Books
Walsh, Thomas & Martens, Frederick H. & Crowley, Paul & Graham, Gladys & Bates, Ernest Sutherland & C., T. & Repplier, Agnes & Kolars, Mary
BOOKS 8hort Talks with the Dead, by Hilaire Belloc. New York: Harper and Brothers. $3.0o. T HERE are only two ways in which a book of essays by Hilaire Belloc might be adequately revlewed....
...The Art of Seeing, by Charles Herbert Woodbury and Eliz- abeth Ward Perkins...
...z.5o...
...but some- how it walks on them...
...The clum- siest conceivable use of connectives, a wealth of loosely vagrant clauses, a number of constantly recurrent mannerisms--these and other matters are deplorable...
...Success means money, and the making of it is an exploitation of the public more or less honest, reasonable or abhorrent...
...To teach observation by dramatization is a sure method of compelling children to see what is happening before their eyes...
...I~a~l,mt advantal~ lamsuag~ Music and Art...
...FgANCIS OF ASSlSI have been reproduced in color on postcards and are now ready for distribution by the publishers...
...With the vast and baffling problem of this allegory M. Legouis does not deal here...
...Best of all, the deaths from starvation have been reduced from 3-337 percent to 3.956, and the illegitimate births from 8.932 to 7.615 per thousand...
...The confusion of the orthodox critical position is well illustrated in Neilson and Thorndike's authoritative History of English Literature...
...rather are they the lightest flicks of the whip, stinging nevertheless...
...T O THE adult who knows perfectly well that he cannot draw or paint, it seems miraculous that children can do both when they are encouraged or persuaded to try...
...And if any ingrate remembers to object on the score of realism, he can only be invited to verify the essential accuracy of certain passages, and in all probability, their verbal accuracy as well, by listening in some night at Mrs...
...There is good fun in the book-- delicious parodies in We Are Seven, and inconsequential chat in On Talking and Not Talking to People in Trains...
...The foul and sordid gloom of London slum life--its highest physical palliatives, sex indulgence and drink...
...Yes, decidedly we can do with more of the spirit of laughing castigation which animates these pages in which Miss Walker too briefly presents Mrs...
...They are met with opposition more or less sincere from the property interests, the yellow press and the children of free- dom, if not Belial, in general...
...For it is true that "we have grown great and our democ- racy has triumphed through the sterling virtues of our citi-zenry...
...And the assumption that a masterpiece can be produced by a mediocre writer is a critical monstrosity...
...The fact that Boswell was hardly a striking example of morality is nothing to the point with Verlaine and Villon, Burns and Bryon standing by his side...
...They repeat conventionally: "This is the best of biographies, partly because Johnson was such an interesting subject and talked so much, and partly because Boswell lived as much as possible with his hero and recorded everything he heard Johnson say...
...It is a good method of helping them to reproduce what they have seen...
...his other writings are declared by the few who have read them to be devoid of the slightest touch of genius...
...One, to write about Mr...
...She has not...
...The impulse of a child to color his drawing in a few flat masses is a sound one," says this wise little volume...
...We are suffering from so many curtailments of our liberties under blue laws, Volstead acts and lock-and-chain legislation that a large part of the public may be well excused if it re-sponds half-heartedly to further enactments at law which might easily be metamorphosed into what would only amount to more sleek parochialism...
...Miss Sinecure, who will walk out the instant a cat is not provided to share her meal...
...Sad, solitary, and sincere in a peculiarly frivolous and superficial era-sad yet jovial, solitary in the midst of his club, sincere above his whims and inconsistencies, he f~onted life four-square, and, indomitably courageous, took its blows without flinching, and triumphed over it...
...their roots strike into the very heart of Mr...
...BOOKS 8hort Talks with the Dead, by Hilaire Belloc...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...Although the casual selfishness of the commonplace does not escape unscathed, it is the organized selfishness of economic exploitation and injustice that draws from Mr...
...But if you want life depicted as it really is among the modern poor, go to the Adelphi melodrama...
...That little scholars deligkt in this re-One Macmillan Book a Week creative occupation can be well imagined...
