Books
C., T. & Shuster, George N. & Martens, Frederick H. & Stapleton, John & Binsse, Harry Lorin & Cunningham, Doris & Walthew, Clare P.
La Vie de Disraeli, by Andre Maurois. Paris: Librairie Gallimard. IT WOULD not be altogether unfair to call it the scenario method—this present-day method of writing biography, presenting the...
...there is evidence of this on almost every page—the close-up, for example, of "Dizzy's" Cambridge friend...
...of Shelley the writer and thinker there was, to be frank, just as little as could possibly be given...
...Now, from the same pen, we have La Vie de Disraeli, as congenial a second choice as could possibly have been found, and a subject moreover which, if properly illuminated and well understood, is capable of letting light into many dark corners of our social and political life today...
...Very tall, alert, clear-eyed, he dominated Christendom as the column dominated all left of ancient Rome...
...But even here, the author's presentation is affected by a sectarian point of view, which inevitably tends to destroy the value of his conclusions...
...But the most engrossing part of the book is the almost lyric interpretation of Meredith, who is seen as "condemning and surpassing romanticism...
...In the sonatas we follow him through the vicissitudes of forty years, from the time he was twelve until he was fifty-two...
...asks Brother Rufino...
...relying on inner experience, one may desire to improve the actualities of life...
...All in all, there is a pleasant time to be spent with Kit O'Brien, and for those that yearn for beautifully written narrative and gentle reading I recommend this book...
...It is a more complete man we find in these swiftly-moving scenes, which have the great merit of driving the reader to a deeper, first-hand study...
...This is a little too sunshiny, a little too nauch like Locksley Hall, to be tied to the thirteenth century...
...Before the series to which I have just referred was started, M. Andre Maurois, justly accounted one of the chief foreign interpreters of Englishmen to themselves, had given, in Ariel, ou la Vie de Shelley, a remarkably brilliant picture of Shelley the man...
...These it was M. Fernandez's desire to set forth in his book...
...The author's partisan treatment of his entire theme, moreover, conveys the impression (and his political conclusions are largely religiously based) that Bohemia is made up, in a confessional sense, mainly of Bohemian Brethren and "Czecho-Slovak Church" schismatics—and this in a land more than 95 percent of whose inhabitants are members of the Roman Catholic Church...
...I am sure that I have made nothing clear...
...And one admits freely that certain points it makes are impressive and fresh—that now and then the old scene is brightened through a quick and jagged flash of insight...
...What chiefly mars the book and, in fact, makes it significant mainly for summer reading, is Miss Scudder's style, which tends at times to oversweetness...
...Kit O'Brien, by Edffar Lee Masters, New York: Boni and Liveriffht...
...Mr...
...For this reason, because he has made Beethoven's personality come vividly to life, this book will be interesting and helpful to those who are trying to give an intelligent interpretation of the spirit of Beethoven rather than to gain laurels by a brilliant performance...
...Masters is loyal to that righteous community of his, and its types are kindly dealt with...
...However, the more vivid interest wanes after their return home, and the incidents that follow might have been hastened to the happy conclusion without any definite sense of loss on my part...
...To this, it is true, he added a firm belief in the state church of England as by law established, but his testimony to the social and political value of a fixed creed sounds strangely applicable to our own day, to which, in England at least, Lothair...
...Lord John Manners, "A Lancelot wandering in a word of machines," or the longsustained succession of flashes in which the figures of Beaconsfield and Gladstone are shown in all their outward, and to a certain extent, their inward contrast...
...ANY book that sheds new light on Beethoven or his music - is eagerly welcomed by all true lovers of the master...
...the blood of Sainte-Beuve is not in their veins for nothing...
...Ludwig van Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas, by William Behrend...
...Guy de Pourtales's Franz Liszt was a particularly vivid affair...
...Readers who have felt the nearness of Meredith to Bergson, and who have sensed as well the difficulty involved in comparing the onward movement of Diana of the Crossways with the ordinary dramatic progress of standard fiction, will read M. Fernandez's treatment with considerable profit and relish...
...AFTER Professor Babbitt had hurled his formidable volumes • at the head of the monster Romanticism, it seemed for a time as if its friends and defenders would hardly dare sally forth...
...This difference is, perhaps, to be accounted for by the fact that the present treatise avoids continental "Romanticism" and seeks to photograph an attitude in English letters with the aid of light supplied by the Greeks...
...The Spirit of Bohemiaj by Vladimir Nosek...
