Books
C., T. & Vernon, Grenville & Shuster, George N. & Martens, Frederick H. & Brennecke, Ernest Jr. & Stuart, Henry Longan & C., R.I.
526 BOOKS The World's Debt to the Irish, by James J. Walsh. Boston: The Stratford Company. $2.50. THERE is always something a little ungrateful in self-congratulation at the benefits we derive...
...Cut off by geographical position from all chance of succor at the hands of his fellows in blood and religion, his humanistic culture smothered under centuries of economic necessity, the fairy gold of his chalices hammered into misspent gold, his native aristocracy banished abroad or underplowed into the soil while a pinchbeck generation of alien placemen seized their lands and titles, even the emergence of the Celt into nationhood in our own day does not make amends for the centuries of mischance and oppression that lie like a yawning and horrible fissure across his national story...
...The Delectable Mountains, by Struthers Burt, seems in many ways the most mature and sensitive of our noveli&tic trio...
...Incidentally, Dr...
...The Drummer of Fyvie and Other Verse, by Faith Fan, Valkenburgh Vilas...
...2.$0...
...It is no longer so clear as it once was that "the most beautiful possession of Rome is the Campagna...
...and is shipped to the volcanic rock of St...
...But the last wager with destiny has been played...
...Carlyle viewed Napoleon as a hero, as a scourge in the hands of God, whereby an insincere and drunken Europe was tamed...
...Three new novels interpret types of youth in the "jazz age" for the benefit of those in their second or third blooming, for, after all, actual youth runs rather than reads...
...Yet there are abiding qualities and things, and it is interesting to see how the aesthetic Englishman's prose renders them...
...What is apparent to Carlyle and to every other analyst of great penetrative powers, including Bonaparte himself, is that the reasons must be sought outside the man...
...Whether we think it would have been better depends largely on the view we take of the comparative demands of flesh and spirit...
...A people whose existence as a nation at all has been for centuries a standing challenge to injustice, and a standing evidence that the harder way may be the safer must not abdicate its ethical function at this late day merely because its children sit in the seats of power and learning from sea to sea...
...Mercedes decides to return to her profession and Stephen lets her go...
...I know not what I do," he wrote to his wife, "for everything depends on events...
...at thirty he is first consul and dictator of France...
...Neither of the men who created it was a genius himself, but the association of the two, a gifted dramatist with a gifted composer, gave the world an art-form that has undeniable genius...
...From another point of view, serious current interest in mediaevalism cannot neglect this finest available contemporary "document," in which humdrum antiquarian detail catches the fire of the cultural soul which inspired it, until all is securely, poetically woven about The Cross...
...His is the story of an American girl of twenty-three, no longer in life's flapper flush, and a man of thirty-four...
...Both are at variance with their social environments...
...Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical Appreciation of the Savoy Opera, by A. H. Godwin...
...Dr...
...There is more than a half truth in this statement, for Gilbert is more popular than ever today on both sides of the Atlantic, which is more than can be said for many of the major prophets of the age which once was looked upon as the rival to that of Elizabeth...
...Symons knew in his youth and the bustling "empire" presided over by Mussolini...
...In order to secure an unpolluted water supply, they were "to be built on the bank of a running stream, or with such a stream passing through the precincts...
...Godwin's opening words, a truth which may be well pondered by every librettist and composer: that light opera, to hold any permanent value, must be a product of a true wedding of words and music...
...If consumption is commoner now, the mishap is due to "the return of a number of immigrants from America," who had contracted the disease in our great cities, and were received and nursed only too hospitably and lovingly when they returned to "die on the old sod...
...The trouble with all these rationalizations is that they seek causes for the Napoleon saga in the man himself...
...Mercedes returns to the Wyoming ranch to bear Stephen's child, and there he returns to her...
...And like a majority of those who in the United States have in hand the training and education of youth, Mr...
...A first novel by a writer who is at home in her social backgrounds, the book has definite merits of form and delineation, despite occasional exaggerations of phrase...
...In the title-poem, the author has caught something of the antiquity and the hereditary gloom of the old Castle of the Fyvie—some of the mournfulness that has come down through the ages as part of the legend that surrounds it...
