Books
Shuster, George N. & Ross, J. Elliot & Clark, Edwin & Kolars, Mary & Byrne, Barry
than Fejevary's son. Silas is dead; his son, a weakling of the soil, is already an aging farmer with a monomania for corn. But Silas's granddaughter, Madeline, whose mother was a Feje- vary, is now...
...MARY KOLAESis a writer of literary criticism for current American magazines...
...Hemingway sets down another graphic description of a bullfight edged with ironic comment, and Steele has his usual good ro- mance...
...At the same time, it must be admitted that there is a leavening mediocrity in the majority of these tales...
...J. ELLIOT Ross, C.S.P., chaplain to the Catholic students of Columbia University, is the author of Consumers and Wage Earners...
...By his choice he loses the love of his young sweetheart, but gains, from his subsequent unhappiness, the strength of maturity and a true vision of life...
...This is architecture, not modern or ancient, but architecture and that is indeed a rarity...
...But apart from indicating a cer- tain trend of thought around us, it has little interest for the Catholic...
...Grain, by Robert Stead...
...A REVIEW of a book devoted to the illustration of architecture is an unusual feature in a journal of the nature of The Commonweal, but the book here reviewed is itself so un- usual and of such interest that the departure, if it may be so called, is one to be recorded with interest and approval...
...The Pathway to Reality, by Viscount Haldane...
...It touches upon well-nigh every topic of vital interest to men and women today...
...After a none too striking boyhood and youth he blossoms out---despite a heady genealogical table--into a regular Denver editor and columnist...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The great Rus- sians, even the most smileless and sorrowing among them, feel this spirit most spontaneously of any writers...
...GEORGE N. SHYSTER...
...Contrasted with this heaviness is the book by Canon Streeter...
...At any rate, the sentimental poems are what the public has chosen to associate with Field's memory...
...Various local anthologies have un- dertaken to prove the point...
...Three Sisters I IS rather late to give an extensive review of this Chekhov T play which has been part of the Le Gallienne repertory for some time...
...5.00...
...He may select for his protagonist some real hero, someone who towers above his kind and magni- fies their obscure destinies in his own greater proportions...
...In all, the book is a distinct contribution, both to the art of printing and, more important, to the further- ance of the creative art of architecture...
...These were also the days of the Tribune Primer, regarding which excellent nonsense Mr...
...Streeter became an agnostic while at college during the mid- dle 'nineties...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...It is part of the genius of Chekhov that he can write a whole play, and an absorbing one, about the inaction of people...
...A comparison with Father Tabb, also a purely native product, will show the "poet- priest" to have mastered a compactness and energy of phrase which Field never attained...
...BOOKS Li[e o/Eucene Field, by 8lason Thompson...
...J. ELLIOT Ross...
...It is a built architecture...
...Miss Hutchinson is exhibiting an ever-increasing range...
...He recovered his faith sufficiently, however, to study for the Anglican ministry...
...More generally, however, one suspects that the "saga of Eugene Field" is likely to be talked over steadily by people who like the fresh flavor of life and writing identified with the American press...
...Not only is it Gothic through the use of the dominant form of Gothic architecture, the pointed arch, but more implicitly and exactly through the fact that in the main it is an architecture which derives inter- est and beauty from the imaginative use of the constructive or structural elements...
...Resident and Day Pupils Campus of 12 Acres on One of Summit's Highest Points Rosemont College at Rosemont, Pa., St...
...Miss Le Gallienne gives it a warm and understanding, if somewhat slow production, in which she herself, Miss Hutchinson, Mary Ward, Beatrice de Neergard, and Paul Leyssac all give un-usually clear characterizations...
...The Glass Eye of Throgmorton, by Corley, is a fine grotesque piece that happily blends sound psychology with imaginative treatment...
...It is not old enough to be historical...
...The quality of design is heightened in these cases by the freshness and individuality of this detail...
...MARK O. SHRIVER is a member of the Maryland bar, and a writer on economics and jurisprudence...
