Books
Walsh, James J. & Eleanore, Sister M. & Edsall, Richard Linn & Walsh, Thomas & Colum, Padraic & McGinnis, William F. & Kolars, Mary
554 BOOKS King Goshawk and the Birds, by Eitnar & Duffy. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.50. THE fact that many of the newer Irish writers are apt to deal with life in harsh or in violent...
...The author calls it in large print, Preaching in Mediaeval England, and then adds in smaller print, C. 13 50-1450...
...He does one thing only—he intervenes in a war to chastise a dictator...
...he addresses our machine-civilization in terms of accusation as unmistakable as those employed in Erewhon...
...wash well in the morning...
...Boston: Houffhton Mifflin Company...
...But here, in Shoot!, one reads words like these...
...Cumston devotes an especially interesting chapter to the history of medicine in the middle-ages...
...Mary Kolars...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Of course, surgery and hospitals had sunk to their lowest ebb in modern times about seventy-five years ago...
...Eimar O'Duffy has been compared to James Stephens...
...It affords two hours' entertainment that will leave no aftermath of regret...
...The Roman Spirit, Its Religion, Thought and Art, by Albert Grenier of the University of Strasbourg...
...He has always been a plaintiff at the bar of cosmic justice, but the identity of the defendant has been obscure...
...His special contributions to the history of medicine have been valuable...
...The pillow-chat of Goshawk and Guzzelind, his queen, which opens the story, derives from the pillow-chat of Aillil and Queen Maeve in the opening of the epic-tale, The Tain Bo Cuilgne...
...such is "disease," which originally meant but slight discomfort, and now is a dread term to conjure with...
...The surprise is to find how thoroughly surgery was developed during the medieval period, in spite of the fact that Lister's discovery of antisepsis was reserved for our day...
...It is the great fault of this most entertaining book that grip is lost on the idea toward the end of the story...
...And when, at the last, he actually is sealed forever into this strange, fierce inaccessibility by a horror which paralyzes his tongue till death, it is not merely the triumph of the machine...
...It is true that this writer is not very new...
...Pity and irony make the method of French satire...
...he almost follows Erewhon in endowing it with a purposive intelligence...
...SlSTER M Eleanore...
...It was held in Rome in 1682 and the patrons of it were eight of the most prominent cardinals of the time including a Colonna, a Rospigliosi, and a Panfillio, all of old Roman families strong in the Church tradition...
...Over southern Sweden we travel with Selma Lagerlof's boy-hero, Nils Holgerson...
...Nelly, as they called an impudent comedian...
...with the son of a rich father too noble to enjoy the ill-gotten luxury of the parental home...
...Dr...
...THIS is one of the series of books on The History of Civilization which is planned to comprise more than two hundred volumes covering every aspect of the subject...
...King Goshawk and the Birds is in the manner of the mock-heroic romance, a manner which has been taken over from old Irish literature...
...His sister's fiance, Count Nuti, hearing of the affair, approaches the actress with the design of breaking off her connection with his prospective brother-in-law...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Cumston's account is interesting not only for the useful information it contains, but also because it tells the story of what has been tried and found wanting...
...Scott Moncrieff, exhibits those traits which we have come chiefly to associate with the dramatic metaphysician from Italy—his baffled sense of the unseizable nature^of reality...
...Richard Linn Edsall...
...or, at any rate, the outlines of the defendant have been more discernible to the eye of the mystic and metaphysician than to the eye of the sociologist...
...And it is interesting to note how themes taken from an old literature can be put to entertaining use by a writer of today familiar with such motives...
...IN THIS work Mr...
...Fourteen years ago, in a review which I had just surrendered, there was published a play by him called The Walls of Athens...
...There is, however, sufficient evidence in this volume and elsewhere to convince us that the secular clergy in the later middle-ages did not give to their people sufficient instructions in the doctrines and practices of their faith...
...A particularly striking growth of surgical knowledge took place in the later middle-ages ; in fact, there seems no doubt that the science was understood better and practised more about the middle of the thirteenth century than it was about the middle of the nineteenth century...
...But this new writer should have learned from Swift one lesson—the lesson of never relaxing grip upon the idea that is to be illustrated...
