Fancy and the Ducats
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...merely "stuff" in relation with which the intelligence But though the system of prize awards may encour- has neither an active nor a passive function...
...Barnard's Cloisters...
...Surely we are already solitude, culture nor yearning has shown it the face surfeited with nicely wrapped tomes which the public of Minerva...
...Even Marion Crawford's suave impression that fiction Perhaps Mr...
...And profitable if one happens to divine correctly the springs in the United States, beginning with the coveted Pulit- of popular tears, chuckles and suspense...
...Curtis Brown, Limited, all truth an artist...
...Theodore Maynard i i Clement Wood, Louise Townsend Nicholl z i Wandering Russians Gouverneur Paulding Q Books Ernest Sutherland Bates, Phantoms (verse) Harry McGuire 15 Henrietta Dana Skinner, Martha Bayard, The Month of Mary G. N. S., Fulton J. Sheen, Thomas Walsh 22 Alice T. A. Quackenbush i 5 The Quiet Corner 27 FANCY AND THE DUCATS AMONG the scenes we should have enjoyed im- this case, what is really great...
...the forming spirit has passed...
...We can only guess that its effect was notable to be remains even more unfathomable...
...But, as it happens, he will be only partly to offer prizes for the books of antiquity...
...bait, is delightfully non-specific...
...Was it And if the mere question of what the novel is has preeminently ethical...
...Was Mr...
...What endless enduring as all time...
...satisfying criterion of the novel...
...gripping summary of the values of fiction...
...What will guarantee read-are being selected by a peculiarly effective sys- delivery of his legacy...
...All the vices of literatives with that awe-inspiring bottle of champagne ture-sentimentalism, insincerity, grossness, pandering known as the prize award...
...Sinclair Lewis may gain only a few more exists to give pleasure has gone by the board...
...and it itself exists as parades, it remains an earthy creature because neither an artificial stimulus to buying...
...we have gone into smith's only novel...
...correct...
...Well, we who yearn to be contemporary awkward assumption of the hand-shaking salesman's have since been forced to recognize the Prix Goncourt attitude...
...We have clapped our hands at raw he forced into a publisher's hands the riches of Gold- and rugged "cross-sections" of life...
...The auditors alone will be able to say...
...Nobel the first -spring from the writing man's (and his publisher's) in the field...
...Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em and the Prix Balzac...
...The most that can be said in reply is the vegetable side of life...
...Father dear, what will this book teach me...
...The august selective powers of wait" is excellent narrative advice, and exceedingly the Academie Francaise have their way with us...
...Or sentimental and imagina- been beyond answering, the query about what it ought tive...
...What will please -the only novels which many people can find time to him...
...But it never forgot a centhat the biographical novel itself is a proof of the tral, permanent, always reliable source of joy-the fact ceaseless rejuvenation of aspect possible to fiction as that work done is satisfactory only when it images an a genre...
...Is this the morally but otherwise-what the novel ought to be...
...What is the meaning Balzac's flare for sociology, the imaginative biography of art-or of life, too-unless it is material into which is simply the use of the same old plow in new fields...
...Or is it as open as ever to endlessly Savants of a later day could have taught it much about varied forms...
...Still more im- to the spirit of genuinee religion-it frowns upon the pressive is the fact that no mortal creature can tell, inold-fashioned habit of putting them into a picture of 2 THE COMMONWEAL May 12, 1926 life...
...Is the public coming to prefer any certain was not always a discerning or a well-behaved society...
...The ability to swallow fiction is, after all, inquires the decorous heroine of an ancient best-seller, limited...
...Modem demand triumphant...
...Or the Ameri- One sometimes gets the impression that in their can Tragedy...
...or under how many daubs of rouge and powder it The prize must be earned in sales...
...That which is beautiful about the holds out the meagre sum of $7,500 to the author of falling of the sun into the waters, or the curve of the "best American biographical novel...
...Nothing Fannie Hurst has been festooned with $50,000 for a less than the hope of immortality has guided it...
...ocratic society, which is always incapable of establishKnowledge of this summary would be valuable just ing or preserving a norm, disposes jauntily of all quesnow because of the bewildered modern search for a tions about standards with a phrase from Oscar Wilde...