...Walsh, "there were two noteworthy exceptions...
...at twenty-five he is a brigadier-general...
...In his chapter on Ancient Irish Medicine, Dr...
...at twenty-nine he overwhelms Egypt...
...What, if anything, does the career of a Napoleon mean— to me...
...The Cross, by Sigrid Undset...
...Considered exclusively in relation to the circumstances which made it possible, Napoleon's life-story (that is to say, its universal essence) may be viewed as an expression or a materialization of the frightful confusion of an age of too violent and too sloppy thinking...
...giving wings to his words, and sending them soaring into the sky...
...Suffice it to record here my own opinion, given for what it is worth: Sigrid Undset's trilogy embodies more of life, seen understandingly and seriously, though unfortunately without humor, than any novel written since Dostoievsky's Brothers Karamazov...
...No event, or situation, could in itself be the tremendous finale—nothing short of death, indeed, and the vision of the soul's flight, in so far as the artist is able to divine that...
...The dramatic quality of the contact between barbarism and Rome has diverted their attention from the quiet apostolate that was working, as it were, from the rear, and relying, not upon the imposing aspects of an ancient civilization, but purely and solely upon the things of the spirit...
...Nathalie Sedgwick Colby's Green Forest—not Hudson's Mansions, but an Edenic dream-garden—the older generation shows to qualified advantage...
...As for Erlend, he, too, is relentlessly objective...
...To the Duchess of Weimar he remarked, "Believe me, there is a Providence which guides all...
...Walsh is very much on his own ground...
...It is also, very probably, the noblest work of fiction ever to have been inspired by the Catholic art of life...
...New York: Boni and Liveright...
...Again, he is a real prophet, laying the foundation for that United States of Europe which he knows will inevitably arise out of the tragic welter of his own age...
...Shirley and David (notice of whose death is cabled Shirley while on the steamer) are too good to be true...
...R. I. C. Cities of Italy, by Arthur Symons...
...Gibbs is chiefly concerned in establishing, and his characters enjoy explaining their new freedom quite as much as practising it...
...Without breaking the tie which binds them, and out of their emotional contacts with other men and women, a better understanding of the other slowly dawns in the soul of each...
...Ludwig has told the story so movingly, yet so economically and fairly, according to the documents quoted, that one can easily condone its lack of a sufficiently powerful and unified interpretation...
...In Mrs...
...Yet: "There are literally hundreds of these Irish monks remembered all over Europe, and their birthday or their death-day celebrated in places many hundreds of miles away from their homes...
...The following critique of Raphael seems rather faded these days: "His gracious saints have never, before they attained sanctity, suffered all the enlightening ardors of sin...
...The opinion of the civilized world concurs in denouncing it, and the voice of the apologist and propagandist whenever it is raised is drowned in the chorus of reprobation...
...Let it be said here that Sigrid Undset is never trapped by the most formidable snare laid in the path of novelists...
...The author does not give us a photographic group reflex of modern youth, like Gibbs...
...the secondary characters, whether merely sketched or, as in the case of Vizatelly, the friend of both husband and wife, glowingly vital, fit naturally into place...
...The precious days are given over to love, and Kristin returns to her home alone...
...She is no Lettice, whose ideals of the newer freedom of youth are grounded on fundamental decency, but a Victorian prude whose modern surface mannerisms overlie a nature cheap, egotistic, and vulgar...
...Their love is not comparable with deaths—it is stronger than life...
...He makes convincingly clear that virtue, in a basic sense, is never out of date, and—something worth heeding at a time when women of character as well as mere alimony-seekers are prone to cast off the tie matrimonial in petulance—that the institution of marriage is greater than the individual...
...His young anarchists are not really disintegrating morally...
...Godwin's book is of value in elaborating this theme, and if his writing is at times naif it has at least the engaging freshness of youthful enthusiasm...
...is drawn so finely that the craftsmen in the modern time find it practically impossible to use pure gold wire in this way because when they try to solder it it melts in the midst of the necessary manipulations...
