Books
Vernon, Grenville & Martens, Frederick H. & Brennecke, Ernest Jr. & Stuart, Henry Longan & Maynard, Theodore & Riggs, T. Lawrason & Adams, Edith & Skinner, Henrietta Dana & Meadows, George D.
November 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 51 BOOKS England, by W. R. Inge. New York. Charles Scribners Sons $3.00. IN The World of William Clissold, Mr H. G. Wells makes a striking comparison...
...Consequently "three-quarters of Ireland were left to lapse into barbarism under the tutelage of a crafty and tyrannical priesthood...
...A really impartial thinker will not be much impressed by the table of statistics designed to show the disappearance of belief in God and immortality amongst scientists...
...Beach is taking a leaf from the bible of Mr...
...All his life he showed his undisguised pleasure in the society of women...
...Churchill's cynical attempt to starve them out, that they live in notable luxury...
...Le Merveilleux Voyage de Saint Brandan a la Recherche du ParadiSj by Paul Tufirau...
...By which he means such as who are at least sons of the squires or the more highly beneficed clergy, and who have been educated in one of the public schools and Oxford or Cambridge...
...Hecht, Mr...
...Of this world Franklin was phenomenally typical: he was a thoroughgoing rationalist, a deist, his ethics were honestly utilitarian, John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury supplied him with all the philosophy he needed, Swift and Defoe provided his models of excellence in composition...
...2.50...
...Leuba reveals his standpoint—that of scepticism as to the objective validity of mysticism and of the greater part of what passes for Christian belief and worship in our times...
...Anderson and Mr...
...Hecht and Mr...
...He accepts Mr...
...Pans io francs...
...But of late she has given us three or four stories so clever, so entertaining, so full of human understanding and spiritual insight that I hastened to read Far End in the eager hope of coming on a successor to The Cure of Souls, The Tree of Heaven, and the two Wyck stones...
...Beach's acceptance of mere revolt, however sincere that revolt may be, as the example to be set before our future writers, should be the final note of this otherwise admirable book...
...His face was round...
...In these chapters, Mr...
...IT MAY be said with some show of justice that only an eighteenth-century writer, or one thoroughly absorbed in the ideas, mannerisms and literary style of the eighteenth century, can really do justice to the figure of a man like Benjamin Franklin...
...First to deal with the Dean's prejudices...
...It is an illuminating passage...
...He has quarreled with the Massachusetts general court, and in a dudgeon is off home to tell mama about it...
...The Htll of Happiness, by George N. Shuster...
...His limbs were round...
...Is there nothing, then, that the Very Reverend Dean likes...
...Many spirited illustrations add to the attractiveness of the volume...
...This feminine element was visible even in his physical structure...
...And this is what the author, in his account of cowboy life, song, clothes, work, language, exploits, virtues, deficiencies, and diversions makes most enjoyably apparent...
...These gentle Brothers, following the rule of their beloved Saint Francis, living a community life of prayer, meditation and service, are portrayed as flesh-and-blood individuals possessed of many of the familiar, lovably human qualities that mark the children of men as we know them in the world, with only this difference—that in the Franciscans Mr...
...The author—in the wife's name—carefully differentiates between them, the first coming through sex appeal—there is no mistake about that—and the second through intellectual affinity...
...But I fear many of Miss Sinclair's admirers will regret that a book so far below her best powers ever saw the light of day...
...IT IS fitting, now that the literature of the vanishing American cowboy has reached a stage where we have "a choice of platitudes or personalities," that it be documented, and such a documentation Douglas Branch furnishes in a straightforward, unaffected way, appearing as the destroyer of the cowboy myth...
...It so happens that I have been reading, concurrently with Dean Inge's book, Mr...
...Beach undertakes a cool, unprejudiced analysis of the styles of a number of the gods of our youthful intelligentsia, employing the scalpel with swift, unerring celerity upon such writers as Mr...
...New York • D Appleton and Company...
...Floyd Collins's Cave, one of the most successful attempts to reproduce the frontier ballad that we remember to have seen, and Wanton, by Virginia McCormick...
