Books
Cain, George M. A. & Shuster, George N. & Martens, Frederick H. & Sands, William Franklin & Hull, Robert R. & Bates, Ernest Sutherland & Maynard, Theodore & Meadows, George D. & Cooper, Frederic Taber
Belasco production of What Never Dies was exerting its in- fluence. For according to its theme, the spirit of romance is a thing unfettered by encroaching years and grey hair--in fact, the author...
...And though he saw that most of the people round about had forgotten the matter, or were indif-ferent to it, he labored away at his tremendous mosaic "so that God might have mercy on his soul...
...The picture verges upon a Rabe-laisian frankness...
...JESSICA POWl~R$ is a contributor of poetry to current magazines...
...2.00...
...So quick is resentment of "hostility" that even among ourselves discussion of these things is very nearly impossible unless one is possessed of a Siegfried's hide or an inexhaustible fund of good temper...
...This generation, in its greater numbers, has still to make its contribu- tion, or miss its glorious opportunity...
...There is a definiteness about words which inhibits the fullest expression," says the author, and sometimes impresses one as dodging the inhibiting definiteness with all the success of most vers libre...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...Sothern is this---in fact, he looks and seems younger by many years than in former New York performances...
...NIczL TouR~UR is a British novelist and critic, and a contributor to English and American periodicals...
...Methodism Adrift, do not mention it if you are a Catholic...
...The chapter which the author devotes to The Roumanian Renaissance, is a most "interesting study of the develop-ment of a national consciousness in a small people sunk in political degradation and despair...
...To set forth an adequate definition of Christian chivalry was, perhaps, the chief purpose of Kenelm Digby's monu-mental and laborious writings...
...The epoch dealt with extends backward from I84O...
...He was conscious, if ever a man was, of how much Europe had profited by the experience of the mlddle-ages...
...For one thing, a good deal of the best material available had already been used up...
...But Asbury, descendant of the first Methodist bishop on American soil, darling of the preachers, pride of the brethren, and hope of his Sunday-school teacher, has gone wrong...
...And besides, in spite of the "thumbs down" turned by the Babbitts of business on all religious controversy, the Mercury writers have revived the religious polemic and are making America like it...
...Asbury, well known to readers of the American Mercury and others since the Hatrack excitement of last spring, is already paying the penalty of one who, destined willy-nilly (as were the ten roosters out of a family of fourteen chicks) for the ministry, persists in going to the devil...
...America did not exist before we came...
...we have built great numbers of churches, therefore we have built the Church...
...and at the Foundation of the Society of Jesus...
...4.00...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Some of the customs, manners, nationalisms to which ref-erence is made are alien to the spirit of America and are objec- tionable wherein they continue misunderstanding or engender repulsion among people not of our faith who are in-terested in it...
...Amusing situations follow--mother, sons, danghter-in-law, grandchildren, proceed to Rome in a body, to investigate...
...The present author avoids this pitfall by emphasizing the importance of education as a preparation for life in the community...
...Marcabrun, by Ramon Guthrie...
...The interest reafiy lies, not in the literature, but in the people who created it and in their civilization...
...The only comment invited by the book is that the compiler's work has been excellently done...
...Between family prayers and the singing to old metre of How Firm a Foundation...
...What is aimed at is intensity and vividness...
...You will find all the data of importance: Keats's connection with the Western Messenger...
...The hand may be the hand of Hewett, but the voice is the voice of Ramon Guthrie--a new voice and a sincere one, with a carrying power likely to be heard afar...
...E IGHTEEN years ago Mr...
...Stephenson has ar-rayed so much exceptional literature---so much kindliness, in- sight, humanity, pathos---that he deserves to be termed the maker of an almost indispensable American book...
...at the Capture of Jerusalem...
...Many are the taboos of the godly...
...2.50...
...I.OO...
...too often we would seem to have a mistaken idea of the meaning of Church militant, as we have of "ecclesia docens...
...Mr...
...New York: D../lppleton and Company...
...and though the "frontier" is nowhere definitely defined, it is taken to include the major towns of Ohio, Kentucky and several neighboring states...
...and the editor of A Tankard of Ale...
...Arranged as they are in this book, with a synthesis that goes much deeper than mere consecutives, the writings of the great President do actually compose a deep and moving autobiography...
...In-stead I refer him to Mr...