...O'Brien in his introduction awards to his book of tales...
...If, as happens, in these buildings his assemblage of forms oc- casionally shows a less congruous relationship than would be hoped for, the fine spirit and integrity of the work so infuses and animates it with its inner quality, that criticism may well be silent before its high excellence...
...MARY KOLARS...
...T HE simple, epical title of this novel offers a promise which its text hardly fulfills...
...Felix Fejevary II is trying to obtain state assistance for the college...
...One may correctly mistrust a little the aura of hero-worship which prevails, and yet concede that a man as genuine as Field deserved no less...
...But there is also a most generous assortment of fugitive pieces, of pleasant anecdote and instructive history...
...The more distinguished stories of the collection are those of such recognized writers as Wilbur Daniel Steele, Ring Lardner, Barry Benefield, Robert Sherwood and three fairly recent new- comers, Ernest Hemingway, Donald Corley, and Arthur Huff Faussett...
...2.00...
...Field's description of Coxey's march to Washington as "the biggest real-estate transfer in history" is a fair sample of his wit, which had the genuine American droll sparkle and never aimed at classic satire...
...REV...
...4 Modern drchitectural Work, by Dom Paul Bellot...
...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...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...And the present collection offers some engaging reading...
...The paragraphs frequently run to two or more pages, and one paragraph actually occupies six pages...
...Apparently, perfecting form has choked out gusto and living substance...
...It is interesting to note that his later works show departures in the form of brick-corbelled openings and arches other than the pointed...
...but it was, after all, a shy genius who finally retreated, in I895, to a house "provided with all the modern conveniences, including an ample porch and a genial mortgage...
...Field's services went to the paper at fifty dollars a week...
...How true that is I have no way of telling, but it does seem reasonably clear that in the past our poetic literature has been predominatingly rural (or at least provincial) in character...
...I shall have failed in my object," he says, "if this book is in- telligible only to philosophers, scientists, and theologians...
...Thu.s the struggle starts between Fejevary and Madeline Morton...
...Some absurdly incline to believe that by best, he means great...
...ADEFREY ODHNER contributes poetry to American magazines...
...There is a great deal of growling over his use of the word "best...
...This pamphlet is the first in a series of reprints from TrI~ COM~tONWEAL dealing with subjects of general interest...
...It deals with difficult and obscure ideas, and the style does not help to lighten the subject...
...One has only to note that five of the twenty stories of this collection have been selected from such unfamiliar magazines as The Midland, Opportunity, the Junior League Bulletin, This Quarter, and the Calendar of Modern Letters, to recognize that Mr...
...F ROM time to time there are captious comments registered about this yearly survey by Edward J. O'Brien...
...and certainly a service has been rendered American letters for which many will be grateful...
...Concerning other details of Field's personal history, such as his friendship with George W. Cable, one should have liked to know just a little more...
...or he may confine himself to average humanity, dealing with it in a comprehending, exalted, really Christian spirit, the spirit of a love which is both philosophic and cherishing...
...Dora Bellot entered the Benedictine order in the early years of this century, after completing his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and his life since has been devoted to the experi- ment of reviving Christian architecture...
...The forms might be of other outline and proportion and Dam Bellot's resulting design would be equally vital and effectively architectural...
...In it were Horatian echoes, sly whimsy, sentimental verse, deft criticism of manners, subtle hoaxes--a complete repertory of column practices...
...The facsimiles offered would alone tempt almost any honest American bibliophile into parting with the purchase price...
...O'Brien's survey is thorough...
...From this point on, the play becomes a bitter indictment of the ioo percenters, those who have lost the idealism of an older generation in the pleasant stodginess of prosperity...
...She makes some rash remarks in public, and gets put in jail, at the very time when her uncle is most anxious to avoid this kind of publicity...
...REx' ROLAND AI~EAIIN, whose poems appear in current publications, is a pastor in Wisconsin...
...The play is entirely a drama of character, running the gamut from ineffective dream- ers to those preoccupied with life's practical details...
