from matins to complines, the hours of study in the library and their silent meditation, the recreation and the monastic garden...
...Huneker fed his mind upon the scraps of gorgeous tables of modern European culture: he had no time to specialize on anything, with the exception perhaps of music: but he was the troubadour from one castle gate to another, the disseminator of much of the half-baked culture that has taken the place of older and more composed and more thorough knowledge, education and cultivation...
...In short, it is for the profane reader a poetic and accurate initiation into the present daily round of the Benedictines, preceded by a marvelous hagiography of Saint Benedict, according to Gregory the Great...
...2,00...
...HP HIS is a substantial volume of 941 pages, bound in A buckram with the accompaniments of a legal book...
...To ascribe weakness of character to what is only the possession of tact and imagination in a supreme degree, is a common mistake...
...The compilers of this book have done a useful and lasting service...
...It is comforting to see a writer not waiting till old age to turn his eyes towards the monastic ideal, and betaking himself thither to imbibe an inspiration which cannot fail to follow him through life...
...His is a living voice, and in the world of letters, of education, of culture, and of the noblest things of the spirit it was always raised for sweetness and light that reason and the will of God might prevail...
...As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state...
...The Royal Road to Romance, by Richard Halliburton...
...For the first time in these decisions, the rights of the family were brought under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment...
...On the day that he lands he finds that every vestige of memory of his former life has been wiped out, with the exception of the name Petre, which he concludes must be his own name...
...James Gibbon Huneker, by Benjamin de Casseres...
...It is a story of mystery, of competent craftsmanship, and of ingratiating writing...
...Nor is it merely a novel whose sole merit rests in the trickery of enigma...
...As often happens when he takes up the pencil, some of the drawings are rather bad...
...It was quite natural that the Benedictines should be honored first...
...In the solitude and anonymity of the cloister, and with the collective labor, void of vanity, which alone is truly fruitful, it is theirs to continue the tradition of those ponderous tomes, which laymen today achieve but rarely and with difficulty...
...Lawyers will find this volume indispensable, but its purpose would be little fulfilled if it did not reach far beyond the limits of the legal profession...
...5.00...
...The estimate with which it closes is the one that will be shared by the world at large when even the last echoes of these controversies have died away— "This generation owes Newman much...
...At one time, the Benedictines saved the heritage of civilization ; today they will aid, along with other monks, in its revival...
...Newman's famous "subtlety," the quality which earned him both praise and blame, was, after all, only the outward sign of an inward sensitiveness to the unseen in which very few men, and perhaps no great writer, ever equalled him...
...Upon giving this name at his hotel in London he is taken to be Mr...
...But in Newman's case a quite especial situation arose which makes him a focus for controversy many years after his last word has been spoken...
...We have seen him trying to realize for us in words things of the mind and spirit, things that are so subtle and unusual and elusive that only men endowed with spiritual insight can sense them and only a master of words can express them adequately • . . In two instances he has done the almost impossible: he has not sought to realize the unseen in words but to suggest it merely, as something too tenuous, too elusive, too goseamerlike to sustain the weight of any language but that of the most delicate implication...
...I recall the cemetery where the monks repose, nameless, each tomb marked only by a lily...
...And it is worth volumes of briefs and transcripts to secure this one sentence found in the opinion of the court, namely— "We think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing for education of children under their control...
...Reilly has availed himself a little too freely of the tradition which ascribes to the French character feminine qualities of sentimentality, introspection and impulsiveness, and to the Anglo-Saxon the more obviously manly ones of decision and persistence...
...and without knowing in the least what Touaregs are, but in order to conceal his ignorance he says, "O, I shall buy...
...de Casseres, Huneker called himself a "Jack of the seven arts, master of none—a newspaper man," and the piercing honesty of Huneker's mind showed here a realization of what his life and his work really amounted to...
...and Touaregs soar...
...At a time when ancient landmarks are shifting and old restraints giving way, the position that a man so steeped in culture and at the same time so saintly, was able to take, in all good conscience, is immensely important as some guide in the prevailing confusion...
...New York: Joseph Lawren...
...The court had on numerous occasions used the Fourteenth Amendment for the protection of property...
...The provisions of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States did not apply because that amendment protected the citizen against acts of Congress only...
...The child is not the mere creature of the state...
...The text is illustrated by Mr...
...Further legal determinations in similar fields will build upon the foundation of these cases, and there will be many such cases in the future as men and institutions clash in the eternal struggle to protect the individual from unreasonable interference...