...Similarly did puritanical parents of the Victorian era allow their children the mild excitement of biblical authors as a Sabbath pastime...
...Symbolists would say that Franklin typified the circle—all round...
...M. Paul Tuffrau, whose articles entitled Carnet d'un Com-battant, attracted much attention during his four years of active service, has adapted the old legend, from various mediaeval sources, into limpid and flowing French The beautifully pnnted volume is full of charm...
...Once he has described the cowboy as he is, he offers us a critical study of cowboy literature as a whole, good, bad and indifferent, which —together with an excellent bibliography—may be recommended to all omnivorous devourers of "westerns...
...Van Vechten and Mr...
...The incoherence of Mr...
...And the new type of labor representative is "a drunken blackguard who turns the House of Commons into a bear-garden...
...he was liberty-loving, frank, unsentimental and witty, he was often irreverent for the sake of irreverence...
...The Outlook for American Prose, by Joseph Warren Beach...
...TO BE told that he is a mediaevalist malgre lui would, perhaps, be the last thing that the professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr might expect to be said by a reviewer of his latest book...
...He exhibited none of the harsh angularities of such associates as Washington and Jefferson...
...The difference between them is that the thirteenth-century thinker and his school tested all subjective phenomena by their correspondence with the findings of a very exact and unemotional body of science known as theology, whereas Mr...
...The philosophical doctrine of analogy prevented the dichotomy from being absolute, and made the bridge between infinite and finite susceptible of human apprehension even if it escaped complete comprehension...
...And I am forced to contrast with shame the humanity, gentleness, sweetness, charm, and wisdom of the Irishman's book with the arrogance, prejudice, and ignorance displayed so openly in the Englishman's...
...And the public-school man, whom Dean Inge regards with such touching innocence as the salt of the earth, has proved his inadequacy and is out of date...
...Certainly it contains reminiscences of real journeys among its marvels: inlets like fjords, a grape-covered strand like the Vmland of the Norsemen, volcanoes and icebergs, or what seem to have been such, and cocoanuts floating on the sea In spite of the old tale's constantly pious tone, it is seldom that its religious significance is important...
...It is hard to believe that in this Mr...
...There is also a reprint of his supposedly salacious Letter of Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress, which the present reviewer remembers having seen surreptitiously circulated in manuscript at the public school which he attended some twenty years ago...
...Nor how Brother Augustine found a name for the Balthaser baby—or how Saint Bona-venture's reservoir became, for the nonce, a "swimmin' hole" through the antics of the mischievous schoolboy who was later himself to don the brown garb of the Franciscans...
...Cabell has treasured from the old masters, not merely the tall words, which were always bookish, but still more, the sturdy little words that were never bookish, and are not bookish even now except as, in their modesty and plainness, they have a sharper and brighter appeal to the imagination than their flabby equivalents in contemporary style," we feel instinctively that here is a man who loves and treasures his native tongue...
...One may note, however, in passing, two poems, The Midnight Express, by Florence M. Wallin, and The Triangle, by Docia Karell, both from the Middle-West, that are terrible human documents in their uncouth and utter disillusionment, Nights, by Perley A. Child, of New York, a particularly graceful arrangement of modern sophistications, a little in the Dowson manner...
...It does manage in some degree to remind us of "a world peopled by a society created in Queen Anne's November 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 53 reign, wherein was no wrestling over meticulous moral problems, no groanings of the spirit over abstruse theological dogmas, no grey didactics, nothing funereal, oppressive or depressive, but a tolerant urban world made interesting by human foibles...
...Hergesheimer he lays to that writer's affectation, the incoherence of Professor Dewey to his sloppmess of thinking, while the banality of Mr...
...Hergesheimer and Professor Dewey, of the cheap turgidness of Mr...
...he was sincere, if shallow, he was curious and many-sided...
...IT IS, indeed, one of happiness, this hill upon which Mr...
...I cannot see that her book could be a moral danger even to the most susceptible...
...Henrietta Dana Skinner...
...The result is, as was inevitable, a book of considerable entertainment-value, but of no overweening importance...
...For each would contain slight vestiges of a belief in a living personal God...