...C. E. M. Joad, a Socialist, who, in his Thrasymachus...
...He was irritated, but the central mystery of Puritan- ism yet eludes him...
...We do not realize this as we should, for we are not interested in what others think about religion...
...With a gay flare of color, Mr...
...Mr...
...The book has much of the Hewlett pattern, his love of gorgeous color, his gift of ramming into one swift, poignant phrase a haunting, unique portrait...
...When you send your fifty cents to E. and R. Munhall, Publishers, G-ermantown, Philadelphia, for a copy of Breakers...
...the prowess of the M'Guffey readers...
...He was present at the next General Conference to battle for the Lord with the fundamentalists...
...Nevertheless, there does emerge from the array of information something like a perspective--a view of the American mind during years that were formative and con- sequently interesting...
...Lemozi, "dear Lemozi, with its roiling, intimate horizons...
...There is a wealth of excellent maxim, of char- acteristic quotation...
...H.W...
...The settings by Joseph Wickes are delightful, and in the Roman scenes, full of enchantment...
...Small wonder that, gypsying along green byways and beside im-promptu little brooks, even a prematurely cynical jongleur could be tricked into outbursts of exuberant boyishness such as that evidenced in the following: "The thickets are crackling with buds green and yellow, Heigh, ho and a lark...
...But Dr...
...blasphem- ers...
...Farmington's religion explains Farmington...
...Suck ref- erences as are made to the Catholic population are always frank tacit tendency to identify Christianity with Catholicism...
...Ramon Guthrie knows when to stop...
...The book contains little that is new, but offers, on the whole, a fair summary of the results achieved in its field by the science, or so-called science of comparative religion...
...but no conceivable heaven has any appeal for him...
...The Literature of the Middle-Western Frontier, by Ralph Leslie Rusk...
...Keeping company" was a gloomy affair in Farmington, for the God of vengeance lurked around every corner to spy on lovers...
...The book is funny--to all sinners and non-Evangelicals...
...It delivers an attack along the whole front of that Puritanism which one invariably finds associated with Evangelical Prot-estantism...
...Sails on the Horizon, by Charles J. Quirk...
...In 1913, Evangelist L. W. Munhall exposed the dock-works...
...IN Sails on the Horizon, we encounter a sort of talent that is growing rare among modern poets--the genius for expressing in the four lines of a quatrain the thought and emotion of the writer...
...G. 8tanley Hall: ./1 Bioeraphy of a Mind, by Lorine Pruette...
...at the Triumph of Saladin...
...And the girl's father, especially if he were a holy deacon, would "listen in" on the conversation of the couple, because he thought no young man could think of a girl save in terms of seduction...
...Of course, Professor Rusk is a representative of the "deposit" school...
...Some are handled much better than others...
...I cannot help thinking, for instance, that Dr...
...Without wearisome polemic or the atmosphere of rather doctrinaire abstraction which seems to oppress one in reading so much writing on the subject, he remains a "realist" in the best sense of the word even while giving us a survey of the basis and the objectives of education as wide and philosophical as anyone could desire...
...The American church had begun to take a distinct character of a high order and was giving a generous proportion of noteworthy men and women to the Church general in re-ligious life and lay activity...
...T HE recent visit to the United States of that gracious royal literary lady, heralded in movie caption as "the most beauti- ful queen of Europe," lends appositeness to the appearance of A History of Roumania by a native historian...
...Now and again some terse, blunt epithet leaps from the page like ~ hard-flung clod...
...The real undoing of Marcabrun was born of his love for Eleanor of Aquitaine, "in the year of our Lord, II35, the most beautiful thing in the world...
...Large expenditures and extravagances are reported, and a family council is called to bring Grandpapa back to the straight and narrow...
...and the mar-velous little sketch entitled Thermidor...
...Heigh, ho to the lark...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...Excerpts from documents, letters and state- ments made in weU-authenticated conversation, have been ar-ranged in chronological order...
...LAWRENCE MAYNARD GREY is a student of oriental religions, and prolessor in Saint John's College, Garrison, New York...
...Guthrie proceeds to fling before us the whole harlequin pageant of those hot-blooded, roistering days...
...Much needs to be said on this subject, by laymen, in the Catholic press, even at the risk of wounding over-sensitive na- tionalisms with which we are overlaid...
...That has been forgotten in this era of easier transportation and material prosperity...
...DR...