...For the import of the extensive editorial work that Mr...
...It must be a question indeed just where, in the last four centuries, work of its quality would be found...
...but often the debts famous people owe them reap what is partial repayment in terms of immortality...
...As a sample of the play's method, when this aunt asks, "Haven't we just fought a war for democ- racy...
...The Best Short 8tories o[ 1926 and the Yearbook of the JmeHcan Short Story, edited by Edward J. O'Brien...
...Unfortunately, it already seems like a distant flame...
...He has been told that to do so, he must ill'st purge the college of radicalism-- make it zoo percent American, and so on...
...It relates the boyhood and young manhood of Gander Stake, who loves the soil too much to leave it for the war...
...The book is easy reading...
...but the real compensation was a growing and lasting glory...
...Sherwood has related a highly satirical, sharp anecdote of married life, with simple compactness...
...In this play, Miss Roberts gives us the interesting Grandmother Morton of the first act...
...25.o0...
...and Christian Ethics...
...Nothing dates so distinctly as the "press- box" manner...
...In championing the cause of the conscientious objector, she runs afoul even of her aunt...
...The editors courteously include Eugene Field and Helen Hunt Jackson, though these had only a bowing acquaintance with Colorado...
...e.5o...
...O'Brien undertakes rests entirely in the general summary that his collected stories give of the changing tendencies, retrogressions, or static condi- tions prevalent in the writing of short stories during a year...
...The human, historical, and literary aspects of the subjects are rich quarries, in which Mr...
...The Pathway to Reality is the Gifford lectures delivered by Viscount Haldane before the University of Aberdeen in 19o2-I9o4, and now reissued as one volume...
...The book is one which every archi- tect or person interested in Catholic church design will view with enthusiasm and delight...
...Frank W. Reilly, and through his mediumship Father Prout, had upon the great word-magician of the Morning News...
...The difference is the difference between a grammarian and a man who measures by rule of thumb...
...There is some of what must seem the worst writ- ing of the decade in his new, expansive life of Field...
...Liliecrona's Home, by 8elma LagerlS...
...It is addressed in the first instance to the man who has no special training in any of these subjects...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...THIS new edition of one of Selma Lagerl6f's earlier books ought to meet with a welcome because it happens to be a most characteristic Scandinavian folk-tale...
...It is only a little over a year since she first impressed us with her characterization of an empty-headed, movie-struck girl in A Man's Man...
...This genial conversation, which one wishes a very long llfe, will be stimulated by Mr...
...EDWIN CLARK is a literary critic for the New York Times and other periodicals...
...Little Boy Blue, and Wynken, Blynken and Nod appear in every popular an-thology and are treasured as sacrosanct...
...Symphon- esque, by Faussett, is a lusty bit of experimentation in the ver- nacular...
...5.00...
...He appears to have believed in the possibility of what Cardinal Newman called a 'science of God,' and definer as 'the truths we know about God put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology.' " Viscount Haldane approaches this subject reverently, and with a grave sense of responsibility, but as an Hegelian idealist...
...O'Brien has no grandiose ideas of their contents, for he remarks in his intro- duction, that his "selection of them does not imply the critical belief that they are great stories...
...There is a genuine mountalny flavor, combined with a typical sentimentalism in Emma Ghent Curtis's songs of the saddle and the trail...
...It is a pity, one may say in passing, that men like Dr...
...What is Eugene Field's own place in these letters ? Whimsy and humor, when scattered like the very spice of life, are not normally long-lived...
...at the lyric ambitiousness of Jamie Sexton Holme, who aspires to philosophy...
...We do not find the contribution of Manuel Kom- roff to whom the collection is dedicated--to contain the merit that Mr...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...BARRY BYRNE...
...Ten Centa a Copy, Se~en Dollars a Hundr...
...Even though this isn't everything one might have desired, it is ample, circumspect and interesting enough to make its way about with very little difficulty...