...A handmaiden of God had she been—a wayward, unruly servant, slothful and neglectful, impatient under correction, but little constant in her deeds—yet had He held her fast in His service, and under a glittering golden ring a mark had been set secretly upon her, showing that she was His handmaid, owned by the Lord and King Who was now coming to give her freedom and salvation...
...But this, God's unfathomable training-school, had not yet done with her...
...Here is the real Chesterton engaged in expressing himself on a subject made for him as for no other living writer of English...
...I am merely its instrument...
...Gibbs, developing his love-story, concludes that the younger generation's cynical bark is worse than its bite...
...Chesterton, "the Victorian monument which best supports and survives the change of fashion, is not the laureate ode and office any more than the Albert Memorial: it is all that remains of the Savoy Opera...
...Consider this breathless and monstrous career: an obscure Corsican is a lieutenant of artillery in the French Republican army at the age of twenty-two...
...The tale of the Irish nation and the Irish race is one of the most tragic history has to tell...
...Walsh corrects the prevailing impression, largely due to Lady Aberdeen's well-intentioned activities, that tuberculosis is indigenous to Irish soil...
...Helena, where he spends the last six years of his life in an agony of loneliness and squalor...
...The monument to Vittorio Eman-uele is a "hulking parvenu" for whom there is no excuse...
...The gold wire...
...Ernest Brennecke, Jr...
...What is he to make of it all...
...The author writes with honesty, warmth and, on occasion, a depth and appeal...
...As we read through the evidence which Dr...
...This is well and truly said...
...It is doubtful whether by itself it would ever have been completely popular...
...But Ludwig's interpretation falls far behind Carlyle's in coherency and compulsion...
...Further on he says: "His satire was really much too intelligent to be intelligible...
...Events pass swiftly...
...2.00...
...with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton...
...Walsh's erudition in preceding chapters prepared us for it, that we hear of such things as trepanning, clinics, hydropathic treatment, graduated fees, and regulations against the unlicensed practice of what today would be described as osteopathy...
...It is inevitable that a woman of her kind should feel so...
...Padraic Colum, which Dr...
...The New York, Philadelphian, and western ambients are convincing...
...IN A WORLD where human seniors loom as impotent as Grecian shades in Elysian fields, the novelist by preference holds up his mirror to youth in revolt...
...We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what...
...Thus, for himself, his life signified no more and no less than those of countless little Napoleons, earlier and later, signified for themselves as individuals...
...for one's answer to the question it implies reveals instantly one's real conception (if any) of the significance of human life...
...Millions of individuals were involved, and millions wished their fate upon themselves...
...But elsewhere the rendition is surprisingly apt and just...
...In The World's Debt to the Irish, it is significant that Dr...
...As things stand," writes Mr...
...Stephen's Philadelphian milieu is aureoled with the prestige of the only real aristocracy, in a European sense, in America—progenitors of high position in colonial days...
...One of these was in India, the other in Ireland...
...The reader must supply that himself...
...Kristin had come back to her home country, since the displeasure of the king and her husband's folly had despoiled them of the magnificent estate at Husaby...
...Napoleon, by Emil Ludwig...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...And "it seemed to her to be a mystery that she could not fathom, but which she knew most surely none the less, that God had held her fast in a covenant made for her without her knowledge by a love poured out upon her richly—and in despite of her self-will, in despite of her heavy, earth-bound spirit, somewhat of this love had become part of her, had wrought in her like sunlight in the earth, had brought forth increase which not even the hottest flames of fleshly love nor its wildest bursts of wrath could lay waste wholly...
...THE story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that produced by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine...
...An interesting chapter in Dr...
...Even when reviewed in a sober, analytical account like Ludwig's, which deliberately eschews the pseudo-glamour of military campaigns, this story leaves the reader with the sensation of having experienced a horrible nightmare—a nightmare so extraordinary and withal so vividly illuminated by infernal fires as to compel him to interpret or to rationalize it somehow...
...This optimistic point of view is what Mr...
...Suzette is so true to a certain type of selfish, hard-lacquered society young girl, that she is "good...
...at forty-three he destroys a half-million lives in an incredible invasion of Russia...