...But he lets us look on at the Baptism of Clovis, at Roncesvalles...
...but the chapter on newspapers and magazines is admirably complete and circumspect...
...The point where established scientific data merge into hypothesis is still far too muck a disputed territory for the various classes of believers and unbelievers to agree on a common program...
...Ten cents a copy Seven dollars a hundred Order a hundred [or distribution THE COMMONWEAL Grand Central TerminM, New York, N. Y. The new book, however, does not succeed so fully as did its predecessor...
...But that was a family quarrel and Munhall never quit the church...
...CONTRIBUTORS Do~ LUIGI STURZO is the founder of the Popular party in Italy and the author of a book on Italy and Fasclsmo...
...His book should bring forth sober thought...
...New York : ztl[red ,,1...
...Miss Rosalinde Fuller, as the young and vivacious Italian noblewoman who is head-over-heels in love with her elderly husband, convinces with her appearance and charm, where she faa% to do so at all times with her acting--and the curtain goes down, after minor complications, on a festively happy pair...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...One feels that Mr...
...A hiography of a mind must appear an ambitious under-taking...
...who even, as is happening all about us today, long to look upon the Catholic religion as dearly all that it claims to be, the one sure hope in a disintegrating spiritual world...
...And that is a great loss...
...An avalanche of pedagogical works, many of them representing diverse and even opposing philosophies or systems, is released every year and meanwhile the hard-worked teachers and their pupils are regarded as fair prey for every enthusiast with a theory to try out or a new philosophy of life to put into practice...
...To relate a series of chemical reactions can hardly seem quite so hopeless a task as to understand the perfectly simple and utterly unfathomable workings of the will which operates the physical-chemical machine...
...We scent hostility where it does not exist and misinterpret its causes where it does exist...
...for copies of the Mercury for April have been selling for $20.oo each ! Worst of all, Asbury says he is now an infidel and is blaming it on the Methodists...
...To the extent that the word applies to international affairs and to domestic politics, the phenomenon it indicates is also observable in religion...
...His narrative is surprisingly consecutive, and the stark, affecting honesty of each word will suggest to every reader the comment that an excursive biographer would make...
...On what is his conviction of the infallibility of the Bible as a moral and religious guide ultimately based ? Is it merely a personal choice or a new "categorical imperative" the blind faith of "fundamentalism" in another dress...
...More serious, however, is the scant attention paid to certain interesting deposits of CathoLic records...
...Poitiers "dinging to its rock...
...edited by Nicholas Dillon...
...That has not always been so with us...
...2.00...
...There is, about the play itself, so much of the farce-comedy, that one should not quarrel too much with certain bits of scarcely convincing psychology--for instance, the young wife remaining fervent and devoted in the face of the disclosure that her husband has concealed their marriage from his family through a sense of shame, and has lied to her about the ages of his sons...
...THEODORE MAYNARD...
...We Catholic Americans today are somewhat under the sway of customs and manners which pass in the rest of the world for our own, but which are not so in fact...
...GEORGE M. A. CAIN is a general reviewer for the American press...
...But the title is too ambitious even when read by one of the school of materialistic thinkers who might take most interest in the mind study of a man so markedly at the front of modern pedagogy as G. Stanley Hall, whom many will regard as at least the American apostle of a science of teaching which is the application of the theory that mind is matter for analysis in physical and chemical laboratories...
...Now, merely because a story is old, because it happened in the quattroeento or trecento, or earlier, it does not follow that it need be musty or faded or dim...
...There is nothing dim or remote or quaint about Boccaccio's joyous ribaldry, or Chaucer's merry pil-grimage...
...It is possible to daim for America that never before has there been offered anywhere such perfect opportunity for the free development of religion...
...And they may get from the volume the feeling that G. Stanley Hall was but a rather magnificent charlatan...
...Yet the result is a better picture than might be expected...
...ROBRRT R. HULL xS assocmte editor of Our Sunday Vimtor, and a general contributor of criticism to the American press...
...At court and castle, on adventurous highway and in brawling tap-room, we meet a motley crew of blithe profligates, male and female...
...and A Modern Book of Catholic Verse...
...te.oo...
...In itself the literature recorded by Professor Rusk may be qualified by a remark once made by a serious German student of Cornish reliques: "They are ex-cellent material for my dissertation, but it is likely that some people might be bored if I mentioned them elsewhere...