...Thompson's misfortune...
...Now and then the author gives a suggestion that may prove valuable in convincing some wavering mind, as in discussing freedom, but on the whole the sort of religion he arrives at in the end is too tenuous for the stern reality of life...
...She tries to befriend a "conscientious objector" and some Hindu students who, like the first Fejevary, are in rebellion against their own government...
...JOHN HANLON IS a contemporary poet of Canada, whose work is frequently published in current periodicals...
...From his dingy, cluttery room, he fed America with a column which set the standard for similar ventures everywhere and even now remains the most notable example of its kind...
...Louis University...
...Apparently her talent is an inherited one, as her mother, Leona Roberts, has had an outstanding season in the same company...
...One admires deeply the skill and reverence with which all this has been gathered...
...Finally, it is difficult to sympathize with an author who takes the curtain whenever occasion offers, with the sublime grand manner of a Booth conscious of his glory...
...44 Blackburn Road, Phone Summit 1804 m One Macmillan Book a Week --AS MAN TO MAN Adventures o[ a Commuter By CONDI~ B. PALLEN The book is alive and wiIl blaze many new trails on the great questions of life and death ever at the back of many of our fears...
...and at the musings of Anna Spencer Twitchelh Then one is square up against Harry McGuire and the hopeful younger generation...
...Thomp- son literally besprinkles his pages with what must seem to the utterly guileless or the relatively blas6 enthusiastic applause of himself...
...A year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one...
...Slason Thompson...
...For today it is too likely to connote some- thing for which we must apologize...
...His books include A Living Wage...
...In its earlier stages, tMs experiment took a somewhat hesitant form, where the ex- ample of German and Dutch precedents, possibly that of Ber- lage, tended to modify the work of the artist...
...The Right to Work...
...MISS WILKINSON recently informed the Poetry Society that the hopes of the art were embedded more or less in the countryside of America...
...The incidental Gothic forms used are secondary to the imaginative use of the structural parts...
...But it would be an injustice to omit mention of it altogether...
...BRIEFER MENTION Evenings with Colorado Poets, edited by Francis 8. Kinder and F. Clarence Spencer...
...Then one pauses at the prairie pastorals of Pearl Riggs Crouch, etched though these are in antique couplets...
...Miss Le Gallienne herself, by way of variety, takes the very minor part of Madeline's aunt--a modest gesture as rare in the theatre as it is refreshing...
...He is also director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference...
...Reilly leave after them so little that guarantees their remembrance...
...Price, $2.00 ~It Your Bookstore or from THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 60 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK, N. Y. COMMONWEAL PAMPHLETS NUMBER ONE Obligations to America By CARLTON J. H. HAYES Professor of History, Columbia On_iversity, the author of "Political and Social History of Modern Europe," "Brief History of the Great War," and other books...
...From them one might easily discern the literary tem- per of the era in which they were written...
...Thompson records affectionately the influence which Dr...
...His exteriors, too, are less moving in their quality than his beautiful interiors, but this is of small matter as related to the fact that in its total, the work of Dam Bellot is probably the most significant contribution to Christian architecture now current...
...REv...
...JAMES J. DALY, S.J., is a poet and critic, at present on the faculty of the St...
...2.00...
...E UGENE FIELD was primarily a newspaperman...
...It is an interestingbook, although one must seri- ously regret the faulty typography (uncorrected even in the third edition) and the practice of cutting down poems ar-bitrarily to "fit the page...
...The story of Three Sisters is little more than the pathetic case of three women in a provincial town of Russia who are always planning and yearning to enlarge their lives by going to Moscow, but who somehow never manage to get there...
...Thompson worked carefully during many years...
...Mr...
...Thompson's book is a mine of valuable, authentic information about the genesis and character of Field's work...
...and Social Reconstruction...
...There he died soon after...
...Among these, Evenings with Colorado Poets has a worthy place, not only by reason of the great names which enhance it, but also because there is much nearly first-rate verse in it...