...Who has decided which are the "lesser men" and which the "greater men," conveniently provided for us in the schedule ? In any case, can a metaphysical question (for such Mr Leuba admits it to be, although with much reference to the pietistic school of theology for which "feeling is a safer guide than reason") be settled by a show of hands...
...An historical basis has been claimed in recent years for the legend...
...Let us remember that these things are the fault of the Dean's unfortunate upbringing...
...He particularly dislikes Frenchmen and Americans and Irishmen—most of all, of course, Irishmen...
...Under these circumstances, the function of the anthology, which gathers up and rescues from oblivion the best of these contemporary offerings, is a very real one, and great credit is due to the editors who make it their concern A brief preface by Mr Franklyn Pierre Davis, who is responsible for the present collection, takes a cursory note of the tendencies that he has gleaned from the many thousand of newspaper clippings that came under his observation while wielding the editorial sieve The darker and more tragic side of life, he observes, has been favorite ground There have been "a surprising number of poems in which murder or homicide was the theme" together with a number, mostly from New England, whose inspiration was "spooks and haunted houses " It is plain, though Mr...
...When he writes: "Mr...
...The rest will prove thnce-familiar ground to the majority of readers...
...And each would be rather weak on the Virgin Birth and very strong on birth control...
...THE seventh annual issue of the Anthology of Newspaper Verse, covering the year 1925, is with us to remind us how much good poetry is reaching the public through that most fugitive and evanescent of all media, the daily journal...
...That is truly and beautifully said...
...In The Hill of Happiness, we find the windows of Mr...
...Scholasticism recognized the fallacy of the unqualified ascription of human emotions, feelings and passions to an infinite God: it also acknowledged the apparently anthropomorphic nature of much scriptural and mystical language...
...Frederick H. Martens...
...There is a plain, unblushing account of Franklin's natural son, and of his likewise natural grandson...
...2.00...
...Shuster has built his unusually charming stories of life in an American Franciscan monastery...
...There is also a not unlikely, but rather overemphasized, speculation that Franklin consciously modeled his character after that of Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley...
...Dreiser, and of the pretentious vulgarity and emptiness of that preposterous product of half-educated aestheticism, Mr...
...But I must do Miss Sinclair justice...
...Kreymborg, his seems too trivial a talent really to be taken seriously...
...Edith Adams The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, by J. H. Leuba...
...She promptly forgives the first offense, but the second hits her own intellectual pride...
...If Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, the great war was nearly lost there...
...Any picturesque epoch of the past is entitled to its legitimate accretion of romantic glamour, but glamour is not a synonym for stultification, nor, so to say, can it be sold by the pound...
...From the summit of its hill, little stones unfold in the delightful manner that marks the tale told merely for pleasure and to give pleasure—stones in which the author has done well that thing which should be easy, but which, by some unfathomable paradox of literature, is most difficult—presented a fundamental truth naturally and convincingly...
...Not much, but he looks back with regret upon the old-fashioned poor who were, as legend tells us, content with the station in which God had placed them, and who, as Cobbett tells us, had an average wage of eight shillings a week The Dean also likes, nay, he even admires, "English gentlemen...
...Here, again, he is a good Thomist...
...Many a mediaeval abbot, one fancies, must have allowed his monks the thrills of following these startling adventures, while salving his conscience with the thought that it was godly reading after all...
...The twentieth-century Freudian psychology which is brought in to illuminate the characters is only a sickly-green artificial imitation of the daylight of reason which makes Franklin's own writings and revelations so telling...
...The section on Saint Margaret Mary reads like an essay on the alleged evils of sex-repression by some earnest sophomore who has just mastered his first text-book of psychoanalysis...
...Hergesheimer and Mr...
...In the case of the giant there is a post mortem baptism, like that of Trajan in the Paradiso, to justify monastic curiosity...
...And fortunately, for there were no Baedekers in those days, an explanatory miracle always occurs...
...Van Vechten, is masterly and devastating...
...He finds the style of Mr...
...Inge-Land, and not England, is the subject of his book...
...Ernest Brennecke, Jr...
...Anderson, not the confused gropings of a powerful but baffled imagination, but something which is already well thought out...