...He does not tell us...
...5.00...
...But read on for a few more pages, and a doubt will spring and grow...
...In the end, one is ready to acoept that as almost a definition of the man--a playboy who had a rigidly Puritan rearing to make him deadly serious about his play and to make his play deadly serious, a playboy whose intense mentality found amusement only in the more startling deductions he could make from sd- entitle investigations he had no patience to complete, a play-boy who rushed out to show his incompleted toy deductions so prematurely that he was obLiged to reverse them with astonish- ing frequency...
...Mr...
...a civilization, whose seeds are planted in shallow soil, must hedge them about lest they be scattered by the wind...
...2.00...
...Historians will probably admit that never before has the Catholic Church functioned in sur-roundings so nearly perfect...
...As to the more directly practical aspect of Evolution and Religion in Educationmits plea for evolutionary teaching in the schools--there is more room for difference of opinion...
...STEPHENSON has added to the number of available lives of Lincoln a volume in which the story is related by the President himself...
...panderers and thieves...
...translated by Joseph McCabe...
...N ATIONALISM is a current catchword among those who specialize in study of international relations...
...the eyes of Farmington's saints were glued to knot-holes...
...Maxims of Christian Chivalry, by Kenelm Henry Digby...
...They were fully aware of what they possessed...
...There is little use dwelling on her marvelous artistry in the part of the spirited great-grandmother, dominant ruling force in the lives of grandchildren and great grand-children alike, for the critics have already burdened her with laurels---and the play-going public is likely to concede, en masse, that they are more than earned...
...The happiest word applied to Stanley Hall is "playboy...
...The Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals of the Methodist Church had better turn its attention to the apostate, since he refuses for love or money to quit his squawking...
...Getting facts down on paper, in becoming sequence, is his prin- cipal ambition...
...But in addition it should be noted that Mr...
...Hewlett, we recall, was the author for whom the term "tapestry novel" was coined...
...But for the peace of mind of the marriage-license clerk, we hasten to add that it would have to be a very special grandfather--with all teeth and hair intact...
...tt/'~F THE making of hooks there is no end" is not the less true when we limit the scope of the saying to the litera- ture of education...
...There can obviously be no discussion of motives, nor can there be any linking of the chain of events...
...They respected their fellow-citizens and were respected...
...When such practices, provincialisms or nationalisms are a part of the being of those who exhibit them and are thereby useful for the purposes of religion in that particular group of people, they are not objectionable...
...But less sympathetic readers WIU see with pity the play- boy sticking to his boasts as he goes over the last hurdle into eternity...
...In Miniatures of French History, Mr...
...WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS is a well-known authority and writer on American diplomatic questions...
...The sinners, in consequence, rejoice...
...That the illogical and spiritually timorous attitude of Protestant "funda- mentalism" in this country must, in the long run, be harmful to the interests of religion, does not seem to he an exaggerated or very disputable thesis...
...The biographer is too much an admirer to mention that playboys are invariably in love with the grand- stand...
...Moreover, his basic essentials are very real ones-- with a strong insistence on the things that make for human happiness, and, therefore, broadly speaking, for nobler life...
...We are absorbed, not in American ideals, but in the new freedom into which we have been inducted...
...It is an art requiring that clearness of thought so often dis- regarded in modern poetry, and a reserve in feeling and im-agination that serves, not to retard but to give springing power to the fancy and the mind...
...titled nobles...
...These budding bishops and incipient preachers re- ceived double measure and then some, when they were caught behind the livery barn puffing away at the "symbol of sin...
...they are a proper part of the means by which religion works upon human nature...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...But then an unbiased outlook with regard to the historically contemporaneous, in view of the lack of a broader critical perspective, is not confined to the Balkan states...
...Belloc employs the method again...
...The faithful, when they are not deploring Asbury's derelic- tion, will assert that he is in the pay of the Pope and the Jesuits...
...for another, the trick is not so fresh...
...He has forfeited every claim to Methodistic consideration...
...Four Essentials o[ Education, by Tkomas Jesse Jones...
...Belloc now takes us from the founding of Marseilles to the Battle of the Marne...
...It fails, as every character study fails which tries to account for a man as a machine...
...The occurrence rather than the motive interests him...
...One regrets occasional lapses of the critical spirit which usually maintains these volumes at a very high level...