...Petre is perhaps less mordant A than that in The Mercy of Allah, and the fun less uproarious than that of Pongo and the Bull, the book is the most finely sustained of all Mr...
...Les Heures Benedictines, by Edoward Schneider...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...As M. Charles Pichon remarks in La Vie Catholique, the religious conquest has spread...
...The Mirrors of New York, by Benjamin de Casseres...
...Belloc's novels...
...He describes the refectory...
...But he deals with them, each in its fitting place, under the various aspects of Newman as preacher, historian, controversialist, and poet...
...There is nothing in the world so wonderful as youth...
...It is the record of a new declaration of independence for the individual and the family with all the approving reasons from the lore of distinguished counsel...
...Fortunately for the case both individuals and property were involved...
...Every man to whom compromise suggests itself as an affront to the only truth he knows anything or cares anything about must look for controversy to rage around the convictions which he has not troubled to make palatable...
...Indeed the satire takes on here a new point: for here a man is found to be allpowerful in the world of high finance not by virtue of controlling money but only because he is supposed to control it...
...Reilly gives us this unique conjuncture in words that are literary criticism of a very high order...
...Exactly what value the Fourdrinier maternal strain may have possessed after four generations in England is problematical...
...His book, a modern sort of adventure tale that is delicate and daring, by an attractive youth who refuses to mature, will entrance the younger reader...
...Rather its mystery belongs to those realms of magic, in the past, so deftly related by Arthur Machen...
...BRIEFER MENTION The Rector of Maliseet, by Leslie Reid...
...Where power of expression accompanies it, it generally becomes vocal in poetry, an arbitrary and personal medium whose law and limit is its own will...
...The character of the rector, St...
...On my return from my first journey to the Indies, it was among the Benedictines of Marseilles that I made a retreat, continued at the Maison Notre Dame within the confines of the monastery of Liguge...
...The American goes to law, loses, unsuccessfully appeals, and finally carries the case to the House of Lords...
...1 HIS is not a mere promising first novel...
...At about that time, Huysmans and I withdrew for a period of "recollection" among the Trappists...
...The very fact that he analyzed his grounds for belief so unsparingly has led to the question whether he was himself fully persuaded...
...There was greatness in Huneker, and a great lesson which his present biographer seems not to grasp: therefore, we have in Mirrors of New York, Mr...
...In fact, it concerns the legal p rofession no more than it does the rank and file of citizenship...
...One follows his course with some quaverings...
...Petre, by Hilaire Belloc...
...but we can prepare them against what is inevitable...
...HT* HOUGH the satire in Mr...
...But it is not one that should be made in a biography of one of the truest and bravest gentlemen who ever breathed...
...Disdain of personal glory, chastity, poverty, obedience bring to the monks a veritable inner emancipation which we vainly seek in disorder or in the organization of ephemeral laws...
...Reilly's study of the great churchman and writer who, in the words of the present Pope, just spoken about Lavigerie, a cardinal as eminent in the sphere of action as he in that of thought, "cast new lustre on the Roman purple," is a rarely illuminating book and justifies the years of work that have gone to it...
...But by this time the second John K. Petre has discovered that he is Peter Blagdon, and, in disgust with the foul financial and political world into which he has been drawn against his will, has retired, with his money safely put into national bonds...
...and it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them...
...Paris: Bernard Grasset...
...This monastic life is all stability, while ours is full of agitation...
...It is perhaps not a paradox to maintain that we have fallen into a sort of barbarism, denser than that of the past, since we have created—taking the complexity of modern life as a pretext— a systematic civilization in bondage to material impulses and intellectual pride...
...John K. Petre, an American multi-millionaire, among whose eccentricities is a mysterious hatred of every form of publicity...
...De Casseres, "which got past the customs inspectors on the walls of our Chinese provincialism and percolated into the darkest fashionable circles of Topeka...
...Against this background, the novel takes added color from the Anglican Church, and its liturgy of the powers of darkness...
...In a fine chapter on Newman the Preacher, Dr...
...The satire is deadly...
...It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man...
...In any case the argument is not one that can be buttressed on any known facts of life or history...
...The upshot is that Peter Blagdon cannot be dispossessed of his money...
...It is enough...
...We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes...
...The only recourse, therefore, was to depend upon the words of the Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868...
...Baltimore: The Belvidere Press...
...Later I visited them in their Belgian house, where the same priests had taken refuge at the beginning of their exile...