...A week's trip on an Atlantic liner suffices—the author writes with distinction and ease of manner—to establish a mother's self-sacrifice and a daughter's egotism...
...THERE is always something a little ungrateful in self-congratulation at the benefits we derive from others' suffering, no matter how much in God's design these can be shown to be...
...I have not a will of my own, but expect everything from their outcome...
...Walsh quotes, may well serve as the exordium to this latest, and perhaps best, book of this cultured physician and writer: "It is this shore, 'trod by no tropic feet,' that still holds the visions and the music and the memories of lovers and saints and rovers of an honor-keeping race— 'Brave hearts, ye never did aspire Wholly to things of earth.'" Henry Longan Stuart...
...It is with a surprise that would be greater had not Dr...
...This heyday of missionary effort abroad corresponded with an upsurge of art and culture at home that is one of the marvels of the world...
...Napoleon as a mystic agency or as a mystic force: we must choose between the two views...
...And therefore the modern age, which has so widely, in its turn, superimposed pagan sexuality upon the Christian marriage form, may see here the relentless truth and (if it will) find the lesson...
...3.00...
...The "hero's" part in this tragedy of masses then reduces itself to that of a mere tool in the hands of chance, or of God, or of both—take your choice...
...The record of English and British rule in Ireland can be compared to nothing but some secret sin in a life outwardly prosperous and seemly...
...A chance meeting, the kindling of sympathy between two natures basically fine, results in marriage...
...Green Forest, by Nathalie Sedgwick Colby...
...A REISSUE of Arthur Symons's carefully wrought meditations upon major Italian cities gives one an opportunity to see with what robustness the spirit of the lavender 'nineties can face these strenuous days...
...GODWIN'S book possesses gusto and good sense...
...The measure of English sincerity in English professions of righteousness is best judged by the measure of English repentance—or silence, when Ireland is mentioned...
...for he had few, and these were constantly changing...
...Strange as it may appear, these two exceptions occurred at the two opposite confines of the civilized world...
...To the historical rule of no hospitals," says Dr...
...Then, in a vivid scene which grips one like the last meeting of Faust and Margaret, both see through the puzzle of existence...
...It is marvelous how one senses in reading Sigrid Undset that the end is by no means at hand...
...One duty surely confronts the Irish race today...
...Historians, he shows, have failed to realize either the volume of this missionary evidence or its momentous character...
...Perhaps the best testimony to its intricacy and minute artistry is to be found in the fact that the [monograph] page is so beautiful that it has tempted many modern draftsmen to make a copy of it, but though a great many have tried they have failed almost without exception and a number of the most accomplished and most enthusiastic . . . have confessed . . . they found the Book of Kells beyond their power...
...But the real joy of the volume lies in Mr...
...Mercedes is a chorus-girl, her background the hectic one of the New York stage...
...2.00...
...It will then be seen how this implacable woman, who sought Catholic baptism through great personal suffering, has sent a dozen trifling theorists off their chairs and proved how a thing that "could not be done" was illustriously possible...
...As Thomas Hardy has phrased it in The Dynasts, Napoleon was "the brazen rod which stirs the fire—because it must...
...New York: Reader Editor, Inc...
...This was what has made the enduring significance of the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan...
...Emil Ludwig, a poetic dramatist of considerable note in Germany, inclines to the latter tendency...
...The beautiful words of Mr...
...Young Anarchy, by Philip Gibbs...
...It is singularly apt...
...Napoleon's influence on Europe is not to be explained by any far-reaching aims of his own...
...This observation of Goethe's is used as the motto for the first book of the present biography...
...George N. Shuster...
...The book is divided into three parts: Words, Wagon-Ruts, and Wine...
...translated by Eden and Cedar Paul...
...It contains none of the simpering, hackneyed lines so frequent in current poetry, but is fresh, virile, and thought-containing...
...Many of them have, indeed, been set to music...
...The poem sweeps along to a solemn but dramatic climax, making it one of the finest of modern ballads...
...She never interposes her subjective desire to have the story progress otherwise than it must...
...Something came to his aid which is more popular than the love of satire: the profound and popular love of song...
...Erlend, returning in haste to defend his wife's slandered honor, confronts her angry with his neglect and her own plight...