...Yet, it is perhaps not altogether the Very Reverend Dean's fault that he is a snob and a sceptic in equal parts, or that he has the clerical fatuity to write so often this sort of thing: "The word parliament, as Sir Cburtenay Ilbert [!] reminds us, meanj a talk...
...Commenting on Franklin's use of a female pen-name in his first literary efforts, Mr...
...Quaintest of all is the episode of the great fish Jasconius, a patient and obliging monster, on whose back the Saint and his companions celebrated Easter for seven years of their wanderings Thereafter they were guided by an angel, through many days of inky darkness, to the gleaming Isle of Paradise, and allowed to wander over such portions of its shores as mortals might visit, till, led this time by a bird from home waters, they regained the shores of Erin, with ambrosial odors still clinging to their garments...
...Modern readers, surfeited with sophisticated fiction, should find the ancient story, in M. Tuffrau's delightful version, a thing of fragrant and ingenuous beauty...
...Kreymborg are sincere, and that neither could be produced anywhere except in America, however doubtful this may seem to most of us in regard to Mr...
...It is in the concluding chapters of his book that Mr...
...Leuba showing his spintual affinity to those of us who accept the great Aristotelian tradition as it was modified and enlarged by the mind of Aquinas For Mr Leuba is acutely—and commend-ably—suspicious of the merely subjective...
...These virtues made him the idol of his era, and they preserve him as a schoolboy's hero today...
...New York- The Macmillan Company...
...He frequently appeared happier and more at ease in his correspondence with feminine friends than with his masculine ones...
...the engaging qualities, and the deep-rooted moral defects, of the race from which it springs...
...New York: Brentano's...
...In its first chapters, indeed until he arrives at the final one, entitled Auguries, he performs with superb skill a service of the greatest value, a service which practically none of our younger critics appears to have the stomach or the courage to attempt...
...Mencken, to the wit and urbanity of the late Mr...
...The western-story magazines, "tin Lizzies of American fiction" as they have been termed, in what they themselves call "big, clean stories," have created a golden cowboy mythology, of cliche super-noblemen of nature (or bad men) who in typewritten sagas snuff out human lives galore with callous indifference while shedding tears over their dying horse on the way to an inevitably happy matrimonial climax with a cowgirl as one-mold as they are...
...The greater part of the present work is written from a purely "scientific" or empirical standpoint, and it is difficult to praise too highly the patient industry and the volume of research that is behind these interesting chapters Following out the logic of a strictly psychological approach to the study of mysticism, the author is compelled to deal with all its forms and limitations, from the effects of hashish or bootleg alcohol to the religious ecstasies of a Saint Teresa, as being merely different degrees of the same thing rather than totally different things...
...To the average reader, it must stultify both the indictment and the praise which have gone before...
...As pure diversion, however, the work is undoubtedly a success...
...Grenville Vernon...
...Beginning with a "catechism" of three pages, in which the events of the hero's first twelve years are covered by a series of ultra-simple questions and answers, it moves swiftly on from high-spot to high-spot, with admirable, if sometimes quite childish, lucidity and directness...
...Hergesheimer, Mr...
...In his appreciation of the last named, he is particularly happy...
...He does, it is true, in certain cases attempt to evaluate his mystics and their visions by a consideration of their ethical results—but in the present state of religious and philosophical thought he can hardly claim that this provides him with a definite and non-controversial standard, for one naturally asks, "Whose ethics' Those, say of a Havelock Ellis—or of a Kansas fundamentalist...
...It is written by a very spnghtly, up-to-the-minute journalist, a psychoanalytic adept with a taste for the dramatic, who has gathered a certain amount of hitherto buned material and has aimed to present it briefly in the current fashion—that is to say, in a style at once terse, witty, cock-sure, outspoken and penetrating...
...Shuster's monastery wide to the sky and to the human heart...
...It is the more effective as in it he pays full tribute to the very real virtues of both Mr...
...HAD Mr...
...It takes her several years to find it out, though the reader has long been irritatmgly aware of it...