...In the end, she goes back to prison rather than give in to her uncle and sacrifice a principle she believes would have been sacred to her Grandfather Morton...
...J'OHN A. RYAN is professor of moral theology and industrial ethics in the Catholic University of America...
...And yet after you have worked beyond these rather stiff handicaps, you are deep in a truly remarkable and fascinating life history...
...Two choices are open to the writer who desires to make such a book genuinely significant...
...Before it gets done with the reader it has put into his possession a constructive and synthetic view of life that seekers for peace will find very precious...
...Then later, about the time of the modernist movement, he passed through another intellec- tual crisis, A second time he was able to square his intellectual convictions with the Anglican ministry, but it was on the basis of modernism...
...But one who has no professional in- terest will probably never wade through the 600 pages of the book...
...Thompson speaks authoritatively...
...His book, therefore, holds little of value for the Catholic casting about for some method of convincing the modern mind of Catholicism, or of the primary truths common to all Orthodox Christianity...
...and Poets and Pilgrims...
...The tale of Carrie Snyder, the small-town prostitute, by Benefield, is already well known...
...For all the diversity of types---even some experimentatlon--there is a confining primness of interest and substance...
...One hopes that it will go far on its new voyage...
...The great opportunity came when Melville Stone recruited a staff for the Chicago Morning News...
...MARY ROLWING and IRENE WILSON are new contributors to The Commonweal...
...That the book as a whole will prove easy reading, I am fairly confident...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...2.00...
...Already she is one of the most important members of the Civic Repertory organization...
...Denver: The 14/'orld Press, Inc...
...Reality: ,4 New Correlation of Science and Religion, by Bur- nett Hillman Streeter...
...MAvIs MCINTOSH and ETHEL ROMIG FULLER are contributors of poetry to current magazines...
...The play is distinctly not a plea for pacificism, but it is a flaming protest against limiting the convictions and speech of those living in a democracy...
...The gulf between it and the mannered editions of so- called Gothic architecture, which we have come to know in this country, is the immeasurable distance between creative art and the too tame replicas of it...
...It is rare in the works of any man, to find such a mounting m development as has taken place in the work of Dam Bellot, and the illustrations of his completed buildings are an excitement to interest in and anticipation for his further and later works...
...This is rather an exaggerated twisting of critical values...
...REV...
...E VERY age needs its own apologetic, because the intellectual milieu of each age is somewhat different...
...There are in it some one hundred loose plates of photographs supplemented by plans and color plates, the latter showing the interesting color arrange- ments which Dora Bellot has developed in brick for the build- ings he has designed...
...and not fresh enough to be timely...
...Even in the pretentious flight of Ira V. Morris's A Tale from the Grave, imagination, taking wing, is dipped, and the fully bodied story never emerges...
...But Silas's granddaughter, Madeline, whose mother was a Feje- vary, is now a student at the college...
...The same variety of merry pranks as used to pre- vail in the neighborhood of Mark Twain, and which were probably almost universal in the days before efficiency had triumphed in newspaperdom, budded and blossomed in the Field office...
...An author with a predilection for their chosen material who, nevertheless, has not mastered the secret of their inspired attitude, cannot write a book of lasting distinction, however exact and full his observa- tions and conclusions may be...
...2.50...
...Decidedly, The Best Short Stories continues to afford the most persuasive survey of the year's crop of short tales...
...Its sentiment is deft rather than effusive...
...That is because he understands so dearly that action of the mind and soul is quite as rich in drama as the outer action of the body...
...The coagulated, mellifluent adjectives of a slightly remote epoch have nothing in common with the hard- fisted feature reporting of today...
...Lardner, too, renders the American "slanguage" in an amusing account of the antics of two bores on a transcontinental train...
...One wonders a little, therefore, if he would have written biog- raphy in the same style as that chosen by his brother in the inner workings of Chicago journalism day before yesterday, Mr...
...There is considerable usage of the reversal of situation in a much too slick rounding off of plot...
