Books
Anderson, Waiter V. & McGowan, R. A. & Maynard, Theodore & Walsh, Thomas & Martens, Frederick H. & Paulding, Gouverneur & Vernon, Grenville & Shuster, George N.
386 THE COMMONWEAL February 9, I9~7 BOOKS Political and Industrial Democracy: x776-I9a6, by H/. Jett Lauck. New York: Funk and ICagnalls Company. $2.oo. ETT LAUCK does not write of...
...Most of them he excludes as examples of industrial autocracy even though often animated by a mild benevolence...
...HEN Mr...
...McG0wAN...
...I wish as much could honestly be said for Representative Catholic Essays, but it is an utterly mid-Victorian collection...
...After describing it along with numerous other plans including unionmanagement co6peration, and the Nash, Dutchess Bleachery, and Filene Plans as well as others that fall definitely outside of his idea of industrial democracy, he returns to it and measures it against certain requirements of industrial democracy which he has already explained...
...Why there should be twelve pages of Father Abram Ryan and not a single line from Brownson is more than I can understand...
...original, to say the least, and with as muck useless information as a telephone directory...
...3.oo...
...But most other people will agree with the main outlines of its thesis...
...Possibly the Catholic searcher for industrial justice and equity will like the book most of all, although he, too, will find points to add or substract...
...Once, and once only, up to that time had he completely succeeded, and that was in his marvelous short story, I'm a Fool...
...The Catkolic Tradition in English...
...Newman's views on the point have never been successfully disputed and it is too late to begin the refutation now...
...let us, likewise, be irreverent enough to divert ourselves by contemplating the indiscretions of the great...
...but somehow they are not quite so interesting as they once were...
...of the collecting of new capital by direct sale of securities to customers so as to avoid the investment bankers...
...Industrial democracy has been the theme of many a book...
...Gemma Caelestis: Breviary Hymns in Honor of Saint Benedict, edited by Reverend Matthew BHtt, O. 8. B. Beatty, Pennsylvania: The Archabbey Press...
...Industrial democracy is held up as the means the industrialized people of the United States must adopt to gain for themselves the equal opportunity which the early American self-ruling farmer-democrat enjoyed when a continent of free land lay before him...
...On the way she perished 388 THE COMMONWEAL February 9, I927 philosophy, and indeed the basis of all his later writings, in his profound and unmitigated sensuality, even his partisanship of Dreyfus being due largely to his intrigue with Madame de Caillavet, a Jewess, and to the fact that the Catholic party was found in the other camp...
...x.75...
...That one should proudly call attention to Catholic letters goes without saying...
...We may pass over the na'ivet6 of Sherwood Anderson's Notebook, published last year...
...The price of each volume is now eighty cents...
...Representative Catholic Essays, edited by Georce Carver and Ellen M. Geyer...
...of their practical control of the company through the ownership of a great deal of the voting stock...
...It has been argued that France himself made no bones about his sensuality, and therefore it ought to be accepted at once, but the fact of the matter is, as Prolessor Cerf points out, that sensuality which is unrestrained is the mother of a whole line of other vices which cannot fail to impair the artistic importance of any writer...
...Aurner's story of Caxton's beginnings is summed up in a probable birth-year in London in I42I, and a discarding of the portraits that have been accepted as his without proper authority...
...Aurner brings a wealth of illustrative matter to present the culture as well as the historical events of Caxton's lifetime: its keen interest in the fables of antiquity...
...With this same qualification he praises the method of choosing the employee representatives who deal with the management and their control of their organization funds...
...That all men should enjoy approximately equal opportunity is the traditional idea underlying political democracy, and this is Mr...
...Because the era dealt with is, then, essentially that of the diaspora, it is hard to see how rigid tests of orthodoxy can be successfully employed...
...Mr...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...If this be representative Catholic thought, then all of us have been asleep for twenty-five years...
...This chivalrous gentleman, famous for his joustings and pilgrimages, collected and translated books from the continent, and gave his works for printing to the care of Caxton: they range from Les dits moraux de philosophes, and Christyne, and Cordyale, to "diverse balades ayenst the seven dedely synnes," and were printed before 1479...
...There were other famous authors on the Caxton list: Gower, with his C0nfessio Amantis and the Pilgrimage of the Soul...
...At the price---$2.5o each--the novels of Leonard Merrick are, in their present format, a very good literary investment...
...Lauck himself quotes very early in his text...
...Picturesquely written, the book should stimulate the general reader's interest in history as a whole...