...Who will easily forget the circus-parade outcome of the argument between Brother Guido, the gardener, from the nape of whose cowl in certain seasons, "the birds chirped as they might have from the hands of Saint Francis," and Brother Alphonse, the librarian, who lived in "constant nearness to 54 THE COMMONWEAL November 17, 1926 long shelves of ascetic volumes in dark calf," as to whether the ichthyosaurus ever lived or not...
...He seems to dislike and despise all foreigners—except the Germans, whose scientific bureaucracy naturally attracts him, and the Austrians, because their aristocrats are the nearest approach to English "gentlemen" that he has met...
...His shoulders were round...
...That reminder is all very well, but it may be useful to point out that Mr...
...The good 56 THE COMMONWEAL November 17, 1926 monk and his companions are surprisingly like modern tourists in their consuming passion of curiosity...
...And incidentally, in this last story, Mr...
...More facts, more documents may be added to the portrait, but scarcely more truth This should be kept in mind, in justice to the present volume which (except in the publisher's announcements) does not pretend to be elaborate, definitive or complete, or to revolutionize current notions of the solon of colonial Philadelphia...
...Branch breathes on his subject a breath of humor and actuality, deflates his hero's romance-swollen "chaps," and allows him to stand forth as a genuine human being...
...It is rather that, despairing of finding a Moses among the accepted writers, he has turned to two men, who though utterly different from one another, appear to be in strongest revolt against the accepted standards of the past...
...Van Vechten is produced without any personal vindictiveness...
...THE legend of Saint Brendan's voyage was among the most popular of mediaeval sagas...
...As he matured, he became conciliatory, non-combative, and preferred to please rather than to antagonize...
...The new material consists of some playfully amorous letters written to Franklin by his Parisian friends, Mmes...
...On the other hand, it is only just to say that it is no credit to him that the dear land in which he lives has put its mark even upon his soul...
...But these things are easily disregarded, for the book is obviously written for him who reads as he runs and does not meditate too deeply...
...Hecht, and attempting to win a title to originality by simply being "different...
...Davis does not go on to the November 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 55 conclusion, that the influence of Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost upon American poets is very strong and that the sense of an indigenous past is growing in America, at least in that part of it where abandoned arms, grass-grown roads and mouldering headstones are at hand to enforce the lesson...
...And if it is not, Franklin may not remain unchallenged as the "first civilized American...
...It is a pity that Mr...
...And there is the tender touch of a war tragedy, leaving us with a suspicion that the beauty and sadness of the old house are going to haunt and influence the survivors in some mystic, supersensual way...
...The wife, who had made an excellent start at being all in all to her supposedly talented author-husband, comes stupidly to neglect him, and appears utterly blind to the approaching dangers of the first triangle...
...Brillon and Helvetius and the Countess d'Houdetot, in the course of their flirtations with him...
...Dewey, Mr...
...And, be it said with all respect to the new psychological school of biology, no modern study can hope to reveal more of the inner man than Franklin himself has revealed to those who read his own life-story with discernment...
...But, indeed, it is not of my country that he writes...
...Dreiser he simply exposes without explanation...
...Since its French is as simple as it is elegant, it might be welcomed in the classroom as a change from the too familiar pages of Colomba and Pecheur d' Islande...
...The Cowboy and His Interpreters, by Douglas Branch...
...This monastery could never have been situated in a valley— it is too full of sunshine—too close to the infinite sky...
...There is no glamour thrown about the man or his affairs or his affinities—it is simply dull and unpleasant, and might well serve as a warning to any who may have illusions on the subject, though I doubt if that was the author's purpose...
...He feels that both Mr...
...They leave behind the atmosphere and memories of Far End and go up to London, where we are dragged through thirteen dull, weary years of a hackneyed plot, unrelieved by any appeal to our sympathies or by witty talk or clever characterization...
...Inge, though a gentleman, in the sense in which he understands the term, seems to be almost completely lacking in humanity, and this fact, combined with his series of prejudices, makes him almost the last conceivable person to explain his country and my own...
...It is too reminiscent of the story of an incompetent schoolmaster who was accustomed to decide a doubtful quantity in the classroom reading of a Latin author by having his pupils vote upon it...
...The author of The Hill of Happiness has written of them as he knows them—and it is obvious that he knows and understands them well...