...These might be crudely characterized as a hatred of selfishness and a contempt for superficiality...
...Rasselas is uninspired either as a narrative or moral treatise...
...The Art of Seeing proves this point beyond the possibility of doubt...
...Perkins are not by way of providing a series of entertainments...
...New York: The lllac- millan Company...
...One will suffice---The Nine Final Things: Disappointed expectation, irretrievable loss, inevitable fatigue, unanswered prayer, unrequited service, ineradicable doubt, perpetual dereliction, death, judgment...
...T HERE are only two ways in which a book of essays by Hilaire Belloc might be adequately revlewed...
...I-Tellem-Blah, the oriental mystic, who wishes only "to know the soul---to caress it" ; and several others whom no book could adequately hold, but whom life itself, in its quaint hospi- tality, amply harbors...
...For further infocmat/on ec.mmnnicate with the REVER]SND MOTHER, 466 Prospect Sir, mr, Fall River, MmmANNOUNCEMENT The fifty paintings by Dom Subercaseaux portraying the life of ST...
...His style, however, is nothing short of atrocious...
...Rosie scornfully refuses to use the child as a tool of vengeance: Sid is not worth it...
...The writer of "The Catholic Church and Philoso- Ill hy" attempts to discharge part of his own debt to them hy seek- [~ g to give some of his own unquenchable hope to men whom the II niversities--if we may believe the reports current in America Ill nd England and Scotland--have filled with despair...
...Selected Poems, by Chaim Nachman Bialik...
...The long poem, The Dead of the Wilderness, contains many passages of descriptive power and lugubrious beauty...
...Belloc the fullest measure of his anathema...
...But this is not sufficient to explain the biography...
...MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 212 Summer Street Boston, Mass...
...Add ten cents for postc~e...
...We have attempted to reform our stage by the creation of white lists and recom-mendations of wholesome activities...
...The present-day artist (or should one say pseudo-artist) and his present-day admirer are alike exposed in their hypocrisy...
...The question seems to draw back into remoter history than the immediate today...
...44 Blackburn Road, Phone Summit 1804 ACADEMY of the SACRED HEARTS FALL RIVER, MASSACHUShl"z~ Boartding and Dw# School Jot G/rls Affdiated with the Catholic University, Washington, D. C. Conducted b,i the Religious ot the Hol...
...and when his brother Sid meanly advantages her while she is drunk, and boasts, she faces down his truth with her gallant lie...
...Board and mealJ moderate...
...The swing of the prose halts one into reading aloud even in such utter nonsense as the treatise on the death of the novel...
...How did it come about that the meeting of these two men should have resulted in one of the literary masterpieces of the world ? Johnson was a great man whose inner qualities never succeeded, save in the single instance of the brief Letter to Chesterfield, in permeating his too heavily learned style...
...Ernie Parker she inclines to out of a vague soub sympathy...
...Charlie Morse, but who is "one of the charter members of The Woman Speaks Club--one of the basic ideas of which is that all women should keep their maiden names, married, divorced or single...
...This work he did produce...
...The section devoted to the Meredithian concept of nature and man is illuminating and convincing...
...Instead, she drowns her wretched babe: "There y' are, Pool...
...The object of the course is not to make necessary work easy, but to make hard work in- teresting...
...The enthusiasm of his followers is hardly war- ranted by these versions in English, of the gloomy, dithyrambic lamentations of oriental woe in which there is so little promise of salvation or hope...
...We have seen several generations of slackening reverence for traditions...
...Belloc's philosophy, and from them spring both his economic and aesthetic creeds...
...The B.B.G...
...The American home has ever been the fountainhead of morality, the sanctuary of youthful innocence...
...And yet many of the essays in this volume are a delight from the standpoint of sheer writing...
...There should be a black list, bravely pre- sented in the face of the evil: a definite pledge from decent people and decent organizations that they will not spend money upon the listed books, plays or dances that offend the board and the not intolerant standards of propriety...
...Little boys and girls, after a course in observation (somewhat like the game played by Kim in Lurgan Sahib's shop) are able, first to see a thing, which is educational, and then to reproduce its outline on paper, which is a genuine form of self-expression...
