Books
Shuster, George N. & Low, Benjamin R. C. & Stuart, Henry Longan & Windle, Bertram C. A. & Slattery, John T.
80 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 BOOKS The Reformation in Dublin, by Myles V. Ronan. New York: Longmans, Green and Company. $7.50. FATHER RONAN'S monograph upon the sorry beginnings...
...3.00...
...FOR 600 years Dante's daim to originality, "the sea I sail has never yet been passed," remained unchallenged by any serious writer...
...a lonely trick at the wheel under full starlight: one has them perfectly, after the author, in entire simplicity, has given them to us...
...In any case, Browne's instructions were clear, and, so long as they were carried out in the political sphere, considerable latitude in the dogmatic seems to have been left him...
...It is certain that the Islamic legend cannot dethrone Dante...
...And yet the style does characterize a man who is nothing so much as a graduate from consciously or unconsciously assimilated Bergsonism into disillusionment...
...Even Gray, by no means the worst of the terrible deputies sent over by England, and who paid for his moderation later with his head, uses it to dissuade his government from what was evidently a scheme of massacre in cold blood conceived after the revolt of the O'Neills...
...a good bit about his mates...
...while the Indian peninsula drifted north, piling up in its transit the Himalayas, the loftiest and the youngest of mountain ranges...
...price, 10 francs...
...How considerable a lowering that is will be understood when it is remembered that if the land surfaces of the earth were smoothed out to conform to the contour of the planet, the seas would cover everything to a depth of two miles...
...In 1548 "here in Dublin it is reported the Dublin soldiers are like to perish for lack of food...
...In Dr...
...These sentences embossed with horny intricacies, these paragraphs which do not follow, this book which is not a book, but a series of theses—the whole of it would round the lips of any intellectually aristocratic Frenchman...
...A jackal peerage of Aliens, Brownes, Cowleys, Brabazons, St...
...A. P. Coleman, the writer of Ice Ages Recent and Ancient, is emeritus professor of the same subject in Toronto University, and well known as a leading authority on the ice age...
...In our own day we have seen the curses come to roost and the dragons' teeth abundantly harvested...
...The picture is crude...
...Kosel'sche Buchhandlung...
...If imitation by Dante can be disproved, the manifest similarity is either an unsolvablc mystery or a miracle of originality...
...If permitted to take their own time and choose their own channel, neither buoys nor bric-a-brac are much at hazard because of them...
...The theory of a racial repugnance of the Celt to the German reformed doctrines will hardly do...
...Noble, for example...
...A typical example in proof of this statement is afforded by the image of the dropping leaves, borrowed from Virgil...
...Then for some reason unknown (and at present that is the weak point in the theory) this mass was rent in twain longitudinally, and a large part floated off in a westerly direction to form the new world—the tremendous wrench piling up the Rockies and the Andes as it terminated...
...musical arrangement by J. Rosamond Johnson...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...THESE two books, both dealing with the fades of our earth as we know it, and amply and splendidly illustrated, are by masters of their subjects...
...As early as 1550 "priests and people had . . . begun to hold their services in secret places, in order to preserve their Mass intact...
...We are greatly diverted...
...How ought the human race— or rather the theoreticians of the human race, those masters of unsentimental reason—approach the problem of misrule...
...After those vast convulsions the earth seems to have rested from its major efforts, though movements of some sort are constantly going on—hence the sea-covered cities of Tunis and elsewhere, and the elevated lands where the sea once was, such as those on the east coast of England—towns with seaside names but now some miles inland...
...It would have been much easier for me," he tells us, "to have written a more popular book, but then it would have been less valuable...
...By means of paraphrases and translations they may have come to the knowledge of the Florentine poet, just as the philosophy of Averrhoes became known to Saint Thomas Aquinas, through the works of Mai-monides and Raymond Martini...
...One castle and fortified manor after another had been abandoned...
...A heavenly bride, v.g., is depicted in the Islamic paradise as meeting her earthly lover and upbraiding him for having on occasions forsaken her for other, earthly-loves...
...Through an error in The Commonweal of November 17, a book review of Le Merveilleux Voyage de Saint Bran-dan a la Recherche du Paradis, by Paul Tujfrau, failed td mention the publisher...
...Even the resistance of the Scottish Highlanders, save in the extreme west, was partial and did not outlast a century and a half...
...Daly's book...
...It is all very well to drink in the fogs of Carlyle and Samuel Butler, but one should realize that doing so means frankly daring to become provincial and prophetic...