...Belloc published a little book which is one of the best of the many that he has written...
...and later, when Maia, the little swineherd, comes to court and makes him a langhing-stock by demanding marriage, the fact that Eleanor, who could have saved him with a word, a gesture, looks on with detached amusement, constitutes the great betrayal that turns his love into an envenomed hate, which finds outlet in scurrilous, mordant verse, sharper and more far-reaching as his fame spreads--publicly shaming the Queen upon her wedding night, following up and thwarting her cherished plans, putting stop to a holy crusade, and in the end leaving the singer "with a dagger in his heart and a not-so-pleasant grin upon his face...
...They are American only by imposition...
...In our attitude to all around us the ancient flavor of oppression dings to us in the midst of perfect liberty...
...He has, of course, used it in many other books, notably in what is perhaps the greatest thing he ever wrote, his biography of Marie Antoinette...
...And others are going to the devil with him...
...The author is not sure what he was or what he did...
...z.25...
...The book is, more- over, invaluable for purposes of reference...
...Some of the best of the earlier pieces are Drouet's Ride...
...Incidentally, Catholic readers owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Osborn for the dearness with which he distinguishes our position from that of the Protestant "fundamentalists" and for the generosity witk which he pays tribute to the palaeontological work of Catholic scientists, notably certain members of the French clergy...
...Belloc rarely writes now with the balanced care that he dis- played eighteen years ago...
...FREDERICK H. MARTENS...
...She does tell us that his own school of scientists criti- cized him both for lack of dose research and inconsistency of theory...
...MARY B~NT WrtlTESlDE is the author of: a book of poems, The Eternal Quest, and a contributor of verse to the magazines...
...Mr...
...A "poison squad" of holy women spent their leisure hours in watching for sin and reporting to anxious parents, with the result that the woodsheds of the holy town resounded to the yelps of the little boys...
...A "faith" that can maintain its hold on men's minds and con-sciences only by asking them to keep up the defensive tactics of the ostrich for an indefinite period is not likely to hold the younger generation of educated Americans for very long...
...Charles J. Quirk shows a remarkable aptness for this form of art, inherited from the oriental poets of the Hafiz and Omar Khayyam schools, through the gnomlc singers, the Celtic scribes, and the modern artists of France and England...
...and numberless matters of the same kind...
...The simplicity of the stage mechanism and costuming make it admirably adapted for amateur production by schools and drama groups...
...The first is centrifugal: it can tolerate individuality because it has a centre...
...They follow the politically tangled trail of Roumanian history from Roman Dacia to the decadent eighteenth-century principality, with its puppet-princes of Wallachla and Roumelia dancing in the leading-strings of Turkish pashas and Austrian overlords...
...he does not waste his fuel...
...FREDERIC TABER COOPER...
...My bird, you are truly a sorry, glum fellow...
...Why...
...THEODORE MAYNARD is the author of Drums of Defeat...
...2.25...
...Hall is left sadly unanalyzed...
...Within the area thus circumscribed, the author is per- fectly at home...
...Rusk adopted a little pre- maturely certain recent pronouncements about what Ch~teau-briand saw in America...
...Surviving the onslaught of the holy army last spring, he dares in this book to insert the Mercury thriller...
...The complete realization of national unity under Ferdinand I and the story of Rou- mania's part in twentieth-century political developments be-fore, during, and after the world war form the concluding chapter, followed by a chronological table of ruling princes, a bibliography, and an index...
...The author-- a professor at the Paris Sorbonne as well as at the University of Bucharest--writes colorfully and con amore...
...GEORGE M. A. CAIN...
...As an interesting narrative dramatization of his people's story, with special reference to literary and cultural, as welt as politi- cal values, Professor Iorga's book has very genuine merits and in view of the various original Greek and Slavonic sources to which he has had access, an authority that is sensed for all, it is not ostentated...
...BOOKS ,4d~entures in Catholicism, by Richard EHison...
...So little scholarly attention has been given to the growth and development of American culture that these books have, in their way, the charm of a pioneer adventure...
...Boyd has adequately extracted all the humor from the really extremely clever lines of the original...
...It is being said...
...They had come through a struggle for political and religious principles, two things which more than any mold men's character...
...or the Future of Morals, says that "a civilization with its roots in the earth can allow its members to spread outward, like the branches of a tree...