...3-50...
...The history of the Church militant for ages past seemed written there...
...Very likely the most suggestive portion of the book is an analysis of Empedocles as a romantic...
...So old, so wise, so weary, Pope Gregory...
...Now the most lucid and tranquil of Scottish poet-professors, Lascelles Abercrombie, gives us a book in which there is no mention of Babbitt and hardly any reference to Rousseau...
...JOHN STAPLETON...
...Like them it strives to explore certain of the larger personalities who have expressed themselves in European letters by the light of philosophic principle...
...And for some months past, in France, a whole collection has been appearing, volume by volume, in which this or that great man is paraded before your eyes, lit up by the arclamps of a hundred epigrams...
...Messaffes, by Ramon Fernandez...
...The very title of the third chapter is a good example of this...
...his terrible loneliness, and finally his frantic, grief-stricken prayer for peace...
...One suspects, however, that this investigation ought to have led to some consideration of Hindu mysticism, from which Empedocles doubtless derived...
...John Huss . . . the Zoroaster or Mohammed of the Czechs...
...Kit's honest recital wins one's affections in the early pages, and thereafter for some time one delightedly follows his exciting career...
...Wordsworth, judged from this point of view (no doubt to Professor Babbitt's astonishment) is not romantic at all...
...And when the book is so deserving of a place of honor as William Behrend's Pianoforte Sonatas, it is sure of finding an appreciative and sympathetic audience...
...Unbowed by the weight of well-nigh a hundred years, he bore himself stately as those columns and with fewer signs of decay...
...still has a message—if not quite the same one as Disraeli intended...
...Nosek's second section offers a "sketch," to use the author's ownl word, which, qualified by a quite comprehensible overinsistence on Czech nationalist merits, adequately covers the general achievement of Czech culture and the moral influence of its arts on Czech national development...
...An introductory essay, Of Philosophic Criticism, does something to remove the handicap...
...There is some good criticism of Proust, particularly as regards his famous' theory of "intermittencies...
...One's feelings of compassion cannot fail to be stirred by the tragedy of the once beautiful actress, and one wishes to hear more of her...
...Not that the forerunner of Tory democracy, the parliamentary slayer of Peel, the first imperialist, the political orator (after the first familiar failure) the purchaser of the Suez Canal shares, the intimate friend and counsellor of Queen Victoria, and the affectionate husband—not that these are passed over...
...In pursuance of this ideal...
...THE author's Survey of Czecho-Slovak History, Music and Literature, with its avowed object of affording an insight into Czecho-Slovakia's culture, character, mentality and spiritual achievements, has been quite legitimately written with the premise that "the only way toward a better understanding among nations is a better knowledge of each other...
...From the pages it devotes to music and (with qualifications) from those given to literature, one may draw information...
...Obviously it was not his intention to do anything of the sort...
...His discussion of Cardinal Newman is very clever, but like the Abbe Bremond's book, it seems to ignore the purpose for which the Grammar of Assent was written at the risk of making the book more autobiographical than Newman intended it should be...
...While not particularly picturesque, it is an easy dialect to follow, and very effective in creating the images of the characters that people the book...
...Later, with that brilliance of perception that perhaps came from his race—"he was," says M. Maurois, "particularly Oriental in desiring the good things of this life while all the time perceiving their worthlessness"—he was to defend tradition, and it is not generally realized that his famous epigram, "My lords, I am on the side of the angels," formed part of a defense of Christian dogma, the maintenance of which he considered a necessity both for personal peace of mind and for the stability of the state...
...IT WOULD not be altogether unfair to call it the scenario method—this present-day method of writing biography, presenting the hero instead of interpreting him, substituting closeups for analysis, and brilliant stage-pictures for a patient account of his character and influence...
...Brother John: A Tale of the First Franciscans, by Vida D. Scudder...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...CLARE P. WALTHEW...
...All such matters, however, involve subtle philosophic points of view...
...his stormy moods and intense desire for solitude in later life...
...Louis and the involuntary adoption of the role of champion to the unhappy Miss Siddons attracts and thrills one...
...The sun shone a white pearl...
...T. C...
...For instance, there is an examination of Balzac's method of characterdrawing which calls attention to the unfortunate fact that people who move through the Comedie Humaine tend gradually to become types or even ideas...
...2.50...
...M. Maurois has not taken the task too easily...
...But M. Maurois is far from being only a scenario-writer...