...The words, "It is the dream of my heart's sorrow shaped in marble," used by Shah Jehan, are neither more nor less apocryphal than "Let me be buried beside my wife in the Taj-Mahal," and they are more poetic...
...HIS is a curious hybrid...
...Added to this the fact that he has a style at once graceful and epigrammatic, he is a man who ought to prove a force in a future not far away...
...The true interest, at least for us Americans, lies in the fact that here is a new critic who has the qualities in which American criticism is at present notoriously lacking--balance, seriousness of purpose, a willingness to burrow deep and avoid the merely facile, a wide knowledge not only of contemporary, but of past literature...
...Jules Verne's two absorbing romances, Five Weeks in a Balloon and Around the World in Eighty Days, bound together in one neat volume...
...W. J. Locke, for instance, professes to see in the book entrusted to him "everywhere the firmness of outline which comes only by conviction of truth, and the light and shade which is only attained by a man who loves his craft...
...Assuming that the union controls the machinery of dealing with the employer, is organized labor willing to adopt the ideas of the Mitten Plan, and, if so, under what conditions...
...Far more typical of all she was and meant were the words spoken at one of those petits soupers at Luciennes when to Louis, rebuking her for drinking from the punch-ladle and replunging it in the bowl, she replied: "Eh bien, je veux que tout le monde boive mon crachat !" Yet, though in various other instances, as in the case of Francis I, we feel his "Woman is changeable" would have been far more characteristic than his "All is lost save honor," since he very definitely lost his honor not long after Pavia by breaking his word, all in all the author must be praised for a breadth of choice which often rises from battle's earthy word of power to the higher phrases of spiritual inspiration...
...Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, a selection, well edited by E. H. Blakeney, of essays dealing with important and thrilling explorations...
...the first and second editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (I478q484...
...The eleven selections include hymns as ancient as those of Saint Damian (Ioo7qo7u) and Peter the Venerable of Cluny (IO721156...
...the invocation from Saint Francls's sermon to the birds...
...Hadley's selection from the Letters of William Cowper groups the most interesting among the epistles of a charming man...
...and "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer...
...Blom attempts to answer this question with his book...
...by Eric Blom...
...sh writing on music, I found myself studying the writer .ather than the subject of his monograph, so awkward, so ~mingly unnatural is the flow of their views...
...It is the anthologist's business to determine what he shall put into his limited space, and his good fortune if he pleases others than himself...
...Constantine's apostrophe to the Cross...
...THE purpose of this little book, as the editor declares, is to popularize the liturgical hymns in honor of Saint Benedict...
...No doubt, Professor Carver's book will please many...
...M O N W E AL February 9, I927 Dr...
...He praises it for being ready to so deal when the employees agree upon a union to represent them...
...The series of introductions which accompany the present issue shower praise over most illustrious signatures...
...To the equally extreme upholder of industrial autocracy, it is, equally of course, anathema...
...and numerous Latin works of religious doctrine and devotion...
...New York: Boni and Liveright...
...Lauck's thesis and the main thesis of the Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction which Mr...
...The same editor's Horace Walpole's Letters offers in an excellent, low-priced form the comment of a brilliant statesman and romantic author upon events and persons of the day...
...When he has obtained the former, the latter will undoubtedly follow...
...He condemns the Mitten Plan for not being based upon collective bargaining with a standard labor-union...
...This fairly bristles with apology: having read the book, can pass on the information that it (the apology, not the book) was not uncalled for...
...Perhaps no other novelist of our time has been so highly praised by his fellows...
...New York: Doubleday, Page and Company...
...and Charles Kingsley's Madam How and Lady Why, a series of lessons on natural history for the benefit of children...
...Since a Story-Teller's Story, however, Mr...
...Blom's interests are wearying, sometimes as obviously affected as is the pedantic cloak he occasionally hurries into to disguise the essentially dilettant~a turn of his mind...
...Blom would lose some of tlk~ "literary sophistica39 ~ T H E C O M if presented in the exquisite literate stylization of a miniaturist suck as Marcel Sckwob, for example...
...To say that Pope's Essay on Man is Catholic (when as a matter of fact it is more than a little deistic) and then to proceed to admit that Ruskin never had a Catholic thing to declare, is to make a distinction that in pracrice remains impossible...
...The wage scale he considers adequate for conductors and motormen, but not for those lower than they...
...To show Du Barry's triumph over royalty in the shape of Louis XV of France we have the phrase, at her court presentation, "You have lost your wager, Sire...
...As he writes in his introduction : "Let us do justice to the minor artist, and allow him to please us, if he can...
...The trade-unionist of the newer school will strain at the higl~ praise given the Philadelphia Mitten Plan even though the failure to deal with the union is condemned...