...This book is indeed a "Paradyse of Dainty Devises," where each may taste with relish his especial food...
...Now, as an interlude, I shall show how four of the words Mr...
...comb your hair and brush your teeth...
...As she emerges from political subjection Ireland produces writers who are capable of dealing harshly and grimly with aspects of the national life: this shows that the revival has been powerful enough to carry over from an era of hopefulness, of heroic aspiration, to an era of criticism...
...But, with all these imperfections, King Goshawk and the Birds is extraordinarily lively—so lively that it makes several highbrow books popular at the moment seem very dead-and-alive...
...of art we learn the story of Anders Zorn and Carl Larssen...
...Gubbio, the author's spokesman, turns the camera at the motion-picture studio in which the action takes place...
...j.oo...
...We of the present esteem Hippocrates more highly than ever, but then, in our day, the founder of osteopathy thought that Pasteur was a fool and Lister a knave, so that history is only repeating itself...
...He may be like Stephens on the outside, but he has no inner likeness to that unbiased man...
...Secondly, how far are we to accept sermons or the lack of them as indexes of the religious conditions of the period...
...Padraic Colum...
...so that, in the end, when the "centre of intelligence" in Shoot!, the camera-man, Gubbio, loses his voice, he speaks of himself with bitter satisfaction as follows: "The vengeance I sought to accomplish upon the obligation imposed on me, as the slave of a machine, to serve up life to my machine as food, life has chosen to turn back upon me...
...He has also displayed throughout a commendable sense of fairness in treating a subject which quite naturally would lead a less balanced mind into a lack of tolerance...
...We visit a ruined chapel, sad witness of the monks long since driven away, and when we come out we see a fairy on a flower or a witch lurking in the shadows of a gnarled tree...
...But, with all due respect to his learning, he impresses the reader as giving a rather one-sided 558 view—the pessimistic...
...It would, perhaps, all things considered, be so much to the good...
...and that the surgery of his time was a disgrace compared to the surgery of seven centuries earlier...
...Surely it is not merely a fanciful reading which sees in them a movement toward, not Brieux, and the school of confident cures, perhaps, but at least Samuel Butler and the school of intelligible diagnosis...
...WITH the trite plot of a title sold for American money through an arranged marriage which is blocked by the nobility of the young people...
...No one can henceforward deny that I have now arrived at perfection...
...keep moderation in all things—do not work too hard, do not eat too much, do not drink too much, do not sleep too much, if you want to be healthy...
...And that device is again in evidence here...
...and Swift, with the passion that is behind his irony, shows the Irish mark...
...With new surprise, one discovers that "blackmail" was in olden days the payment for a highly respectable profession in Scotland, a word that fell out of use and was revived by Scott, only to be handed over to the tabloids...
...surely something to be said of a novel of its type today...
...Her stupidity is too perfect to be true...
...The story opens with a love-scene enacted on a Pennsylvania hillside between St...
...Internally, he is much more related to James Joyce...
...and Rome, the Lawgiver, by J. Declareuil...
...His work is, of course, merely the point of view of the traveling Englishman which our American publishers are so prone to spread across America...
...We have learned to make this contrast, not from traditions, but from the actual text-books of the teachers of surgery at that time...
...Weekley upholds his reputation for presenting fruits of the soundest researches in etymology, under a guise not only readable, but captivating for those who know nothing about that subject and care less...
...The first is as to how far the author has correctly estimated the state of preaching in the period under discussion...
...Obviously, these writers are racial...
...One is amazed to find that words with which he would little care to be associated have far more distinguished forbears than the most high-sounding words in his vocabulary...
...they are inheritors of a portion of the Irish mind...
...For this spring are announced Life and Labor in Europe in the Middle-Ages, by Professor Boissonard...
...these newer writers seem disposed to take the conventions and the convictions that the present Ireland grew out of, and to treat them savagely...
...and that on "superman," with its keen satire on the word which "in a verbal chamber of horrors might reasonably claim the preeminence accorded to the late Mr...
...In one respect only, though: to make a clean sweep and start afresh...
...This little island is like a little book "full of a hundred tales...