...The result has been successful in some ways, in the regularization of vice which for the most part has merely changed its direction, so that if not good at least the average wrong-doer is more careful...
...p ROFESSOR LEGOUIS'S interesting little book of comment makes no pretense at being a complete discussion of a great Elizabethan who, it seems, is returning to favor...
...So long as we have large audiences for filthy plays, vast populaees for salacious films, public shops and public libraries bulging with the questionable literatures of Europe, Asia, Africa and our own United States, just so long shall we have purveyors, and just so long supply and demand will continue to meet and confabulate...
...Rosie stands out as a soul which finds itself, in a spiritualization which, albeit purely pagan, is a spiritualization none the less...
...Unhampered by conventions, untroubled by rules, they draw what they think they see...
...Almost as ably he decides that the moral content of the Fae- rie Queene is of no consequence, because the philosophical ideas expressed are trite and never very deeply fathomed...
...These exposes are never heavy-handed takings-to-task...
...we have seen the primitive l Fifth Volume in The Calvert Series li The Catholic Church and Philosophy IllI[ By FR...
...Decimals to three places) ." Mr...
...Chase-Lyon...
...2.50...
...MARY KOLARS...
...Belloc's scorn for the superficiality of modern educa- tion and modern culture permeates the entire volume...
...New York: Charles 8cribner's 8ons...
...It is pantheistic mysticism developed in the Talmudic schools, and the refrain--"Oi, Oi, omar Rabba, omar Abbaya Thus Rabba said, and thus Abbaya taught"--runs through it reiteratively...
...by Anthony Bertram...
...Then a long passage of brilliant description is quoted in which Johnson utters only two colorless phrases, and their account closes with an excellent char- it down here, as I have said, without any softening in the in- terest of either artistic credibility or the quality of mercy...
...If," he said, in effect, "you want nice shading, delicate bal- ance, a fine regard for rightness of expression, go to the play about the modern poor written by the modern artistic realist...
...There are so few good books about George Meredith that the English Men of Letters volume, by J. B. Priestley, ought to be welcome...
...The wide world is the plaything of the child...
...Rosie Betts, the belle of Rotherhithe, has gullioned her way to provocative slum girlhood only to hold at bay the eager boys who yearn to conquer her in the flesh...
...The old French and Italian fathers and mothers understood these conditions: they kept their children properly guarded in their homes...
...It is time that the critical depredation of Boswell which has been accepted for over a century should be abandoned...
...George Meredith, by J. B. PHestley...
...We should learn and follow the practice of the old chemists and pharma- cists and mark the poisons dearly with the skull and cross-bones, and forbid the children to play with them under any excuse of art, freedom, enlightenment, experience, or what is sometimes called "education...
...T HERE can be no question that the problems presented on our stage, in the public films, and on the publishers' lists are such as may well cause serious concern among educators and guardians of morals and decorum...
...Sid, maddened to see the one truth he has told in life scorn- fully overborne by her falsehood, finally confronts her before the other boys with proof positive, only to go down in defeat once more when she tells how shamefully he got the better of her, and to fall into disrepute and hopeless sottishness...
...It is true that Miss Walker's transcriptions of the Chase-Lyon dialogues have, all of them, that suggestion of ex- aggeration and excess which we associate with caricature...
...But per- haps one cannot judge this aspect of Spenser properly unless one can do either of two things: realize the moral content of the greater poems as directly applicable to oneself, or grasp the practical inferences which the poet thought would be con-veyed by his allegory...
...but so are the originals...
...It weren't no use to anyone, an' its life 'ud a bin 'ell...
...Similarly, it would be pos- sible to portray Mrs...
...Ernie, whom she has come to love, has married...
...its loftiest spir- MONWEAL February 2, I927 a itual indulgence, the cinema--is revealed with an intense, mov- ingly sincere realism...
...Miss Walker's dialogues are caricatures...
...I.~5...
...curtailed their theatrical ad- venturings, and their unrestricted browsings in the poison-ivy glades of what is so easily called literature...
