Books

...The mass of the middle class, moving from one apartment to another, cannot encumber themselves with collections of paintings even if they could afford to buy them...

...His aim seems to have been nothing more momentous than to write an interesting book, full of whimsical ideas and the free play of intellectual fancy...

...One of Professor Ha'skins's major virtues is his ability to keep this "comprehensive impression" always in mind...

...The beauty of Dr...

...Alfred Adler and his theory of the "inferiority complex...

...To be able to impose this sort of imaginative realization is an achievement to which one is moved to extend high praise indeed...

...MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL...

...The third summer, after renting other painters, the brewer might find that he wanted a Hassam every summer...

...In his other essays, devoted to similar subjects, Mr...

...And the moral is that the great mass of artistic bric-a-brac that encumbers most museums and has value only for historical research should be stored in well-lighted subterranean galleries where it can be adequately studied by those who are interested, while the museum itself should be an exposition-house where a few chosen relics of the past should be so placed as to restore the sense of their original function, living again as they originally lived, in a temple, a palace or a cathedral...

...Dodd, "as a spoiled child, of course...

...According to Dr...

...And another, equally favorable to its production, is to begin as a lonely, neglected child...

...The author's particular target is—instead of the better known Freud and Jung—the equally vulnerable Dr...

...Moreover, with the experimental nature of so much modern art, there is an additional value in being able to possess pictures for a season only...

...The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is a book to which one can cheerfully extend a hearty welcome...

...And all this is particularly important in America where museums, otherwise than in Europe, contain masses of art works that are wholly divorced from any national tradition...

...the details in town and home and nature, though occasionally conscious of the neo-Irish man^ ner of investing all thing...

...Thus, in his Land of Sunday Afternoon he attacks the conventional American museum as a dreary asylum where taste and aesthetic pleasure are drugged and destroyed: "If it is a misdemeanor to crowd five Italians into a tenement bedroom, it is criminal to crowd five great works of art into a space where not one can truly live...

...Here again the value of the treatment lies not so much in the amount of new material incorporated as in the skill with which fact and opinion has been sifted, and in the clearness of the resultant outlines...

...Throughout the development of this essentially familiar theme, there are a rising vigor and an unfolding truth which make no great claim to originality in extension and application, but which hold all their old artistic potency, and impart, in addition, a' feeling of independent judgment and imaginative resource...

...I N ORDER to impress the dramatic quality of her narrative idea more emphatically and firmly upon the attention of her reader...

...New York: The John Day Company...

...Dodd goes glitteringly on for 150 pages, showing that the greatness of America is due to our sense of inferiority toward the older cultures of Europe, and finally, as the fooling reaches a cosmic pitch, arguing that the course of organic evolution takes its start in the amoeba's well-grounded sense of insignificance...

...The descriptive values in the book are particularly notable...

...Those who find pleasure in aimless thinking for its own sake, the sending of ideas like soap-bubbles into the air merely to watch their shimmer—and if they break too soon no harm is done, as there are plenty more to be had for the asking—such fortunate people wrill find no better book than Mr...

...Simonson's paper will be delighted to see it reprinted with all its wealth of incidental motives...

...In a field so vast there are sure to be minor details about which difference of opinion will arise...

...The source of the idea has no doubt been forgotten in most quarters, but those who have always remembered Mr...

...Adler tells us: "Whoever takes this goal of godlikeness seriously or literally, will soon be compelled to flee from real life and compromise by seeking a life within life...

...Cambridge: The Harvard University Press...

...Only the rich, as a rule, can afford to buy pictures nowadays, with the result that painters can neither reach the public nor support themselves...

...The Irish landscape is visualized in terms of brooding, sombre beauty or of bright, happy charm with an unfailing capture of memorable aspects and phases...

...Simonson is equally fertile in happy suggestions...

...Professor Haskins also observes that the "plays of the Latin dramatists survived only in books which were little read" and that Hroswitha's imitations of him "were not meant to be acted...

...At the end of the winter he might reluctantly sell a bond rather than part with the picture...

...5.00...

...Its purpose, however, is more especially popularization of what scholars know about an unusually important period in western history—the century which, roughly speaking, may be called the twelfth...

...T. C. Shule Agra, by Kathleen Coyle...

...In A Revolution as Curator, Mr...

...Hence he dubs it "the golden complex" and proceeds to trace its role in human history...

...May not some elderly lawyer prefer to look at Glackens's Beach at Bellport for a winter rather than renew his two subscription seats for the opera...

...This feature of her style appears in different ways: in descriptive phraseology...

...Dodd's to take with them on their vacation...