...Johnson, the editor of the Second Book of Negro Spirituals, seems to lean a trifle too closely to the story of the African origins of the music of the spirituals and makes no mention of the Spanish and French influences that show themselves markedly in the West Indian and South American Negro music...
...Few books give you more thinking about sociological problems of primary importance, as distinguished from facts of primary importance...
...It is not necessary to labor a point which respectable historians now admit...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...But its immediate consequence, as with the Indians of Puritan America, was to have them regarded by the comfort-loving English settlers, as something a little less than human, and explains much of the inhumanity exercised in their regard...
...Neither will the fact that the new religion came from England, with English governors to enforce it and English speech as its medium altogether explain the instant and permanent hostility it aroused...
...Nothing is more surprising among the many surprising facts of which Father Ronan informs us than the unworthy complaisance of the Celtic aristocracy and episcopate to Henry's claims to be the supreme head of the Church in Ireland as well as in England, and the difficulties encountered by envoys from Rome in getting a footing, even in parts of the country where the English warrant did not run...
...Lewis is not so bold as to draw up a practical formula...
...1 HE place of poetic reflection in novel w^ting is well emphasized by such English books as Marius the Epicurean, and Flecker's King of Alsander...
...Noble's quite extraordinary power of making one see through his eyes...
...On the side of Rome were ranged popular feeling, religious tradition, the faith handed down to them through generations, and these had the support of crowds of devoted men who could exhort the people in their own November 24, 1926 THE COMMONW E A L 81 tongue and whose example was sometimes more eloquent than their words...
...Die Gefrorene Melodie, by Karl Linzen...
...Stokcsley, Bishop of London, calls him a "railing friar," both Ormond and Gray despised him and made no secret of their contempt, and his own master beset him by spies...
...But with the people it was different...
...Neither does it stand forth, as far as can lie learned from the book under review, perfect in architecture as does the Inferno which amazed Ruskin because "it is accurately separated into circles drawn with well-pointed compasses, mapped and properly surveyed in every direction, trenched in a thoroughly good style of engineering...
...The Moslem Hell, it is safe to say, shows no such artistic realism as that which distinguishes the Inferno and constitutes one of its great charms...
...In that judgment the world was wrong, according to the dissertation, Escatologia Musulmana en la Divina Comedia, which Father Miguel Asin presented upon the occasion of his reception into membership of the Royal Academy, Madrid, in 1919...
...It was not for their interest that tribal lands should be turned into private estates, nor could they hope for special marks of royal favor...
...Coleman is more doubtful, which tells us that there was, in post-carboniferous times, but one single continent, and one ocean which was a much enlarged Pacific...
...For the rest, those who could feather their nests at the expense of the old agencies of civilization and humanity were welcome to the pickings, on the one easy condition that they should consider themselves a "garrison" ior the govcnxment at I/ondon...
...Daly commences his thesis with the idea of a molten hot world...
...Beginning with the general assumption that revolution is a basic rule of modern life, he proceeds in the direction of a kind of internationalized Fascismo even while pausing to fling bombs at a great variety of matters construed as "sentiment...
...In his foreword, Father Ronan modestly states his purpose in writing this first authoritative story of the Reformation in Ireland...
...It is considered "one of the most touching and beautiful episodes in all literature...
...The most perfect adaptation of the legend is found in the Futurhat of the Murcian Ibn Arabi...
...At most, it demonstrates that the religious literature of Islam in the theme of the hereafter "offers to investigators a more abundant harvest of ideas, images, symbols and descriptions similar to those of Dante than all the other religious literatures together that have up to now been consulted by Dantists in their endeavor to explain the genesis of the Divine Comedy...
...As Dr...
...they could not even be prevented from preaching...
...The reflecting reader sees at once that the charge of servile imitation cannot be made against Dante unless the impossible feat be demonstrated that Dante was a master of Arabic and had a comprehensive knowledge of the writings of Ibn Arabi...
...He was to suppress, on any pretexts that might seem best to him, the religious houses in Dublin and throughout Ireland, turn over such of their property as could be realized upon to the English crown, and come to what arrangements were feasible for the distribution of their real estate among a host of greedy placemen and officials...
...Eight marks...
...It is about a mile high, and the island of Ascension stands above it at about its central point...
...A positive exodus of farmers of English stock seems to have been under way...
...New York: Charlei Scribner's Sons...
...An apostate prior of the Augustinian Priory in London, a lickspittle and spy of Thomas Cromwell from the first, Browne was rewarded for his work in bringing about the suppression of the friars' houses in England by the see of Saint Lawrence OToole...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes...