...Many of these customs and manners, in- vigorated of late by this phenomenon of nationalism, have grown up under the exigencies of other times and other conditions, in other places...
...GEORGE D. MEADOWS...
...But Farm- ington is not the only place on the map...
...He was primarily a weaver of word-wrought tapestries--an embroiderer of the golden phrase...
...Knopf...
...Lorine Pruette gives us but a character study of a prominent figure...
...the Catholic Church in America did not exist before we came...
...A NEW edition of Professor Rusk's two-volume history of early middle-western literature leads to the remark that the accumulation of materials it presents is astonishing and almost unique...
...One, The Conversation of the King, is hardly more than a series of quotations from Joinville--though it may be none the worse on that account...
...The publication of "The Reveller" in pamphlet form is especially timely in that it makes available another splendid contribution to Franciscan literature for the sep- tacentenary anniversary of the great saint's birth...
...The list is too long...
...Evidently he never reached bottom...
...and reflects the viewpoint of those in authority...
...Each enthusiast, per- haps, will find in her performance one thing more than another particularly fine---but the tones of her voice, charmingly blend- ing the silvery quavering quality of age with the firmness of an unquenchable character and will, are likely to form the most tangible memory of her impersonation...
...The extreme literalism of the late William Jennings Bryan and his followers set up in the minds of too many of his countrymen a conviction that there is an impassable chasm between the basic verities of the Christian faith and the established findings of modern scientific research...
...The story is European in its essence--a story of a family of two sons, a danghter-in-law, and some odd grandchildren, growing deeply concerned because "Grandpapa," who, since his widowerhood, has consistently refused to be dignified or to share family responsibilities, has escaped from the deadly at-mosphere of a perfectly ordered Viennese household (up-holstered in heavy foreboding velvet curtains) and flitted to Rome---whence rumor drifts that he has acquired a charming villa, and~what is worse to his family--an even more charm- ing lady...
...7.50...
...Most of the supposed or actual hostility against Cath- olics in America comes from misunderstanding or bitter dis-appointment--not in our religion or in what the Church claims, but in what it appears to be and appears to claim through our own actions...
...2.50...
...But one wishes he had been less chary with his transla- tions of the old Provencal songs...
...But to him her indifference is a monstrous thing...
...McCabe's translation reproduces that flowing, pellucid style in which French historical writers excel--come eight vivid narrative chapters...
...They be- come truly objectionable, however, when they repel those not of our faith, or when they are forced by some zealous group as an essential part of universal religion upon others of the same faith to whom they are inapplicable and who do not like them...
...but it is sufficient to say that the holy ones find no difficulty in recognizing sin when they see it...
...BRIEFER MENTION ./In zlutobiogrraphy of `4braham Lincoln, compiled and anno- tated by Nathaniel ICricht Stephenson...
...After the land and the racial origins of its peoples are placed ~Mr...
...The real spiritual salvaging of harassed minds will be accomplished along such lines as those indicated in Canon Dorlodot's Darwin- ism and Catholic Thought...
...Rights for production may be secured from THE COMMONWEAL...
...New York: Benziger Brothers...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...If one cannot alto- gether agree with the publisher's announcement, "Go back to the real Lincoln: you will find him here," it is simply because a man so great needs to be seen through the veil of accumulated opinion and historical tradition...
...Maybe it should be taken as a demonstration that our chemist-psychologists have done little more than invent some new words for things long under- stood by people who believed that an immaterial and immortal soul informs a material body to make it a human being, as closely related as the matter and form of every substance...
...RNEST SUT/:IERLAND BATES, formerly associated with western umversities in the department of philosophy, writes for American periodicals on educational and literary subjects...
...One must confess, too, that Professor Osborn's particular syn- thesis lays him open to attack along sceptical lines...
...It was entitled The Eye-Witness, and its object was to present either actual historical events, or imaginary scenes which were yet in accordance with actual historical knowledge in the way that they would have struck a man who had beheld them with his own eyes...
...ROBERT R. HULL...
...The book itself is disappointing...
...The second is centripetal: it must enforce uniformity because it has none...
...Yes...
...If it were possible to collect a series of "regional" histories equally reliable and complete, the panorama of the synthetic historian would be made vastly richer and more ~mpressive than it now is...
...I you cherish glad memories of The Forest Lovers, andF Richard Yea-and-Nay, the opening paragraphs of Marca- brun may well trick you into a rash conclusion that here is a new Hewlett, in manner and in mood...