...Russell is rather inconsistent when he condones those foibles (sexual indiscretions, chiefly) for he shows no inclination to condone the utterly dissimilar but no more reprehensible foibles of Cotton Mather and other religious men of the period who were also, in a sense, representative of "civilization...
...IN The World of William Clissold, Mr H. G. Wells makes a striking comparison between himself and Dean Inge...
...As for the United States: "For more than a hundred years England has submitted, for the sake of Canada, to a series of affronts which would not have been tolerated from any other nation, and we have stood between America and any project of a European coalition...
...Hecht, of the banality of Mr...
...In this instance, the truth is that the essentially religious is ever the essentially human...
...Chicago- The University of Chicago Press...
...These items exhaust the novelties in the book...
...It is a hill swept by the winds of heaven, but whose leafy paths descend gently, with never a suspicion of steepness, to the little villages and farms below, drawing the life of the monastery and the life of the world together as though by a golden thread...
...Kreymborg...
...Anyway, the "feminine theory" does not seem to clarify very much...
...Russell writes: "Franklin had a pronounced feminine element in his nature and personality...
...But no...
...New York D. Appleton and Company...
...Shuster has written of, the qualities have been wistfully molded into the essence of the life of the religious—subordination of self...
...He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes...
...Beach then turns to writers whose style he does approve, and pays generous tribute to the force and native tang of Mr...
...As education spreads—as thought becomes more and more articulate, it is plain we are within measurable distance of a situation reached centuries ago in certain countries of Asia, where the faculty of putting striking reflections and graceful fancies into a metrical form was no more than was expected of any educated man or woman, and where many short poems that strike us today as powerful and distinguished productions, were either anonymous or of merely traditional authorship...
...The temptation to quote, if once yielded to, would swell this notice to a length that would spell rough weather with editors and make-up executives...
...His exposure of the incoherence of Mr...
...Shuster has shown that he can write about boys with the same understanding and natural charm that characterize his delineation of the friars...
...Harcourt, Brace and Company $5.00...
...Goad her with your chastity, (Virtue ever crucifies) Read the pity in her face, Love has made her very wise...
...We are no longer in a position to insult with impunity the rest of the human race...
...Leuba has no such criterion...
...Sherman, to the grace, flexibility, and flavor of Mr...
...Cabell...
...Nevertheless, there is much, both in his methods and his lines of thought, that establishes an intellectual kinship with the best Thomism, that, too, m spite of a professed scepticism as to the basis of "orthodox Christianity," as Mr...
...1.75...
...Far End opens promisingly enough...
...His Isle of Paradise, variously situated, continued to appear in maps of the renaissance period, inhabitants of the Azores and elsewhere long insisted that they had seen it on the horizon, it was not till the nineteenth century that all traces of the belief died out...
...Theodore Maynard...
...Benjamin Franklin, the First Civilized American, by Phillips Russell...
...As for Mr...
...his nature was social and lovable...
...There are exquisite descriptions of the lovely old English country-house and garden, with the romance of the two young couples who love it and fit into it so beautifully...
...It is very probable that in his matter Mr...
...If there is anything worse than the eternal triangle, it is two triangles, and the versatile man figures successively in two such episodes...
...Those who have had the good fortune to have lived under the roof of monastery or convent in their school years, will recognize how faithfully the author has reproduced the spiritual, human, and frequently humorous incidents of a sort common to such communities, where many of widely varying temperaments have chosen to gather together and blend their differing personalities in the service of God...
...If the British flag were hauled down on the North American continent, it is more than possible that the nations of Europe, enraged by the bloated prosperity and airs of superiority of 'the man that won by the war,' would combine to draw Shylock's teeth...
...The urbane Dean also dislikes (among other things) the British labor movement...
...Kreymborg at once and utterly...
...A poet once wrote: "I have built my house on a hilltop, And its windows are wide to the sky...
...Leuba is a foe to the extreme anthropomorphism which he finds in much of the language of mystics and in many of the forms of Christian theism...
...It is only after many storm-clouded days that they eventually take refuge at Far End...
...The book is beautifully printed, and full of most interesting portraits and reproductions of letters and documents...