...The utter insignificance And thereby is proved once again the superbly of so much that now passes for creative literature is magistral efficacy, the universal reign, of the most due to neglect of what was a mediaeval axiom...
...and serial, even the most staid among us cannot resist the the acclaim which it has yearned to get is at least as temptation to read at least fifty pages...
...Perhaps the steady mensely, there is one particular favorite which vogue of relative criticism throughout the nineteenth must have been staged just inside a sagging, ink-stained century was the result of this inability on the part of door...
...merely reserving the privilege of hauling up from the Ralph Adams Cram says elsewhere in these pages) deep what they will...
...The Atlantic Venus's arm, is indeed "a joy forever...
...But in so far zer prize, a system of substantial tips has introduced as the use of language has aspired to be an art, it has us to a growing chain of fictional head-waiters...
...We really haven't the slightest idea-not only emperors, it needs a brand-new appetizer...
...Meanwhile the novel, like a caretea, challenged the world by saying: "My dear sir, that less and bored literary Moloch, has swallowed up all was a corking story 1" But upon this memorable after- painstakingly arrived at definitions of genres and dicnoon he must have enunciated some grandiose and tional beauty...
...It scarcely seems possible that ecstasies over ethereal symbolism...
...The society which fashioned its defined object and a wide field lies some direction to twelfth-century home amid the ruins of great antiquity thought...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, May 12...
...And then one thinks momentem of advertising...
...For nearly one hun- It concedes, for instance, excepting in moments of indred years fiction has been the Jenghis Khan of the toxicated sophistication, that morals have their place literary world...
...attitude toward the public, literary folk are not a little Under the circumstances it is rather depressing to like expectant heirs cramming the soon-to-be-deceased note that the novels which everybody will have to read uncle with flattery and tasty titbits...
...What was Doctor Johnson's manner, precisely mankind to arrive at anything like an objective verdict what were his words, upon that foggy afternoon when about fictional art...
...and lately we have the Doctor himself took any deep delight in fiction...
...and so great is the strain to which it has been coming from the library with a sombre volume in tree- subjected by competitive advertising and reams of calf, and thereby baffling twentieth-century comprehen- unctuous blurbing that, like divers satiated Roman sion...
...can get any pleasure out of Germinal...
...But because its morals shoulder the task of reading through the innumerable are always preventive, purposive-in a manner foreign narratives that have been called great...
...type of story...
...Monthly Press, fishing in dark waters with a $io,ooo Fancy and the ducats have flirted but never wedded...
...When beckoned to a more transcendental purpose...
...Not even Professor Saintsbury could in domestic and civil existence...
...observed, with some pleasure, the introduction of One gropes in vain through Boswell for a moment recondite psychological knowledge into the business of when the dictator, chuckling over his tenth cup of character analysis...
...Like Sir Walter's recourse to history or ideal sponsored by the mind...
...1926 Number i CONTENTS Fancy and the Ducats I Cloister Cobwebs (verse) . . Isabel Fiske Conant i6 Week by Week 3 Mr...
...Now in this contrast between a in mediaevalism...
...No matage new departures or multiply the yield, it is fatal ter in how many novel garments it may venture forth, to anything like what may be termed literary eugenics...
...The old thinker who said depossibilities are concealed under this idea 1 fiantly that change does not exist may have been a poor The latest offering of prizes includes two which are observer of the fissures in Ionian cliffs, but he was in more than usually educative...
...Who readers on the strength of this year's Pulitzer award...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...Edythe H. Browne i6 Federalizing the Film 7 Communications 17 Thinking and Feeling 8 The Play R. Dana Skinner, H. L. S. 20 Mediaevalism and Modern Life Poems Samuel Heller, Harold Vinal, Ralph Adams Cram 9 Mabel Cornelia Matson, Grace Wickham, The Rural Rider Returns...
...It is modern of literary implements...
...Some sardonic enemy of the human tarily of Cordelia, whose voice was sweetly low and race must have conceived the idea of launching narra- whom braggadocio outraged...
...prize award...
...What will he fall for...
...gobbles up in lots of ioo,ooo, the despairing citizen After all, might it not be an excellent, remedial idea will say...
...Any kind of novel, And that is one reason why a not wholly barbarous every kind of novel, will be welcome, the editors section of the modern world is interested (as Mr...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 1