...and in view of the fact that it probably never will be solved, at least for the aver- age reader, we shall very likely be wise if we simply accept the poem (with our critic) as one of the most remarkable pageants ever created in the form of verse...
...The Pool...
...She has no higher educa- tional ambitions...
...M. Legouis brings out very clearly the essential duality which so many readers, surprisingly enough, miss altogether--the op-position in the poet of passion and moral restraint, of a Catholic love of beauty with a Puritan doctrinaire's sombre righteousness...
...Now that English criticism has really improved its method, it ought not to make a whole- sale concession of its manners...
...Details have no place in his mind...
...Socrates was one greater than Johnson and he also revealed himself only in his life and conversation, yet this did not make the Memorabilia of his disciple Xenophon a masterpiece...
...But through the kaleidoscopic scenes and the multifarious interests, and through all the battledore and shuttlecock of the sublime and the ridiculous, there run two constant underly- ing themes...
...In short, they recognized a spade for a spade and called it so...
...But when I read: "Teachers should not attempt to teach light and shade according to cause and effect until they have thoroughly dramatized the new point of view in their own minds," I ieel a little sorry for the teacher...
...edited by Arnold Glover, with an introduction by Austin Dobson...
...Boswell's character has been the favorite butt of historians and critics...
...Chase-Lyon and her ineffable guests with a more restrained artistry than Miss Walker employs...
...and if the results are always rude and sometimes fantastic, they have in them an element of life...
...Its merits are his merits...
...Criminal Obscenity, by John Ford...
...and the legislative efforts of Justice John Ford and his associates merit the due ap-predation and sympathy of decent folk of any age and condi- tion...
...Short Talks with the Dead is a book to be read, not reviewed...
...Learning, sagacity, and gen- uine artistic sensibility are all reflected in M. Legouis's book, which has the added merit of an attractive style...
...These organized beggars, mostly falling under the head of those who won't rather than of those who can't see, are sucked dry by those "higher up...
...One looks in vain for the original note or the creative phrase, passage or allusion...
...Union ot theS,wted He,~ts ROMI3 The~ Reli~ious also conduct an Establishment in Rome...
...Price, $2.50...
...THOMAS WALSH...
...But she takes Bert, a young prize-fighter, for a hus- band-her drowning the child makes no difference to him-- since he is willing to let her remain captain of her soul, and take what she chooses to give...
...FREDERICK H. MARTENS...
...Chase-Lyon's board...
...One may go even farther and point out that the greatest literary figure in eighteenth- century England was not a really great writer at all...
...The most interesting pages of the book deal with the ele- ments of color...
...Here is distilled the very essence of Mr...
...The poem, The MaR- mid, is" a study of a mysterious type of Hebrew ascetic that seems strangely rare in America...
...qualities of fine peasant stock from Europe shattered and de- stroyed in the intermediate disorders of the Americanization of their children, that first American generation which has given so large a count in our criminal records...
...2.00...
...Although children like to draw alad to paint, to illustrate what they conceive to be stories with what they conceive to be pictures, to compare results and to laugh at failures, Mr...
...but that would be to depart, in precisely that degree, from the fan-tastic, excessive, gorgeously silly effect these people really pro- duce...
...Belloe as brilliantly as he writes about the subjects he selects, is precluded by the literary limitations of the reviewer...
...r.25...
...Thus far Mr...
...stand for Blind Beggars' Guild, a corporation founded by a cannily mean-minded Londoner to put mendicancy on its feet--to make of it a profitable "big business" instead of letting it waste its enormous financial possibilities in mere private enterprise...
...Throughout The Pool is the black, turgid backwater of this well-written and convincing drama of the festering life of civilized primitives...
...Compared to the daily torture of working out a sum on the blackboard, it must seem like the sport of angels...
...GL~Ys G~HAr...
...indeed, they are to him appreciable values at all only in so far as they reflect some first cause...
...B.B.G...
...With them, also, come their standards in morals, ethics, their practices in sex life and physical promis- cuities...
...This is true of everything which the child learns...
...After all, Boswell, not Johnson, wrote the biography...