...He has published several books since, but it seems to me that the book which I am reviewing has in it a vitality, an invention, an imperfection which suggests that it will have successors worth looking out for...
...Very good...
...so it is with "marshal," at first a horse-knave, now the chief of the French army...
...I hardly think so, unless he did so with much allowance for the exaggeration natural to all orators...
...The young writer of King Goshawk and the Birds puts passion behind his irony...
...The book is clever and is full of fun...
...Frederic Whyte's may be given a distinguished place...
...2.00...
...He is as fair as he is learned...
...The Nestoroff, a notorious actress, wins the love of a pure young artist...
...Clad in Purple Mist, by Catherine Dodd...
...Thessalus held that the physicians of the Hippocratic sect were foolish...
...A Wayfarer in Sweden, by Frederic Whyte...
...Many things in the volume demonstrate the Church's interest in the cultivation of medicine...
...Mesopotamia, the Babylonian and Assyrian Civilization, by L. De Laporte...
...In the novel, Clad in Purple Mist, she has outclassed even herself...
...All the stock ingredients are present, including the simple country maiden who might have been the victim of the worthless son of the rich man if she had not been—but that would be giving the secret away...
...Because of the approach to the Isle of Man, Catherine Dodd has named her novel Clad in Purple Mist...
...THE fact that many of the newer Irish writers are apt to deal with life in harsh or in violent terms is not an unhopeful sign—rather it shows that what used to be called "the Irish revival" is by no means a flash in the pan...
...Preachers are notoriously fervid and liable to a pessimistic view of conditions...
...Preaching in Mediaeval England, by G. R. Otvst...
...in reading of Queen Christina, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, we are introduced to the fascinating journal, 1653-1654, of the British Ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke...
...But Eimar O'Duffy in the sort of satire he uses in King Goshawk and the Birds, is capable of a detachment that produces something like the startling effect of Joyce's detachment...
...The authors of the twenty-five volumes which already have been published are among the most distinguished of present-day scholars...
...F. G. Crookshank of London...
...The selection of Dr...
...She subjugates him...
...We may be surprised that today there should be a thousand chiropractors in a city like New York, but if we go back nearly two thousand years to Rome, among a people of like culture, we find charlatans of all kinds flourishing there...
...Now, this will be misleading to the average reader who will take the book by its big title as a description of preaching throughout the entire period of the so-called middle-ages, and this will lead him into the error of thinking that preaching in the entire period was as bad as the author makes it appear from 1350 to 14.50, and that religious life was correspondingly low...
...Such books as History and Literature of Christianity from Tertul-lian to Boethius, by Professor P. De Labriolle...
...Crookshank holds that the motto of the physician 555 should be the saying of Baglivi, the great Italian physiologist who lived for a time in Rome as an intimate friend of the Popes: "Novi veteribus: non opponendi, sed quoad fieri potest, perpetuo jungendi foedere...
...Cuchullain cannot exist in the Ireland of today—he is too simple and too impetuous: he begets a hero, his bride being a millionaire's daughter, and this hero, Cu-an-duine, the Hound of Man, is given to the philosopher to help man to win back the flowers and the songbirds...
...RECENTLY there have been several excellent studies of Sweden and its invitation for the tourist, and among these books Mr...
...others will reap joy upon finding Evelyn cut to the quick at seeing Charles II having "a very familiar discourse" with "Mrs...
...that on "Robot," with its charming discussion of how all modern synonyms for "work" once meant "torture...
...yet the mind of the author is very finely attuned to his subject and his knowledge of things Swedish adequate enough to carry valuable hints in history, art, and contemporary observation to a large reading public The arrangement of the book is intelligent and clever...
...However, all in all, the book of Mr...
...Their neglect to do so opened the way to their flocks to listen to the teachings of Lollards and other free-lance dispensers of the Divine Word...
...THIS latest work of Pirandello, as it comes to us in the limpid and flexible translation of Mr...
...Charles Peace at Madame Tussaud's...
...The conception of mechanical predetermination is not new in Pirandello...
...5.00...
...Words Ancient and Modern, by Ernest Weekley...