...Asin's book gives only the various summaries and not the text of the Islamic legend, it is impossible to make a minute comparison of the detailed treatment of all the subject-matter which appears both in the Futurhat and the Divine Comedy...
...5.00...
...Our Mobile Earth, by R. A. Daly...
...Yes, if you have got through your primer of sociology and over your youthful flush of heterodoxy...
...Father Asin aims to throw into relief the resemblances and analogies existing between the various forms of the Nocturnal Journey and Ascension of Mahomet, and the Divine Comedy, and so to prove that the latter is really an imitation of the former...
...Of course, many of the ideas advanced in these two books are still theories, but there are strong scientific arguments in favor of them, and a number of statements are ascertained facts...
...The waters rushing in between the two continents formed the Atlantic, and the mid-Atlantic swell—a ridge which runs beneath it and between the two continents, parallel with their long axes— marks the spot where the rupture took place...
...Then dry land emerged for the reception of those living things which did not frequent, as most of the first comers did, the waters...
...A real touch of literary greatness, that...
...The evangelical hymns and the popular melodies of the northern and southern states have also their place in this history of the spirituals which, it is rather surprising to find, the modern critics of their words and music are rather slow to acknowledge...
...The Art of Being Ruled, by Wyndham Lewis...
...Then it cooled, and water was deposited—at first covering the whole surface save where, perhaps, here and there, the peak of a volcano rose above it...
...Sam Noble, Able Seaman: 'Tween Decks in the 'Seventies...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...In that event, Dante will be recognized more than ever as the voice of the middle-ages, as expressing the thoughts, not only of the Christian world, but also of the realm of Mahomet...
...it is a very slight movement on an arc of many hundred miles, but it exists...
...Some of these writings are today unedited and are extant in only three copies...
...Islam and the Divine Comedy, by Miguel Asin...
...From no country did the light of faith disappear so completely as from neighboring Wales and Cornwall...
...In both cases the style is pleasant and the language not unduly technical...
...R. A. Daly, author of Our Mobile Earth, is professor of geology at Harvard University...
...John T. Slattery...
...once in awhile deeply touched...
...Moreover, the weight of this immense mass of ice depressed the land on which it lay, the crust of the earth being elastic and resting on a fluid magma beneath...
...Each chapter states a proposition, which is then examined and confuted in the best scholastic fashion...
...But should you read the book...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...What was the real reason for the failure of the Reformation in Ireland...
...That it should be a coincidence is impossible...
...Lewis is not a devotee of facts or statistics...
...ABLE seamen have this in common with cats on mantles: they know their way about, and are exceedingly nimble in following it...
...There have been many of these ages from the very earliest times...
...The English translation, due to the initiative of Lord Balfour and the Duke of Alba, has finally found publishers in E. P. Dutton and Company...
...The present book seems an advance over the rest of his narrative work...
...Neither book is beyond the comprehension of the general reader, and both are of intense interest...
...Daly is prepared to accept the Wegencr theory, of which Dr...
...In a very earnest sense it need not be written, and certainly I shall not foolishly attempt to outline it here...
...The present volume of spirituals presents some splendid results of the marked Negro faculty for harmonies and tonal phrasings...
...Swallow...
...In some places the ice was as much as three miles in thickness...
...Your "thinker" never is, being primarily far more interested in philosophies or ensembles...
...Even the Archbishop's other manor of Shankhill was made useless for him by the raids of the mountain dans...
...FATHER RONAN'S monograph upon the sorry beginnings of Protestantism in Ireland has all the air of breaking new ground, and very hard and stubborn ground at that...
...Democracy...
...George N. Shuster...
...It discusses the metaphysics of government, erasing with a wry and understanding smile all such matters as political campaigns and ward bosses...
...Not until shrinkage of the part that was land took place with the formation of deep clefts and elevated portions, were the waters separated into seas, lakes, and rivers...
...Lewis is an atrocious writer...
...The identification of nationality and religion was doubtless to become complete later...
...This is an amazing theory, but there are many things to support it—especially the correspondence of the strata on each side of the Atlantic At the same time, the nose of northeastern Africa was being pulled out of the Gulf of Mexico, the great island continent of Australia was torn off as well as Antarctica...
...The Church has even conquered a representative number of artists, who seem to be Mr...
...And, of course, there are plenty of quotations from Professor Irving Babbitt...
...The majority of Irish chieftains," says Father Ronan, "seem to have cared a great deal for land and titles, and were ready enough to accept the king's ecclesiastical polity...
...We consider the things that have happened as well as the things which really did not happen...
...Some of the most remarkable of the movements of the earth have been due to the ice ages...