...But Miniatures of French History contains many great moments and, as is always the ease with Hilaire Belloc, much brilliant and noble writing...
...No one can deny it a place in the sum of human energies...
...Evolution and Rdigion in Education, by Henry Fairfield Osborn...
...I shall not quote a Catholic writer...
...but the problem now is--to stop him l He is out of their "celestial mouse-trap" with a whoop and a bang, and is running amuck through the length and breadth of "Nordic" America...
...4 History of Roumania: Land, People, Civilization, by N. Iorga...
...His pic-tures have the ripple and sheen of soft, rich textures, with colors mellowed by the touch of time...
...Alexander Engel is the author of What Never Dies, and Ernest Boyd its translator into English...
...The author gains still sharper piquancy by contrast with the sheer physical loveliness of his background--those plains and uplands of old France, where the place-names sing themselves in a soft lilt of rhythmic syllables: Ventadour, Angoul~me, and Campostella...
...B~J~NARD FA~t is the author of Panorama de la Litt~rature Fran~aise, and has served as an exchange professor in the United States...
...it lacks nice reticence in fact and in phrase mand this lack is deliberate...
...Trollope's observations...
...It is, of course, not at all a question of fairness...
...There is many another verse that begs to be quoted, and many an episode over which it would be easy to linger...
...but they are forced to accept the situation when they discover the charming lady is really a charming wife (a fact heretofore concealed by Grandpapa) and that there is, moreover, a baby in the picture...
...not as customs and manners ideally Catholic, but as a consequence of aberration from ideal Catholic life under the influence of persecution, of deprivation of all those rights which early Americans have claimed to be inherent in man and unalienable...
...our intercourse with our neighbors in matters of religion is polemic, often harsh, and insomuch, not Catholic...
...Again, he complains: "Everything I wanted to do, everything that seemed to hold any promise of fun or excitement, was a sin...
...Haidee Wright, who plays that r61e, puts so much fire into her lines that it would seem only plausible that such a mother should produce such a son...
...It is something to which young people ought to be sent--to which they could be sent, moreover, with perfect confidence that every word read would be an interesting lesson in nobility...
...at the death of Saint Louis...
...F~DRRICK H. MARTENS iS a New York critic of music, and the author of 1001 Nights of Opera...
...It applies essentially to a very real phenomenon which may be described as an acute self-consciousness among racial groups manifesting itself in a great variety of ways...
...But there and elsewhere it was called upon--in fact it could only be called upon--at the most dramatic moments of the story...
...Asbury is disgusted with all religion...
...braggarts and bullies...
...but avoids altogether the Revolution...
...Several generations ago, those Catholics who had survived the discomforts and actual disabilities of colonial days did understand and respect the Protestant mind...
...These that have been mentioned are only a few of the scenes...
...and likewise /.here is no touch of the faded or far away in Ramon Guthrie's story of a great rascal, and a great singer...
...In the first of the volumes listed above, for example, the president of the American Museum of Natural History pleads, with the religious fervor of the "fundamental- ists" whom he attacks, for the inclusion of definite evolutionary teaching in American education, while in the other book there is outlined a philosophy of education which would banish from our school curricula a large proportion of the "courses" which ornament school .prospectuses...
...GEORGE D. MEADOWS is an English reviewer residing in the United States FI',EDERIC TABER COOPER was formerly literary editor of the New York Globe, The Bookman, and The Forum...
...We do not realize that to what remains of Protestant America true religion is the major interest of the day, and that Protestants are examining with the keenest scrutiny, not dognm so much as the externals of the Church and our own understanding and practice of our own belief...
...The essential difference is not difficult to trace...
...Marcabrun is a twelfth-century tale of one of the first troubadours, whose sum of earthly goods was his arrogance, his gift of song, and his scorn of women--a scorn not wholly strange, since he owed to women the shame of a nameless birth, the sordid drama of his marriage, and the grim surprise of an untimely death...
...He has to---if only because of his stage-mother...
...Even though it is not quite the nlgby anthology one should like to have--that would necessarily in- clude Mores Catholici, Compitum, and a great deal besides --the book has its place and should be found upon the shelves of every library...
...To Eleanor, Marcabrun was a mere episode, already fading into the limbo of forgotten things, even while he vows to love her always...