...America was quite openly furnishing, not only funds, but agitators, murderers and incendiaries, to aid the rebels...
...Van Vechten...
...AFTER reading one of May Sinclair's early books I own that, for many years, I cautiously abstained from reading another...
...The smart journalistic jargon is sometimes faintly offensive: "The province is bossed by Governor Samuel Shute, one of those far-flung dunderheads who through the years have done so much to start seams in the British ship of state...
...So was Saint Thomas Aquinas...
...Love and humor have touched each of his pages—and, after all, what two qualities ever combine as irresistibly as these...
...Far End, by May Sinclair...
...Perhaps even it is not his fault—I brace myself in an ecstasy of heroic virtue to practise charity—that he talks the fly-blown Nordic nonsense and refers to the Irish ("absurdly called Celtic") as a Mediterranean stock that possesses, generally speaking (how rich is that qualification...
...T _, T. Lawrason Riggs...
...Leuba understands that somewhat debatable term, and with an almost religiously earnest trust in the scientific attitude that is generally taken to be the hallmark of the best "modern" thought...
...Saint Brendan never prays harder than when he wants to know what a multitude of white birds may mean or whether a tomb-like island contains a dead giant...
...His book goes beyond Emerson Hough's Story of the Cowboy in so much as it shows the cowboy as he really is (or, rather, was) by vivid contrast with the romantic nonesuch of pattern fiction and the movies...
...Colum's The Road Round Ireland...
...The coal strike he calls, with startling originality, a "criminal conspiracy...
...Civilized," indeed, is an apt word for the subtitle of a Franklin biography, if the term "civilization" is to be limited so as to mean only that curiously liberal, and no less curiously narrow, world in which our great Revolutionary personages and most of their European contemporaries lived and moved...
...Dreiser, and even his withering comment on Mr...
...All of them, together with their concomitant vices and shortcomings, are amply displayed in his familiar autobiography...
...Dreiser, and Mr...
...It helps to explain the bitter, though probably unconscious, prejudice the two men share against the Catholic Church But Wells, though a bounder, has many warm human elements m him...
...The question of the religious dogma of the Incarnation is, of course, outside this thesis, but one would like to protest in passing against a puerility in the author's treatment of the Blessed Henry Suso...
...It is here, strangely enough, that we find Mr...
...George D. Meadows Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1925 Seventh Annual Issue, by Franklyn Pierre Daws Enid, Oklahoma Frank P Davts...
...2.50...
...It is all very bald and obvious and sordid...
...5.00...
...No Catholic, as the Dean has explicitly said—though not in this book—can possibly be an "English gentleman " But our Dean has all of the frigid insolence that is a char52 THE COMMONWEAL November 17, 1926 acteristic of many "English gentlemen" and a still larger number of their middle-class imitators And the attitude is as ungracious as it is, in these days, dangerous...
...So far are the miners from having suffered from Mr...
...Beach not found it necessary to search so desperately for an American literary Moses, this book would have been one of the soundest, sanest, and keenest works of criticism which America has produced...
...he was practical and efficient...
...And then just as we are about to hail him as a critic jealous of the high standard of his calling, and impervious to the mere clamor of the moment, he lays before us Sherwood Anderson and Alfred Kreymborg as the fathers of American writing of the future...
...If we reproduce the last-named textually, it is not so much because its briefness tempts us or its merit outstands, but because, in a certain bitter-sweet quality, a certain amorous asceticism, it is typical of so much good verse that is reaching us from the more dehcate of our craf tswomen: "Strip her of her silken clothes, Lay her lovely body where Day's cold light may shine upon Reddened lips and hennaed hair...
...He says (I quote with substantial, not verbal, accuracy) that if some superhuman chemist could reduce his body and the Dean's to powder and examine their constitutent molecules, he would find them to be very similar...
...Anderson has widened the borders of American literature, though there are many who will doubt the wisdom of his particular widening, but in his manner, despite many racy passages, he writes like a none too well educated schoolboy...
...May it not be legitimate to consider even these characteristics as essentially mannish...
...Rationalism, it might be remembered, is not the only test of civilization...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 2