...The story of Shoot!, in contrast to the tormented refinements which Gubbio, the recording intelligence, spins around it, is forthright and melodramatic—again a combination characteristic of its author...
...Not more digressions, however, than are in Eimar O'Duffy's master's Tale of a Tub...
...It is startling to find that the instructions for health given at that time are most of them exactly the same as those current at the present time: "Let the air you breathe be pure— let it not be contaminated by decomposing material...
...It was formerly the custom for physicians to be also doctors of philosophy—an excellent combination...
...Cumston does a service of value in giving the philosophy underlying the various schools of medicine, and in showing the significance of the ideas which prompted the practice of the various leaders of the science at various times...
...do not eat unless you are hungry...
...There is also a very timely chapter on English writers and Swedish readers, discussing the character of the authors who are most industriously distributed in Swedish homes...
...He attends the development of the curious tragedy, attends it in its minutest detail, with an intensity which is like passion, and yet with a dumbness and coldness to its human implications which reproduces the dumbness and coldness of the instrument he manipulates...
...the mathematical perfection of his denouement, which is too logical to be human...
...The Civilization of the South American Indians, by Rafael Karsten...
...2.00...
...There are many precious documents, including, above all, the Regimen of Health of Salerno—the most published medical book in history, since some four hundred editions have probably been issued...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...in the story of Charles XII we accompany the studies of Voltaire...
...The artist commits suicide, and his sister enters religion...
...For the rest, as has been said, Shoot...
...She is indifferent to his pain, for she is secretly working out her own expiation by taking as her permanent lover a coarse and sensual man whom she detests...
...Croix Creighton, a fastidious, wealthy young man, who prizes his ancestral tree, and a beautiful but apparently ignorant Dutch girl...
...it is the triumph, likewise, because it is the logical term, of the remote, impersonal yet suffering intellect, the "pure reason," by which Pirandello chiefly sees...
...Nuti, possessed by the conviction that there is now a blood bond between him and the actress, follows her to the studio and obtains work there...
...Dr...
...William F. McGinnis...
...And why not ? Satire of the harshest and the fiercest kind has always been part of the Irish mind, has always been present in Irish literature, and the fact that it is cropping out today shows that the impulse which has made for so much liberation is not slackening, that it is showing itself capable of restoring something which belongs very definitely to the racial mind...
...Another story is that of the slave whose son becomes the king's favorite...
...The hero is baffled...
...James J. Walsh...
...Shoot!, by Luigi Pirandello...
...As he notes, the controversy over the extent of pre-Reformation preaching is an old one reaching back to the seventeenth century and extending to our own when Cardinal Gasquet has taken up the defense of the parish priests in the question of fulfilling their duty to preach to their people...
...Cu-an-duine fails in his quests for the very good reason that neither the people of Ireland nor of England will permit themselves to be roused into action...
...I do not now refer to James Joyce: Joyce, to my mind, finishes rather than begins an era—I refer to writers like Liam O'Flaherty and Eimar O'Duffy—men who have grown up during the struggle that has eventuated in the establishment of the Irish Free State...
...Two questions arise on its persual...
...Twenty years ago it might have been supposed that Irish literary activity was no more than realization on a traditional store of quaint, charming, and idyllic matter...
...If one only knows enough about even some of the most discredited of the number, one realizes that their purpose was high and that they were simply doing the best they could do under the circumstances...
...One of them, Thessalus, was always accompanied by numerous disciples and patients whom he had cured, and to whom he had promised to impart the secrets of medicine in six months...
...The history proper is preceded by an introductory essay on The Relation of History and Philosophy to Medicine, by Dr...
...As an operator I am now, truly, perfect...
...Then is the weakling whose son becomes a heavyweight champion...
...for example, when he asks her condescendingly if she would like to be treated as if she were a fine lady and she answers, "No, I'd like you to treat me as if you was a fine gentleman...
...556 Dr...
...Greene Cumston, lecturer on the history of medicine and medical philosophy at the University of Geneva, to write the medical volume, was wise...
...Among the British Isles there is one toward which you sail through a purple mist until at last a corner of the veil is lifted to show you faint outlines of blue mountains, emerald patches of meadowland, and grey rocks standing out of the blue sea...