...despite adjustment to new life conditions which seem normal to them though revolutionary to their elders, one need not despair of them...
...He tries to ward off the blows of snarling peasants, and falls, mortally wounded...
...Possibly a consciousness of misdoing lies back of the comparative neglect of ancient Irish history by British savants and historians...
...In the light of that radiance one somehow forgets the brutal frankness of the actual circumstances of the story—the wild lusts, the intimacies of marriage, the primitive surrender to anger and jealousy, which are everywhere antecedent to remorse and the rigorous penances...
...nor a specific portrait of a modern girl not, in essence, "modern...
...The elaborateness of the decoration," Dr...
...It is a far cry, indeed, from the softly tinted restfulness of the Italy Mr...
...Walsh, in an introductory chapter, sets the keynote of his new book with a fearless assertion that the Irish race can claim to be one of the "five peoples in the world's history" who "have made supreme contributions to civilization as we have it at the present time," the others being the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans and Italians, and that their earliest and greatest contribution was the carrying of Christian light into the homelands of the barbarous peoples whose pioneers were pressing upon the Roman empire...
...He presents the "man of destiny" again, in a rapid, powerful style, reminiscent of Carlyle and Goethe...
...Perhaps, had Ireland been less true to herself, had she accepted as England and France accepted, the incursions of the Northmen, and thickened the almost magical fluidity of her civilization with their coarser and more practical integument, the history of Ireland would have been different...
...Chesterton's introduction...
...A genius of another school of art crossed his path and cooperated in his work...
...Walsh tells us that: "Over and over again those who have studied these interesting pieces of jewelry have wondered how the Irish craftsmen ever accomplished their work...
...at thirty-five he crowns himself emperor, proceeds to grasp political control of Europe from the Tagus to the Vistula, and makes kings of his brothers...
...The rest of Mr...
...at forty-six he returns, is once more emperor, is outlawed, and defeated in the ghastly armageddon of Waterloo...
...2.00...
...but the essence of what he has to say he says in the first two sentences of the book when he writes: "Gilbert and Sullivan is one of the outstanding examples of partnership genius...
...Frederick H. Martens...
...In them two men became truly one...
...at forty-five he sees his whole empire reduced to dust, and is himself banished to Elba...
...Thus Philip Gibbs, in Young Anarchy, offers a study, in the author's frankly journalistic style, of the social reflexes of London's equivalent for New York's post-war generation...
...The Delectable Mountains, by Strut hers Burt...
...Others have seen him as an illustration of the power of the mind over matter, as the radiator of a magic personal spell, angelic or diabolical, but always irresistible to individuals and masses...
...Grenvillb Vernon...
...The old Brehon laws are quoted to show us that a sounder hygiene obtained in old Irish hospitals than even those in our great cities could boast of till comparatively recently...
...But one man cannot disembowel or overthrow a continent...
...But life on Stephen's Wyoming ranch brings disillusion: two powerfully individual reserves are unable to overcome their mutual inarticulateness...
...translated by Charles Archer...
...Sigrid Undset's minutely described matrimonial situation is half pagan, half Catholic, the unregulated background showing through the benign Christian pattern as the outlines of a pagan temple may be revealed in one or the other Roman basilica...
...3.00...
...His impulses urged him to grab everything he could, and he grabbed with all his might...
...1.50...
...Walsh has amassed, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that a very precious and fine civilization was evolving itself in ancient Erin, to be crushed, in blood and tears, before it had given more than a hint of what, under happier circumstances, it might have become...
...ONE comes upon this book of verse with a feeling of refreshment, for here is beauty...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...After making every allowance for the very primitive and partial lights on the human structure accorded doctors of the past, what he tells us is not without its suggestion that a certain instinct for health has had a great deal to do with preserving the physique of the Irish race under conditions where many peoples would have deteriorated...
...The cares of an estate upon which her own free-born pride, the welfare of her children and the good name of her family depend, embitter her toward Erlend, the Viking lover who remains without an ounce of practical reason...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...It throws out various mystic motifs, drops them to take up new ones, and recurs to them again...