...Time alone wiU set his place, whether it is to be among the immortals or the dilettantes...
...But all such details are best left out of court...
...Textual difficulties seem to have precluded reprints from pre-Chaucerian poetry and prose--an omission that may be regretted but which could not easily be remedied...
...Tar, by Sherwood ~nderson...
...For the rest he has nothing but praise and herein, along with union recognition, are found the main lines of his idea...
...6.00...
...Within the limits of a basic wage he praises the method of modifying money wages in accord with changes in the cost of living...
...Dr...
...of employees purchasing common stock with their share of the profits...
...of the division between them of part of the money so gained after capital stock receives dividends...
...The novels o[ Leonard Merrick in the uniform edition published by E. P. Dutton and Company, will undoubtedly appeal to the large number of readers who have enjoyed the work of this master craftsman...
...More than half of the volume is given over to a description of present-day approaches to industrial democracy in particular concerns and to an analysis of these plans in relation to the author's conception of industrial democracy...
...Precisely because there is a difference between an author and his work, between the sins of Verlaine and the poetry of Verlaine, it seems to me that many of the best evidences of a living Catholic tradition in English letters have been omitted from this book...
...The dates in the subtitle set the action in a familiar scene, and the emphasis upon industrial democracy in relation to political democracy hints at once at the theme and the tempo...
...One would like also to see a consideration of the practical possibilities of turning employee representation plans, including the Mitten one, into the stream of the organized labor movement...
...e.5o...
...We all know that every recognized work of art represents but the peak of innumerable and forgotten works of less or no value, all of which sought to express what is consummated in the chrysalis: to what purpose, then, could they be brought to light...
...To the communist this book is, of course, anathema...
...We have Sainte Jeanne d'Arc's triumphant "My voices truly come from heaven...
...the efforts for spiritual edification through the lives of the saints...
...the pioneer teachings of science and scholarship, law and poetry...
...its love of the contemplative life...
...it is instructive to follow Cherubini, Roussel, Delius, Strauss, or Bartok into one particular field of their art in which they may or may not be at home, or to observe Arnold Bax unloekin~ the rusty padlocks of a gate leading into one that has long lain fallow...
...One cannot praise too highly the service rendered by Everyman's Library in placing good books, not easily obtainable elsewhere, at the disposal of all...
...By a long way the most powerful part of the book is the thirteenth chapter...
...Other volumes are: Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, a famous emancipator...
...He, moreover, relies greatly upon practical experimentation and upon the growth of industrial democracy through the force of successful examples...
...and the admission that "we do not know what the wager was...
...Jett Lauck...
...As with so much contemporary Bni...
...The half-tones of famous paintings add to its attractiveness...
...of their representation upon the directorate...
...Dark Laughter was, to be sure, not positively silly in the manner of Many Marriages, but it was equally humorless in its factitious sexuality, and even, at its crisis, less convincing...
...Lauck says nothing of the American Federation of Labor's manifesto of I923, Industry's Manifest Duty, or of the place occupied by labor's co6perative banks, insurance companies, and investment companies in the gradual trend toward industrial democracy...
...ETT LAUCK does not write of Mars...
...Anderson has suffered a relapse...
...of their holding of this stock through their own trustees so as to unite its strength...
...and it is useful to discover the causes of the rapid downfall of a Serov, or of the neglect of a work like Elgar's Falstaff...
...Even the socialist, now that he has overturned his old landmarks of an intransigent class war and universal common ownership will find much to admire in it...
...Caxton, by Nelle 81ayton Aurner...
...GEOROE N. SHUSTER...
...Strangely, Mr...
...Anderson was chiefly concerned with his own literary development and with his own ideas...
...its morals and manners...
...r.8o...
...About these he said rn~ny striking things and managed--thougk the book had a wider range than Tar-to draw order, and beauty at times, out of the chaos of his plan...
...but it is also agreeable to see Liszt discarding all shallow mannerism when he sets out to give us of his best in a work which few care to know...
...FREDI/RICK H. MARTENS...
...Lauck approaches it, however, with the supposition that it includes the right of property ownership...
...They have done everything to make these exceptionally well-printed and attractively bound volumes worthy of their status as a "definitive" edition...
...Professor Cerf believes, and many of us believe with him, that it will be among the latter, and in that belief he has written a study at once scholarly and brilliantly expressed...
...Lauck's general standard for sound relations in industry...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...His attitude toward the Mitten Plan of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company is the touchstone of his theory...
...Again his genial shiftless Southern father, his kindly Italian mother, and his brothers appear...