...They encounter here in America a system of schooling that concerns itself with their brains--in an amateur sort of way--and neglects character, religion and all deep-seated moral education in the name of liberalism, materialism, and sucoess...
...Irrelevant also is the fact that he produced no other work of importance...
...The cat's legs may be imperfectly connected with its body...
...A largeM "e~ats in odem bmutifuUy situalx.d on tha Via Salaria...
...T HE arrival in America of the much heralded poet, Bailik, has been followed by the publication in English of his Selected Poems...
...To say casually: "Although a thorougk training is necessary for supervisors and normal teachers of the Woodbury course in observation, the usual grade teacher who has a good working knowledge of educational psychology should be able to teach the course under careful supervision," is to infer that the aver- age instructor has a working knowledge of educational psy-chology...
...and though one may not always agree with the estimate placed on the novels, what is said concerning them seems generally reasonable and im-personal...
...Chesterton once rendered to the putative critics of the old Adelphi melodrama...
...The latter circumstance need not be fingered over, since it is unlikely that even the most compassionate reader would feel that cases of this sort call for mercy...
...New York: The New Palestine...
...Belloc's magic, stagger the critic with their impossibility of generalization...
...and the other, to deal exclusively in very long quotations from the book itself, is precluded by the editorial limitations of space...
...We are enlightened, perhaps, in the lines : "Of, tanu rebanan--till forty years The great Akiba was an empty vessel, A shepherd ignorant, and he became, Through study of the Torah, like a banner Unto his people--and I am yet a boy, 0 God, I pray Thee, take me as I ask, Take all Thou wilt, my body and its blood, For I am vowed to Thee and to Thy Torah, For her my lips will move, for her my voice Will never fail, and for her sake I stand Firm rooted to my place and move not hence...
...but with the stopping-off places he has no concern...
...He can follow the march of manhood along the great highways...
...John-son's poems are admittedly academic and imitative...
...He was more real than any other in his generation...
...2.00...
...8penser, by Emile Legouis...
...Belloc's attitude toward life and letters in a memorable sentence...
...Y. C...
...Play palls on all children, and palls soonest when it is superinduced...
...but gets a general color reaction unhampered by lesser things...
...PAUL CROWLEY...
...There are well-paid teachers in private schools, graduates of good colleges, who know everything under the sun except the children whom they teach...
...is a merciless and amusing excursion in this field...
...Here we reach the spirit of all childhood, which moves freely in a rainbow-tinted world, delighting in a box of paints rather than in a box of pencils...
...The very range of topic and shifting humor of viewpoint, which are essential elements in Mr...
...11 p~,., ~1.oo II At your bookstore or [rom [I THE MACMILLAN COMPANY I! Y. I URSULINE ACADEMY ~ud Conemmme (tarot 14Jgtlk Stroot), Hew Yem~k PRIVATs SCHOOL FOR GIRLS Re.ldent and D~y Pu~ Be~ admittod to tim KI~tm7 Desmrtm~ts C/umuw~l b7 sk,, U,,~era/t~ M 0~ S~#e Gf Net }'~l A SCHOOL FOR GIRLS OAK KNOLL School of the Holy Child AN ELEM~ARY and COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL IIUMMIT, N.J...
...AGNES REPPLIER...
...Compared to a spell- ing lesson, it must be unalloyed enjoyment...
...His at- tention is directed first to the character of the poet, and sec-ondly to the beauties and faults of what the poet accomplished...
...Walter Bagehot points out that a boy studying history sees it as a whole, or he does not see it at all...
...Rosidont and Day Pupils Camp,~ of 12 Aorta o~, O~ of Ssmsmit's Higt~st Points Rogemont College at Rosemom, Pa., St...
...Its qualities were qualities of none other than James Boswell himself...
...Henry Longan Stuart has caught Mr...
...but if you are looking for cheerful reading, beware of A Chinese Litany of Odd Numbers...
...It seems to me nobody has stated more succinctly and discrim- inatingly the things that matter about Spenser as a man...
...The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell...
...The authors of The Art of Seeing are of the opinion that one half-hour a day would be well spent in teaching children to draw from memory the outlines of objects which they have carefully scrutinized...