...BRIEFER MENTION The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, edited by Jamesi Weldon Johnson...
...As we read on, and begin to realize the self-sacrifice and labor that went to make it a documented history, we are divided between respect for the learned parish priest who, by virtue of a single book, takes rank among the authorities whom every serious student of the period will have to consult, and the obscure and anonymous populace whose share in defeating the Reformation, with all its inheritance of materialism, industrialism and social injustice, he chronicles...
...Linzen is one of the newer Catholic novelists and has distinguished himself for notable essay writing and exquisite short-story telling...
...One is particularly struck with Mr...
...Asin's scholarly volume, insistence is made on the existence of Islamic literary models and little attention is given to the enrichment effected by Dante's art in transforming the copy, if copy it be, into a thing of ineffable beauty not found in the so-called model...
...But the book makes excellent reading, and the author's zest in recollection casts a golden, sunset glow over the whole book, that is as warming to the heart's cockles as must have been the "tots" of grog he lovingly celebrates...
...Lewis would have none of that...
...The last, or pleistocene, which came to an end about twenty thousand years November 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 83 ago on this continent, covered with ice about four thousand square miles of North America, including the whole of Canada...
...1 HE older critics were accustomed to find in Negro music many traces of the experiences of the race after it had left its African home...
...It is a curious book, wise and beautifully written...
...It is plain that English policy was at the end of its first phase of bankruptcy...
...the softening shores of lovely England...
...something about his officers, but rather less than we should like about the hard facts of life in the English navy in the 'seventies...
...But it is edifying to find the author of The Reformation in Dublin, in a foreword, advising his readers that a Life of Archbishop Browne, which has formed the backbone of the five main histories of the period has now been shown, by the discovery of original documents, to be an entirely spurious collection printed to feed religious bigotry during the anti-Popery scare of 1678...
...Lewis frequently out-Spenglers Spengler) are thrown at one en passant...
...As there was a similar ice formation in northern Europe at the same time, it may be imagined that a good deal of water was locked up in the process...
...Dante transforms the simple image into a pathetic picture by personifying the stripped branch—an invention lacking in Virgil, and the transformation shows us "autumn leaves which drop one by one until the branch beholds all its garments on the ground...
...But it does seem that the Church—or any other institution for that matter —has conquered the world precisely because it did not need to be clever...
...The land is as large as England," reports Gray, "too large to be altogether inhabited anew, and the total extirpation of the Irish would be very difficult, considering the lack of in-habiters and the hardships these Irishmen can endure...
...A prosperous voyage to it...
...Boston is built on the eroded summit of a very ancient mountain range...
...82 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 "The similarity between this work and the Divine Comedy," says Dr...
...It is interesting, in view of the "low" and evangelical tone of the Anglican church in Ireland down to our own days, to note that Browne's religious "convictions" at the time of his appointment to Dublin, were far in advance of what was safe in England and that his affiliations, like those of his master and the wily Cranmer, were with Bucer, Zwingli and the German Protestants generally...
...5.00...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Henry Ixingan Stuart...
...Against the friars Henry had no available weapon...
...History and politics in Ireland have always been interchangeable terms...
...Benjamin R. C. Low...
...Kempten: Jos...
...Big mouthfuls like "the great war was a gigantic episode in the Russian revolution" (it might be stated here that Mr...
...There is some very shrewd criticism of Bernard S'haw and sundry other folk, some pertinent explanation of 84 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 what men like Sorel and Kautsky attempted to profess...
...A variety of loftily disdainful satire is expended upon matters like Christianity and romanticism...
...From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, Moslem traditionists, poets, and mystics elaborated the legend into a fabric of religious narrative...
...Asin, "betrays a relation such as exists between copy and model...
...He simply says that he is entitled to their property...
...An Autobiography...
...But its date must be set a good many years further on...
...Stuart, as being very small—news which may well increase one's dwindling optimism...
...The picture of Ireland of the Reformation epoch which Father Ronan gives us is that of a terribly upheaved country, and contemporary letters which he quotes tell us why...
...Even Boston moves up and down every few hours...
...An excellent recommendation to the rivet-racked and subway-ridden...
...Lewis offers a kind of summa of modern political thinking...
...Under the very shadow of Dublin Castle the king could bring no peace to his 'reformed' church...
...His lovely, curious, memory-haunted house becomes the shelter of character and readers—until, at the end, the windows are opened and action is aroused...
...4.00...
...This sturdiness of the Irish constitution may well be regarded, by those who do not know on what manna from heaven they have been fed, .is their racial salvation...