...An exposition of our own ideas can only be effective if we understand the thoughts of those we address...
...p ROFESSOR HAYES gives in this pamphlet, reprinted from THE COMMONWEAL, the clearest and most significant summary of the debt of the United States to the spiritual forces, the philosophy, and the social ideas of Catholicism, ever presented in such brief form...
...BARRY BYRNE iS one of the leaders in the newer school of American architecture...
...In fact, the word "apologetics," no doubt good enough when first used, is itself an example of this need...
...Stead presents nothing more than a routine story of the Canadian wheat country, a story, one would guess, composed rather as a pleasant relaxation for its author than under the stress of an inescapable vision...
...The purpose of Lord Gifford in founding these lectureships," he tells us in his first lecture of the series, "may be said to have been to promote a A SCHOOL FOR GIRLS OAK KNOLL School of the Holy Child AN ELE~IENTARY and COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL SUMMIT, N.J...
...CONTRIBUTORS KATHERINE BRI~GY is a critic and l~oet, and the author of The Poets' Chantry...
...With a succession of such works as Quarr Abbey in the Isle of Wight, the Abbey at Oosterhout, Eindhoven College and the sanctuary of the church at Heerle, all these in Holland, this remarkable talent had opportunity to mature and to reveal the distinction and thought inspiring it...
...Bos-ton: Marshall Jones Company...
...The polished craftsmanship so frequently present, is employed with recording the rustling of dead leaves...
...EI)wI~r CLARK...
...The architecture of Dam BeUot is Gothic, but with a difference, a difference in favor of its quality which is construc- tively inventive...
...Beside it the essays made locally in the revival of mediaeval design become but shadowy equivalents to the reality that is evidenced in this work...
...That their reputation is fully deserved will be cheerfully admitted by everybody who believes that good verse need not always be "metaphysical" in content...
...THE COMMONWEAL Grand Central Terminal, New York, N. Y. thinking consideration of the Nature of God and of His revela- tion to the actual world...
...To anyone interested in the contemporary estate of the short story as an art form, The Best Short Stories of 1926 provides an excellent and agreeable medium of approach...
...It is heartening to see how sturdily this gracious book transcends the years, seeming quite as fresh now as it did in the season when the news that Selma LagerliJf had won the Nobel Prize was announced to the world for the first time...
...And so the two books before us may be useful in helping us to do this from two rather different angles...
...At the same time he brings out in bold relief the obligations of Catholics to their nation and the services they are called upon to give...
...Briefly, it has nothing of the commended folk motif...
...The book, A Modern Architectural Work, is a well illus- trated and printed portfolio of the work of the Benedictine priest-architect, Dom Paul Bellot...
...The informing introduction, contributed by Henry Charlier, together with descriptive matter of the buildings, is beautifully printed in quarto form...
...The reader never knows quite whether he is in a land of fancy or on terra (irma, but the experience is constantly delightful...
...Madeline replies, "Is that any reason why we can't have one...
...There is also some apparent ignorance of the fact that American literary history has been moving rather swiftly since the "good old days...
...His is a splendid conception of the monumental, and Dam Bellot seems happiest when working in the less hampered domain of church design, rather than in schools and the living portions of monasteries, which are of less interest, while still holding to a plane where merit rules...
...Thompson's generous book...
...Opposition makes Madeline almost a fanatic...
...They are like lovable, self-effacing actors...
...That is Mr...
...The professional student of philosophy can find here a fair expo- sition of modem idealism...
...In this particular instance, the remarkable and charming pastor's daughter, who embodies idealistic imagination, is the central figure toward whom Lilie- crona (whose home is in music) comes slowly but inevitably...
...One thing or another prevents it, but chiefly their own inability to take decided action...
...The feeling expressed is often commonplace and hackneyed...
...It is saved only by the beauty and sincerity of most of its writing (I except the purely theatri- cal blasphemies of the last act) and the amazingly fine acting of Josephine Hutchinson as Madeline Morton...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 21