...a love that makes her follow him to Australia when he is sent there on a convict ship for a crime he did not commit...
...For instance, would a future historian (some 600 years from now) be justified in estimating contemporary society by the rather lurid sermons now appearing in our Monday papers...
...The birds are to be put into his own aviary, but a certain number of them will be left in municipal aviaries where the public, for a slight fee (for the public only appreciates what it has to pay for) will be allowed to hear their singing...
...This is said with allowance for an evident decline in preaching as in all religious life in the period discussed...
...so the word "story" could once be used by a divine like Robert South of the "good book" itself, but now means no more than a flapper's fib...
...Gubbio, standing directly by, is stricken permanently speechless...
...SS', By the by, it may well be mentioned here that Mr...
...Martin has concocted a most engaging story...
...Draper was writing so contemptuously about the science of the middle-ages and suggesting that the Church was responsible for the suppression of any originality that men might display in the healing art, he was the attending physician at Bellevue, a hospital far below the hospitals of the middle-ages in appointments and furnishings...
...A History of Medicine from the Time of the Pharaohs to the End of the Eighteenth Century, by Charles Greene Gutn-ston...
...Thomas Walsh...
...Weekley shows what an undreamed-of number of words, long sleeping in their graves, were disinterred by Scott, and given a totally different meaning in their new life, either by Scott or by those who have come after him...
...translated by C.K.Scott Mon-crieff...
...The story is full of digressions...
...When the tiger springs, he turns his pistol on the woman, so that they die together—she of the bullet, he of the tiger's fangs...
...It exhibits, also, the same sort of unity as prevails in Pirandello's plays, in spite of their almost obsessed concern with the conflicting aspects of actuality—the unity which is derived from the presence of what may be called a "centre of intelligence," to which these aspects are all referred, and from which, frequently, their resolution emanates...
...his almost brutally violent detachment from his characters, whom, nevertheless, he studies with morbid avidity...
...Goshawk, an American multi-millionaire, resolves to corner all the singing birds in the world, and thereafter, all the wild flowers in the world...
...An opening discussion on Swedish and English manners and methods of thought is followed by a study of Visby and the ancient glories of its Gotland...
...She takes us back a hundred years and makes us live the life of the simple country-folk on the island, with a wealth of fairy lore and detailed incident of real life inextricably intermingled...
...and The Dawn of European Civilization, by V. Gordon Childe, have already appeared...
...The author has produced a scholarly work which cannot be commended too highly for its laborious investigations into this field of historical research...
...at times it seems to me so impossible to believe in the reality of all that I see and hear, that being incapable, on the other hand, of believing that they are all doing it as a joke, I ask myself whether really all this clamorous and dizzy machinery of life, which from day to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater speed, has not reduced the human race to such a condition of insanity that presently we must break out in fury and overthrow and destroy everything...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...The author does indeed bring forth a mass of evidence that seems to make this defense now appear less strong than when first put forth...
...He deprecates the use of "Jones' Snappy Aids to Medicine" or "Smith's Bright Tips on Diagnosis," and does not hesitate to affirm that "the false systemati-zation in terms of definite 'diseases' with special signs, symptoms, etiology and morbid anatomy, so dear to the physicians of last century, shows everywhere evidence of breaking down under the self-imposed strain, whilst a reaction toward Hippoc-ratic methods of diagnosis and prescription is once more clearly marked...
...j.oo...
...Miss Dodd already displayed her power to create strong fine women in her first novel, The Farthing Spinster, as well as her genius in creating atmosphere...
...His satire does not approach Joyce's—it is a satire on the social life of man whereas Joyce's is a satire on life itself...
...There she is, our heroine, always clever, always able to keep the reader guessing...
...But heretofore the predetermination has been a deliberate artistic and philosophic device for forcing either an idea or a situation to the uttermost fantastic reaches of its own inner logic...
...Somehow or other, one cannot help feeling that a more favorable judgment could be given by any opposing special pleader...