...and the first is the result of a turning inward which may assume either of two forms— "relying on inner experience, one may desire to withdraw from the actualities of life...
...Nosek's volume we find such grotesque phrases as "the chivalrous spirit" of Lutheranism...
...The Spirit of Bohemia is divided into two halves—part one dealing with Bohemian history and part two with Bohemian literature and music...
...translated by Montgomery Belffion...
...The firm skin of his face showed an infinitude of minute lines, cryptic register of past experience...
...translated from the Danish by Ingeborg Lund, with an introduction by Alfred Cortot...
...Most surprisingly one finds throughout the book a real feeling for the difficulty, the discipline, inherent in the Franciscan way of life...
...EDGAR LEE MASTERS has again happily employed the jargon of the Petersburg, Illinois, locality in this tale which he allows Kit O'Brien to tell...
...These aspects of Disraeli's life and character are singled out because they are too much neglected in the popular picture...
...This is surely not that sentimental Franciscanism so common among modem admirers of the great saint...
...Elsewhere our author is not so successful...
...In fact, the author's Bohemian history is quite frankly and zealously antiCatholic, and paints the historic scene, not as it is, but as he would have it appear in his readers' eyes...
...The limelight is turned to deeper things...
...3.00...
...This does not mean that the book is merely designed for students of Beethoven's sonatas...
...Herr Ludwig carried it on with his more weighty portrayals of Bismarck, Napoleon and the German kaiser...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...This, a fair example of his method of expression, leads one to wonder if Gaul be not divided into far more parts than Caesar knew...
...The flight from Petersburg and the dreaded reformatory to a houseboat near St...
...DORIS CUNNINGHAM...
...Miss Scudder's sympathies, too, although she does not lavish them, are rather Tennysonian, in a way which one feels must be alien to the time of which she writes...
...BELGION says, in his introduction to this unusual series of critical essays, that M. Fernandez's lineal literary ancestor is Coleridge...
...This description of Pope Gregory offers a good sample of Miss Scudder's manner: "Old, old—surely coaeval with those ruined columns which stood in the Campo Vaccino and always stung John to reverence as he passed by...
...When we reach the beginning of the struggle for Czech political autonomy and the activities of the historian Palacky and of Havlicek, Mazzini's pupil, we find an exposition as detailed as unconvincing of the former's paradoxical theories to the effect that "Catholicism has despoiled Christianity,, which in itself is sufficient for humanity at all stages of civilization, through insisting more on dogmas than on the morality of life...
...To it he confided all his secrets from his "infant prodigy" days to almost the very end of his life...
...Each character in the story lives, but George Montgomery and Miss Siddons are portrayed with amazing deftness...
...Blake and Shelley are therefore two dominant romantic types...
...Probably the only section of The Spirit of Bohemiai which is free from this defect is that which deals with Czech music...
...his gay career in Vienna during the years when he was feted and petted as a brilliant virtuoso, his bitterness at being thus misunderstood and underrated...
...But they, after all, can be found in other lives of Disraeli...
...The formula at which Mr...
...FREDERICK H . MARTENS...
...The town itself lay like a dimmer pearl upon its hill...
...the "moral strength" of the bloodthirsty Zizka...
...It should be read by all who are interested in the vast, complex problem it discusses...
...Why should criticism choke its utterance with an almost fantastic jargon...
...It deserves to be tested, not by what it is worth in itself, but by the newness of the vision which it brings to the contemplation of literature...
...Have you observed, my son, how wondrous are the ways of love...
...Abercrombie arrives is this: the contrast really lies between romantic and realistic...
...New York: E. P. Button and Company...
...We can but agree with the author when he says that the piano was ever the instrument with which Beethoven was most intimate...
...2.00...
...But lack of the historic sense which leads to misrepresentations of historic values has never made for ''a better understanding among nations...
...But this is only one of many suggestive points of view which this new book opens up...
...The tales of these people that come through him abound in sympathy and humor, though prose is not the medium of the creator of the Spoon River Anthology...
...MISS SCUDDER has written an ideal book for summer reading...
...GEORGE N . SHUSTER...
...2.50...
...Of course, everything hinges upon the query, "What philosophy...
...Eliot's poem "with having too great an autonomy of the aesthetic synthesis...
...With all of this Miss Scudder couples a truly understanding attitude toward the men of the middle way, whose policies finally succeeded in the order, and whose chief exponent, Bonaventure, ends by having Brother John clapped into prison, there to end his days...
...Thus throughout Mr...