...Anderson published A Story-Teller's Story W a couple of years ago, I, for one, believed that he had at last escaped from adolescence and was about to accomplish what he so often seemed to be on the very verge of doing...
...Literary fadl[y'seems to be more prized by British music criticism in g~ieral than that abiding and beautiful instinct of their Gall~ neighbors: lucidity...
...GRENVILLE VERNON...
...Tar, which bears the subtitle of A Midwest Childhood, is another autobiography, and a much less successful one than A Story-Teller's Story...
...It is amusing to watch the youthful Rossini fumbling with a medium that does not suit him, or Samuel Butler dabbling in one not properly his own...
...The position which Anatde France is to occupy in the history of the world's literature will not, of course, be affected by the books which any man or group off men may write upon the subject...
...It is one thing to give people "something helpful to read": it is another to offer a book which presumes to characterize achievement in the essay form...
...Everyman's Library (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company) includes in recent editions two volumes of biography that will be welcomed by every student of English letters...
...The English versions have been made by such fine stylists as Alan McDougall and Father Caswall, ensuring the high standard and literary quality of the collection as a whole...
...It is a story of an old woman who was going home, accompanied by her dogs, and carrying a piece of salt pork, a piece of liver, some dog meat and some soup bones...
...It is only another instance of an artist who is uncertain about his own method trying to find his range by commenting upon the art of other people...
...Literature, edited by Georce Carver...
...What he still needs to attain is a somewhat less diffuse presentation of his facts and a greater climatic power...
...Critically it should also be added that there is plenty of room to quarrel with the selections...
...Chief among Caxton's patrons was Lord Rivers, the brother of Edward IV's queen: he is described in The Secret History of Burgundy as "the handsomest man living," and Sir Thomas More speaks of him as "a right honorable man, as valiante of hand as politik in counsayle...
...But those vcho are impressed with Thompson's Shelley can hardly overlook altogether the fact that he read Shelley...
...Nor would one be wide of the mark in venturing the estimate that there are as many step- and illegitimate children of music (minor or neglected works of famous composers) as there are names in the local 'phone directory...
...it is wholesome to witness the tragedy of explorers like Chabrier and Pedrell, who were broken, the one.~ misunderstanding, and the other by a strenuousness of labor that defeated its own ends...
...And is the smug cynicism of a Barnum, 'TII believe in the mermaid and I'll hire it" fit company for Nathan Hale's "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country...
...THOMAS WALSH...
...and the profound influences of French romance...
...It is remarkable how close a similarity there is between Mr...
...It is not all: "Up Guards, and at 'era...
...Stepchildren of Music...
...The early estimate of Caxton that he was an "illiterate man and of small judgment," has been met by more recent biographers (Knight, Le Roux de Line'y, Blades, and Duff) with the rebuttal that he translated from three languages--French, Latin, and Dutch--with a high degree of excellence, "an astonishingly large body of literature, much of which has proved of the greatest value even today...
...pIROFESSOR CARVER'S anthology of Catholic passages from English and American literature is about as good an indication of what riches have been accumulated as one could reasonably expect...
...of the return of the remaining profits in some form to the public...
...So, too, does the status of public ownership in relation to industrial democracy...
...There are distinguished pages, of course--names which have appeared in every kind of anthology see to that--but the total effect is as grandmotherly as a series of unctuous pamphlets...
...To return once more to the matter of choice of famous phrases, however, it seems as though here and there it might he improved upon...
...This conviction must have been shared by the publishers...
...There is still another gap...
...Working conditions and the control of welfare work, again with the qualification regarding union representation, are considered satisfactory...
...In the earlier book, Mr...
...Besides, I can't help thinking that all this endeavor to isolate relatively homiletic Catholic literature from the whole current of English expression is poor pedagogy...
...He adds, however, the recommendation that herein the management should take the initiative as did, for example, "Golden Rule" Nash...
...For him the Mitten Plan exemplifies his idea of employee-management coi~peration in economies and efficiency...
...and of their ownership of a co6perative bank...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The consumers' co6perative movement likewise deserves analysis...
...Since all the selections were obviously made for the benefit of school-children, the title is dearly a misnomer...
...VOIDING comparisons with the able works of William Blades and E. Gordon Duff, the author of this new volume devotes himself to the study of Caxton as an "author and editor: to examine the works he selected to print and, through them, to gain more knowledge of one of the least understood periods of English literature...
...If Mr...
...386 THE COMMONWEAL February 9, I9~7 BOOKS Political and Industrial Democracy: x776-I9a6, by H...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 14