...Nuti compasses his plan of linking their sinful destinies as follows: He frightens her lover into allowing him to replace the latter in a tiger-killing scene...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...But even before we have come to the war we have ceased to feel that Cu-an-duine has a single flaming interest in the flowers and the singing birds...
...And it exhibits, in addition, a something at least partly new, a variation of Pirandello's pessimism in the direction of, apparently, a greater explicitness than he has heretofore employed...
...Moreover, the title of the book is unfortunate...
...Our author seems not to make sufficient allowance...
...presents a mood already familiar...
...A philosopher in Dublin resolves to baffle his attempt at a new monopoly: he brings back to earth the spirit of the hero Cuchullain to act as champion and guardian of the birds and flowers...
...But, above all, do I recommend to those without much knowledge of etymology, the article on "bourgeois," where Mr...
...THIS work is an attempt to remedy the neglect of the texts of mediaeval sermons on the part of English historians and archivists, as well as to give a picture of the period during the later middle-ages in England...
...Cumston presents the title-page of the program of the first medical congress of which we have any record...
...passion and irony make the method of Irish satire...
...There are imperfections in the story and they are due to the fact that the writer does not stick to his point...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...and Pepys, chasing all over England to satisfy his passion for the newly-imported "Poli-chinello" shows...
...But in addition, Pirandello seems to contemplate a new villain in his social scheme...
...Croix realize this...
...Finally, there is the "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves" tale, as seen in "sergeant," first meaning servant, then a major in the army, and now a mere non-com...
...It is a book of etymology gilded over with solemn bantering, in the best professorial manner...
...But Irish literary activity still goes on, and it has made itself independent of just that sort of matter...
...First is the history of the stalwart citizen whose son is a wealthy ne'er-do-well...
...It is also a weakness in the book that many of the things satirized are really due to temporary and local circumstances...
...Now this comparison, although made by the foremost writer in Ireland, is not correct...
...Nor is there any lack of quotation from our best-beloved writers: the Englishman will be grieved to find Swift casually using the adjective "bloody" in a letter to Stella, and Richardson, as casually, in Pamela...
...the exact reverse is true, indeed...
...All this, it would seem, should make a student of mediaeval history cautious (as has been said) in estimating the spoken sermon as an index of Catholic religious fervor at any epoch past or present...
...It is an interesting fact that, at the time when Dr...
...The novel tells the story of beautiful Mollie and her love for Stephen Fannin, a love that makes her glad to be poor and to do hard work, because thus she can show her love...
...Here we see the genealogies of words as diverse as "anlace" and "rile," as familiar as "mop," and as exotic as "swaraj...
...with an up-to-the-minute heroine whose principal characteristic is a scrupulous avoidance of truthfulness, Mrs...
...Weekley pictures the sad downfall of that once noble word, at the hands of, "the Beau-monde, Bohemia, and Bolshevia...
...Owst is a notable contribution to mediaeval history and, in addition, is intensely interesting in spite of a too often cumbrous and difficult style...
...A vein of satire has been disclosed by them...
...The war that the hero intervenes in has nothing to do with the birds and the flowers...
...Undoubtedly they can be used as indexes, but with extreme caution...
...She sometimes makes St...
...And lastly, there should ever be kept in mind something which a non-Catholic does not easily grasp, namely, the fact that in Catholic (hence mediaevel) religious life the Mass takes precedence over the sermon, however important the latter also may be: also that an immense amount of real piety finds expression in practised devotions, not words...
...but he keeps on turning, turning the wheel of his machine...
...The successive chapters of the cures that have failed are extremely valuable...
...It used to be thought that there was no medical study worth talking of in the middle-ages, but the development of the history of science in recent years has completely destroyed this notion...
...Weekley discusses have had histories strangely similar to four well-known family-histories, of fiction if not of life...
...In many of our churches today, the clergy might learn from the pages of this book and from subsequent events in England to give at least ten minutes' solid instruction to the vast congregations that are present at the low Masses in our city churches...
...She teaches in the little red schoolhouse, and the way in which she leads the stolid Dutch children through the mazes of romantic literature ought to win for her a place among heroines who dare to be original...
...Sylvia of the Minute, by Helen R. Martin...
...they are of the sod of Ireland...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 20