...Dis-tinguo" is his forte, and is especially effective where liberalism is the target...
...George Browne, the first Protestant Archbishop of Dublin is the villain of the drab story that Father Ronan has to tell...
...The book is published by I' Artisan du Livre, 2 rue de Fleurus, Paris, France...
...Legers, and Cavendishes, meaner and more rapacious, if possible, than their brethren in England who had fattened on ruined abbeys and priories, takes hold of the land...
...Ex uno disce cmnes...
...It is worthy of note," says Father Ronan, "that the king gave no reason such as Cowley advanced, for the suppression of the religious houses...
...The Pale had been pushed back to within a few miles of Dublin, and the Englishry were practically in a state of siege...
...At the end of it we know a great deal about the entirely likable and unassuming author...
...But begin to read the present German story and you are immediately in a kind of world not conceived of by either of the above enumerated tales—a world in which reflection is almost the sole activity...
...The tendency to ascribe some superhuman and baffling quality of persistence to the Celtic stock appears again and again...
...3.50...
...The dualism of Irish social life that is to be the country's bane for nearly four centuries begins...
...A letter from Robert Cowley, Master of the Rolls, to Cromwell in 1537, laments the condition of "the poor English earth-tillers in the English pale, who cannot skill upon penury nor wretchedness as the Irish tenants do sustain" and who are being "driven hither into England and Wales, and the Irish tenants in their rooms and farms...
...Lewis's symbol of ultimate cleverness...
...In fact, it is calculated that the surface of the oceans was lowered 150 feet during that time...
...TT Bertram C. A. Windle...
...They all present many difficulties, even to the most learned Arabic scholars...
...The Catholic reply to books like this has not yet been written...
...A long twilight on the old Victory...
...It was their instinct for truth, he makes it quite dear, their determination to seek first the kingdom of God, and accept nothing in its place, which has kept Ireland Irish and kept it Catholic to our own day...
...What we are facing, as we read one despatch after another to London telling of empty churches, of old sanctuaries turned into inns, of parishes without pastors, and of sermons preached to rocks and trees, is the spectacle of a boycott of the new religion carried out by peasants and common people on a national scale which was not only to fasten upon Protestantism in Ireland for all time the stigma of oppression and proselytism, but eventually to bring the unworthy leaders of their own race back into the martyr ranks...
...Klaus Noggerath, an elderly recluse and painter, dreams back over his life and its motives...
...From the day of Giraldus Cambrensis to the day of Piggott, the arts of the interpolator and the forger have been busy, seeking to justify to the world the most shameless and the most persistent denials of justice with which the records of any great nation are disgraced...
...In the austerity and self-denial of the friars they could discern a higher light than that provided by Henry VIII and his grasping officials...
...He steers a pleasant and quite illogical course, in and out and roundabout, among his recollections of early and seagoing years on H.M.S...
...sometimes hugely amused...
...HERE is a book by a "cold thinker," the number of which is reported by my confrere, Mr...
...Tween Decks is comfortable reading...
...Coleman is not so sure of this—it was "void and empty," and the clouds of vapor and smoke which hung over it covered it with darkness...
...The truth is that even if Dante derived the material of the Divine Comedy from sources outside of himself, he has to transmuted and enriched it by his own experience and imagination that the original pales into insignificance when compared to the finished product of his artistic craftsmanship...
...A parallel scene is painted by-Dante of his meeting with Beatrice in the Garden of Eden...
...The collecting of these volumes of Negro folk-lore and music, comes a little later in history, but is yet timely enough to produce art results in American composition which, while their limitations should be recognized, really form a valuable national asset...
...As has always been the case with English rule in Ireland, even the facade of decency that has masked oppressive acts in the larger country, was abandoned, as though not worth the trouble of justifying...
...Grandgent...
...One of my elderly friends used to speak of certain books as making "comfortable reading...
...Ice Ages Recent and Ancient, by A. P. Coleman...
...4.00...
...It has never withstood the probe of reason, it is the buffoon of political experience...
...Since those early days there have been violent convulsions, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, the causes and nature of which are fully detailed in Dr...
...The so-called "precursors" of the Divine Comedy, such as the sixth book of Virgil, Saint Patrick's Purgatory, the Vision of Friar Alberic, the Apocalypse of Saint Paul, if they entered into the genesis of the Divine Comedy, had never been considered as models for the work which six centuries regarded as the product of original inventive genius...
...Perhaps in the end it need only admit, when a new school of Doric sages has gone its way, that it has sometimes seen the miracle of grace...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 3