...The contemplative soul, which loves to steep itself in reveries that almost pass the power of words to convey, "deep beneath unknown deep and height above unknown height," is not so rare as the rough manifestations of the outside world would lead one to believe...
...It is not a convent, it is not a seminary, it is a place to fit men of the world for the world...
...The Oregon School Cases...
...New York: Joseph Lawren...
...That the difficulty, though hardly so urgent in his day, did exist for him, and was foreseen by him, is evident from the words which Dr...
...Mirrors, Mr...
...The sixty or seventy people who count in London whisper "John K. Petre is buying...
...As for me, I passed an unforgettable week at La Trappe of Staoueli, near Algiers...
...The same dexterous, tapestry-like weaving of word patterns, is here, even though it may not reach to the excellence of the consummate artistry of Huysmans, it is of such high quality to suggest comparison with the master...
...Bernard Grasset, alert to note every new movement likely to succeed, has made a financial hit with Les Heures Benedictines of M. Edouard Schneider, first published by Ollendorff...
...Petre is bluntly asked the next day at a luncheon to which he is inveigled whether he means to buy Touaregs or to sell...
...The scene of The Rector of Maliseet, is in a far-off forgotten village in the west of England...
...It is the cortiplete record of the famous Oregon Law compelling all elementary school children to attend the public schools, as disclosed by the arguments, briefs and decision in its clash with the Constitution of the United States...
...It is the smallest of his deals...
...1 HE world remains an oyster that some would open with a sword, some with a tourist ticket and some with a ligjit scrip and the smiling assurance of unconquerable youth...
...His book abounds in touching and vital pictures...
...De Casseres has remembered, are mere reflections, and he has chosen the title for his book with this practical acknowledgment of the instability and «emphemeral quality of its cleverness...
...I also still cherish the memory &i a certain Christmas morning, rue Monsieur, Paris, in the chapel of the Benedictines, when the author of En Route and I listened to the celestial plain-chant of the holy nuns, invisible beyond the grille...
...Unlike many of his associates, and to the evident pain of Mr...
...Perhaps of all that Dr...
...I went there to rejoin J. K. Huysmans, who was engaged at the time in the writing of L'Oblat...
...For the atmosphere has been adroitly created...
...We French say of a task which surpasses ordinary possibilities—"C'est un travail de Benedictin...
...This portrayal, with its epicureanism and elements of demonology is reminiscent of Huysmans's novels, previous to the writing of En Route...
...It was one of the few cases where property interests and human interests coincided...
...inquisitive about unvisited lands and peoples...
...HP HE general public, in France at least, has passed from a A state of vague ignorance about the cloisters to one of sympathetic curiosity, shown by the current vogue of books on mysticism, and even the founding of pious collections...
...But as an attempt to place Newman's mind in its true perspective to the controversies that) crowded in upon it throughout his long life, the book has all the qualities of finality...
...3.00...
...What a host of soldiers, missionaries, martyrs, and explorers, might leave their graves to protest against such a statement as—"In the mutual antagonism of English stolidity and French impulsiveness, we often see Newman wavering before alternative courses, unable to free his mind of some remote but not utterly ill consequence which might follow this line of action or that...
...Dr...
...Tie technique of the briefs, transcripts and decision are the ,/orking tools of the constitutional lawyer, but the basis of the decision itself is the warp and woof of the citizen's business...
...Every man who exposes his heart must expect to have it liberally pecked by the daws of this world...
...The result is a certain lassitude in the depths of the soul which was felt by the generations which preceded that to which M. Schneider belongs...
...A simple minded, middle-aged English gentleman, after two years spent in America, where he has managed to acquire just enough of an American accent for the purposes of the story, arrives in England on April 3, 1953...
...The undoubted fact that he found himself, after his conversion towards middle life, a stranger to the habits of thought and action of many men born in the Catholic Church, has been swollen by gossip and innuendo into the absurd statement that he disliked his companions and regretted his step...
...The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only...
...The Oregon Law was, in fact, a constitutional amendment adopted by the voters of that state...
...New York: Robert M. McBride and Company...
...Being a part of the constitution the question of its constitutionality was not raised in the state courts...
...This spirituality of the monastery M. E. Schneider understands...
...He has lessons for us beyond any of the prophets of his age...
...Youth...
...curious at his experiences in the well-trodden tourist haunts...
...The book ends with a sort of prose canticle, soberly lyrical, dedicated to the overflowing love that the claustral soul pours out, no longer to the creature but to the Creator...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 6