...Everything looks forward to that happy day, the age of the spirit, when all men shall be united in a great brotherly love...
...HARRY LORIN BINSSE...
...It would, of course, be impossible to read through some of Beethoven's sonatas without marveling at his genius in making notes do astonishing things, but the author is more interested in what those notes are saying, and what the sonata is expressing...
...Those who know Mr...
...One may reasonably feel slightly dubious about this claim, but the book does bear some relation to Biographia Litteraria and its companion volumes...
...Then he adds— wondrous "in that it always demands what is most foreign to nature, and most offensive to the natural man...
...Applied to criticism, it is interested in picking up and following the "spiritual dynamism" which books reveal and then situating "them in the human universe...
...Through his pallor shone an almost physical light, not emanating, curiously enough, from his eyes so much as from his entire countenance...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...With regard to its Historical Aspects, the author has vitiated The Spirit of Bohemia with too much of the spirit of his own narrow religious particularism to justify commendation...
...The story concerns an English Franciscan, Brother John of Sanfort, and carries him through the turbulent years just after the death of Saint Francis, when the Spirituals, or Zealots, of whom he is one, opposed the more practical wisdom of the Church and suffered to keep pure what they considered the true rule of their order...
...M. Fernandez, who seems to lean in the general direction of Paul Valery's intellectual discipline, is first of all a Bergsonian.^ This is not the simplest and least technical of philosophic attitudes, and so the reader who is not familiar with it, at least to some extent, will find Messages a trifle baffling...
...but I have tried faithfully to state the author's point of departure...
...By it we are informed that "modern philosophy is like a sort of transparent gauze, subtle, shapeless, revealing itself as it reveals and modeling itself as it models the spontaneous products of the human mind...
...That a face could be so worldly-wise yet so illumined...
...As regards the rest, while one must admit that absolute impersonality on the historian's part is a practical impossibility, the personal viewpoint should not obtrude to the extent of justifying Voltaire's cynical dictum that all historical writing is merely "playing tricks with the dead"—or the living, for that matter...
...Behrend sets out to discover Beethoven the man as revealed in his piano sonatas...
...2.50...
...it is called Beau Brummell and Saint Ignatius, and it brings out, more vividly and concisely than any full-length biography, the place which was filled in the mind of this dandypolitician by his early read'ng of the Jesuit saint and his constant admiration of the order Saint Ignatius founded...
...But the fact is he courts the risk of appearing to be a pamphleteer for an ideology when he is really a remarkably perceptive young man...
...The limelight has been used dexterously...
...Altogether the work is excellently done...
...the characters stand forth well, if a little too boldly...
...the action moves swiftly...
...and there have been, to single out the more pronounced successes, M. Jacques Sindral's Talleyrand and M. Jean Prevost's Montaigne...
...it is written in an interesting manner and is no more technical than the average concert program notes...
...the second of these is based on an acceptance of the "actualities of life...
...The fashion is now international...
...It may seem ungrateful and caviling to suggest, therefore, that what is really valuable in what he has to say (and much is valuable) apparently depends less upon his philosophic assumptions than upon his real critical acumen...
...the same writer's Chopin, just published, was equally bright...
...Lytton Strachey began it in England with his Eminent Victorians...
...Abcrcrombie's previous books need not be reminded that his manner of presentation is both clear and poetic...
...He [John of Sanfort] felt the rhythm of his breath and blood one with the rhythm of all growing things, nay, with the ordered dancing of the stars...
...it is, if one may say so, made to penetrate Disraeli's mind and shine on pages from his novels and his wonderfully self-revealing letters, so that at the end, while the man stands forth in our vision, his significance is also imprinted on our imagination and our understanding...
...Behrend cannot be said to have contributed anything material toward the study of the technique of Beethoven, nor has he brought to light any new facts concerning his life...
...his was rather the dignity than the pathos of age...
...it is full of golden days, Umbrian landscapes and warm sunshine, mixed with just enough history and serious thought to relieve the more conscientious of any sense of guilt in devoting a few hours to it...
...M. Fernandez reproaches Mr...
...Brother John's face shone of a sudden...
...Romanticism, by Lascelles Abercrombie...
...his deep despondency when he learned he was going to be totally deaf...
...New York: Brentano's...
...The basic definition arrived at by M. Fernandez is, therefore, this: "Aesthetics must be an imaginative ontology...
...Through this form of music he voiced his distaste for the conditions of his home life...
...Clearly the French have a genius for this kind of writing...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 11