...T HE slum streets of The Pool fester below Limehouse, and Anthony Bertram has Burked them in their homely cockney viciousness, without the additional taint of Chinese vice...
...He says, "Literary values, one is aware, are not, by now, first values with Mr...
...Obviously, he should be enjoyed at first hand...
...We have seen, also, the change in the complexion of our immigration when the semi-barbarian races of the South and East are canvassed from birth for the great crossing-over, which is to mean for them a prosperity, wealth and position to which their ancestors never even aspired at home...
...I say "she" because the he's are too few to count...
...She bears her deformed and defective babe in secret, fiercely resolving to bring it up to murder its father...
...It follows the official schema of the series, compressing the biographical data into a couple of chapters and going on then to discuss the nature and significance of Mere- dithian ideas, narrative, and style...
...tt][T IS a truism, but none the less true for all that, that ! Samuel Johnson is more vivid to us in a book written by another man than in any of the books that he wrote himself...
...Ladies visiting Rome (an be conveniently accommodated...
...Belloc's bitter brew...
...It would be difficult to quarrel with the temper of Mr...
...New :York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...G. K. Chesterton...
...Fleming H. Revell...
...What can be done with an author who slips out of every classification before the ink is dry on the paper...
...And, if he does, he will meet there, too, Miss Georgette Soule, who is really Mrs...
...Three volumes, $IO.OO...
...But it is worth while pausing to make a point in regard to what I have called artistic credibility...
...Chase-Lyon, dedicated to the intellectuals, and blandly resolved to do her duty to civilization by becoming "intime with the more repre-sentative ones"-- though she does administer the side caution to her niece, "Of course you must be careful not to grow too intime with them...
...she is good only in a technically physical sense, hut an individual independence of spirit and a pride which brooks no superior are ideals she defends in the foul idiom of her habitat...
...The final paragraph must be quoted here: "Today, apart from the grand master, the wardens, the district inspectors, the local inspectors, checkers, accountants and the rest, no less than 7,532 members of the Blind Beggars' Guild now stand upon the rolls, and there has recently been added, standing between the magnificent inquiry wing of the general office and the employers' lounge, a department which occupies itself with all the legitimate branches of banking, in- eluding, as a special feature, operations in the foreign ex-changes...
...VINCENT McNABB, O. [I We who have escaped the pitfalls of our day--even the fol-]ll wers of Jesus of Nazareth--are all in debt to Socrates, Plato, I| d Aristotle...
...Frideswide's at Oxford and finishing schools in Paris, Rome and Freibourg, are also under the supervision of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus...
...It does not seem that this is effort enough...
...Such incidentals as dates, boundary lines, and languages belong to the dry-as-dust educational period...
...He does not see minor grad- ations...
...The inadequacies of James Boswell are even more striking...
...Woodbury and Mrs...
...The Lives of the Poets, admirable as they are, if compared with the work of Sainte-Beuve or Francesco de Sanctis show that Johnson never attained the creative level even in his chosen field of literary criticism...
...The turkey bears a general resemblance to the Rock of Gibraltar, but nevertheless it struts...
...Priestley's criticism, particularly if one lingers a little over fine passages like that commenting upon Harry Richmond...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...I am glad that the picture of the lobster is not reproduced...
...A lobster pre- sents such a painfully complicated outline that the mere thought of drawing one fills the heart of the reader--who is not an artist--with dismay...
...But I cannot help thinking that a good deal of sprightly intelligence is demanded of the very tired, and probably not very sprightly or intelligent teacher...
...Priestley has diligently examined several myths and managed to explode them: his Meredith is considerably and surprisingly like Edmund Spen-ser--a man whose social desires were vastly different from and superior to his origins, a devotee of diction for its own sake, a moralizer through the mask of allegory...
...The only reply which can be made, I think, if this is put into the form of an objection, is the reply which Mr...
...To face these conditions, certain bodies of our citizens rep- resenting the moral, religious elements in our civic-uplift work, have long been engaged in study, conference, protest, and at-tack...
...And he will meet Mrs...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 13