...Francis was successfully pro- duced by the Tavern Club in Boston, with incidental music ar- ranged by C. M. Loeffler...
...ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES...
...for, even in Farmington itself of late years, "flaming youth" flaunts its sin up and down Main Street and in front of the Methodist church...
...It cannot be consistent with itself...
...To quote Mr...
...In one close-packed, brimming paragraph we view Queen Eleanor's whole life, phase by phase, from her heyday as light-hearted queen of France, "leading a crusade as though it were a carnival," to the last stage, when we see her old at Fontevrault, with "one weakling son still wabbling on a throne," her splendors and her treacheries forgotten...
...He doesn't want to go to the Methodist heaven, of course...
...Father Dillon has prepared a little anthology of passages from The Broad Stone of Honour...
...Thomas Jesse Jones's little book is one of the best pieces of educational writing that has appeared for a very long time...
...Scandals there have been ere now...
...If one accompanied a girl to evening services, he pub- lished the banns...
...In the youthful mind He was usually identified with some preacher or member of the Ladies' Aid Society who had foot-and-mouth disease...
...In The Eye-Witness and in Miniatures of French History, everything that is recorded can be set down as though it were beheld by a living observer...
...For, after a winter with never a groat, And nothing but water to swish in my throat, Why, I'd crack all my ribs with one glorious note, If I were a lark...
...No important sources have been overlooked, and sometimes the probe of meticulous investigation brings genuine riches to the surface...
...To seek female society was to proclaim that you wished to marry the gift...
...the effect of Mrs...
...A modern--and highly commendable --reaction against the rigid and often stereotyped methods of the old class of teachers has resulted in some cases in a science and an art of education that stress the value of the individual as such at the expense of his function as a member of organized society...
...In the holy town of Farmington, Missouri, life was very carefully chaperoned and guarded...
...The Catholic Church is universal, and its very universality permits the growth and existence of a multitude of local cus- toms, local manners, local group and racial manifestations and individual practices in religious expression...
...Richard Ellison, a soundly Catholic author (though he chooses to call himself a "hyphenate" Catholic) has taken up many of the points of practice and manners which repel Protestants and distress many more Catholics than we realize, on the solid ground that they are extraneous to the Faith, and that nothing in Catholic faith or practice should be repellent to honest souls...
...Rightly, E. H. Sothern, always the figure of romance, has been cast to prove this, and to show that a certain sort of grandfather can make a more charming lover and husband than many an average youth...
...ladies fair and frail...
...Perhaps the best section deals with the beginnings of the theatre...
...WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS...
...This typical small town of the hinterland swarmed with men of God in Prince-Albert coats with a grim resolve to make "manly little fellows" out of the progeny of Evangelicals...
...So far as its last chapter is concerned, the volume, quite naturally, is quasi-official...
...Miniatures of French History, by Hilaire Belloc...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...Boston: The Stratford Company...
...Nor is his "creative evolution"--Bergson with, apparently, theistic modifications---much more satisfactory, for it leaves us just as far from arriving at a real ultimate in our religious philosophy...
...In this he succeeded admirably, and performed what Michelet declared to be the chief function of the vital hisforian: to effect a resurrection from the dead...
...for he has a rare trick for putting them into English, and the volume needs more of them...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...Asbury, "the sins were invariably things from which they re- ceived no pleasure...
...Valmy, the glimpse an American visitor who did not know what he was seeing--had of Marie Antoinette being carried in the cart to the guillotine on October 16, 1793...
...COMMONWEAL PAMPHLETS NUMBER THREE THE REVELLER e/I Franciscan Play r DANIEL SARGENT T HIS one-act play about St...
...Perhaps it sounds less ambitious to those who like both the author and the subject, decline to acknowledge any distinction between the immaterial spirit that is mind and the material instrument, of amazingly complex yet purely physi- cal and chemical matter, the body and brain through which mind works...
...Up from Methodism, by Herbert ,dsbury...
...With a great deal that is in Professor Osborn's book every reader of The Commonweal will be in agreement...
...For according to its theme, the spirit of romance is a thing unfettered by encroaching years and grey hair--in fact, the author would have us believe that it not only never dies, but grows ever more youthful and spontaneous with the filter- ing of sand through the hour-glass...
...I THINK it best to preserve the style and spirit of the book...
Vol. 5 • January 1927 • No. 10