...Pages in this book, such as those devoted to St...
...only a continent can do that...
...The scale was prodigiously larger in his case...
...Walsh tells us, "is almost beyond belief...
...James J. Walsh, who is giving us the result of twenty-five years of investigation, has to record that "the important authorities as to the place of the Irish in the history of civilization are, above all, the German and French savants who have devoted themselves to the study of Celtic influences in the world...
...Once again, however, Erlend triumphs, as he has since the beginning...
...The historian of the novel will some day have to trace a current in fiction which runs steadily from Walter Scott through Manzoni and Sienkiewicz to Sigrid Undset...
...Kristin moves as only Kristin would, the arbiter of her destiny and never the author's plaything...
...Shirley, free at her husband's death to marry David, a faithful adorer, is dragged off by her daughter Suzette on a European trip to serve the girl's pique against Tony, the boy whose engagement ring she has returned...
...His thought generally followed after his actions, and seldom preceded and determined them...
...Peter's or to the wharves of Venice, are really vibrant and promise to abide...
...Again, he is a cold mathematician, hence dominant as the sole realist among men self-hypnotized with the unreal logic of sentimentality (as Shaw puts it, he alone realizes that if a cannon-ball hits a man, it kills him...
...Bored to death with the routine of his wife's husbandry, he takes refuge in a country place where there is hunting and freedom...
...Chesterton himself is the most doughty of the slayers of Georgian British humbug, as Gilbert was of the humbug of the Victorian age, and into the eight and a half pages of his introduction he packs a whole volume of sound common sense...
...But time had been given her to reflect upon the bitter brew she had drunk, in which were her own sins, the woes of others, the shock of disappointment, and long days of sacrifice...
...It takes up the various operas in detail, picks out the choicest morsels, and very justly apportions what is due to Sullivan and what to Gilbert...
...In these three the author presents old thoughts in a new and convincing manner to be highly commended for its originality...
...THE two earlier volumes of Sigrid Undset's trilogy were like gardens in which the girl Kristin grew to the ripe bloom of womanhood—grew through the mystical seasons of the Church, through passionate moments during which the impact of lusty blood was fierce, through hours of pain, realization, longing and despair, until her children were grouped about her and she had nothing more to learn from life...
...These poems are inherent with music, not only in rhythm, but in structure...
...About books of so much power and substance, much else might be said...
...but where all is relative, as in any individual's career, scale means nothing...
...horror was inevitable, Napoleon or no Napoleon...
...Of Irish jewelry, claimed by Sir William Wilde to be "the most gorgeous and magnificent specimens of gold-work discovered anywhere in the world," Dr...
...at twenty-seven he conquers Italy...
...After Erlend's death, Kristin solves the immediate problems of her sons' future and then retires to a convent, where she dies after having rendered arduous service on behalf of the poor...
...Among the shorter poems that stand out, are Wine, Unrequited, and Ultima Thule...
...Love that has been the whole meaning of her married life means nothing temporarily...
...As Lettice, his heroine, says: "There's no risk if the girl is decent and the boy well brought up by his sisters and girl friends...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...T. C...
...Finally Kristin goes to him, eager to plead the problem of her sons' future and to bring the husband back where he belongs...
...The Providence of God moves through this tremendous pageant of mediaeval life like a constant, steadfast undertow...
...Napoleon is now successful as the fascinating visionary, the world-weary conqueror, sighing after the manner of his favorite Ossian or the Goethe of the Sorrows of Werther...
...Florence is still "a corridor, through which the beauty and the finery of the world have passed...
...Here Chesterton reenforces the truth of Mr...
...They were provided with doors, to be left open in turn according to the prevailing wind...
...Walsh's book is that in which he gives a description of the famous Book of Kells, of which it has been well remarked that were it found isolated and unaccounted for in some tumulus, it would be quite sufficient evidence upon which to base a confident assumption of a high degree of civilization on the part of the people who could produce it...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Ably translated as it is, the book does vividly present a nightmare which reflection may possibly transfigure into a revelation...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...The "half-door," he tells us, open day and night, was the physical salvation of the Irish through years of overcrowding and undernourishment...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 19