...Even if the enforced separation of Latin poetry from, say, the revival of science creates an artificial symmetry of which life knovps nothing, it is our only way of getting a comprehensive impression of the past...

...but no other work in English outlines so succinctly just what the monasteries, the cathedral schools, the courts and the "traveling scholars" were, and how they kept up relations with one another...

...in the intensity of human relationships...

...The genuine scientific merits of the psychoanalytic method have been so overshadowed by the mythological symbolism of its founders, their over-emphasis upon sex, and their exaggerated claims, that there is hardly any movement today calling more loudly for ridicule...

...The Golden Complex: A Defense of Inferiority, by Lee Wilson Dodd...

...This theory, beginning as a sound empirical discovery that many neuroses seem to be due to unconscious over-compensation for organic inferiority of one kind or another, was enlarged by its propounder and philosophized after the German fashion until, like other psychoanalytic theories, it covers everything and nothing...

...Her directness, her skilful selection, and her unmistakable grasp of a basic idea show it...

...The last statement seems probable, although Hroswitha has really been acted...

...2.00...

...But she certainly wrote because so many were reading Terence—to their souls' undoing...

...Dodd partly essays the role of this much-needed satirist and partly avoids it...

...Simonson, "even for a collector, that the picture which he likes today, he vdll enjoy five years hence, is an expert sense acquired usually only after years of systematic collecting and many failures...

...SIMONSON modestly calls his book of essays Minor Prophecies, but one of them at least is rather entitled, in its own field, to the epithet major...

...It is frankly a humanistic book, interested in the story of culture because culture is felt to be a good thing, but there is an admirable sympathy with the religious aspirations of the period...

...Though the material is far more vast than is commonly assumed (owing to an historical near-sightedness which Professor Haskins gently but firmly chides) it is quite assimilable to the general reader when neatly and picturesquely classified...

...And again: "A brewer who moved from a hotel to his country estate every June might conceivably enjoy pictures, a still-life by Hassam perhaps, as he enjoys his garden, until the frost...

...That beginning, as I shall presently insist, is certain to produce an inferiority complex...

...Adler's theory, for Mr...

...Similarly a chapter on books and libraries collates personal investigation with the researches of others in such a way that the scene takes on definite shape and one is enabled to see precisely, for instance, what the copying of manuscripts entailed...

...And just this has been done, in a small way, he points out, in the print collection of the Boston Art Museum where Mr...

...Professor Haskins ought to win readers as well as praise for his work, and no reader can resist being emancipated to some extent from prepossessions...

...So Mr...

...Other chapters deal with historical writing and translators, with the revival of science and philosophy (to both of which subjects commendably adequate bibliographies are appended, although one misses just a little the titles of books like Father Harper's Metaphysics of the Schools) and with the beginnings of universities...

...It is a simple and clearly designed narrative of family allegiance and contacts in recent Ireland, of a daughter's rebellion against restraint and prejudice, and finally of her reliance on their fundamental wisdom when the tragedy of life comes, and her faith in the homely tenacious ideals is renewed in the light of a rediscovered insight when her impulse and adventure fail her...

...This was tjie germ of an idea that he worked out in a paper called The Painter's Ark and published in 1917, in which he pointed out the advisability of renting contemporary paintings instead of selling them as a means of solving the problem of the modern picture market from the point of view both of the artist and the patron...

...1.75PSYCHOANALYSIS has long been waiting for its satirist...

...and in the narrative climax of her final chapter where tragedy mounts abruptly and with vehemence...

...The gaps in the information now accumulated are always carefully indicated, and the author preserves a truly scholarly modesty...

...but his book supplements Male better than any work I know of and is assuredly worthy of a place beside it on the shelves of any library...

...The author, unfortunately, tries to extract more humor from his thesis than it will yield, and toward the end both he and the reader grow a little weary...

...I do not think, for instance, that the twelfth century can be accepted as "perhaps the culminating age of religious poetry...

...Dodd, of the thought that a "complex" which is responsible for art and pietism must be highly valuable...

...The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, by Charles Homer Haskins...

...Being the oldest child, in such circumstances, is an excellent way of catching an inferiority complex, and another splendid way is to be the youngest child, or any one of the intermediate children...

...This side of her ability—terseness, incisive thrusts of analysis and imagery, courageous brevity in fixing issues—is her best, and to refine it even at the expense of some of the properties which make her story most vivid and exciting would be, for her, to develop a scope which might easily make her Work distinctive and remarkable even in the achievements of contemporary writers out of Ireland...

...with an accepted magic or strangeness which soon becomes obvious, are exquisitely selected and reproduced...

...But in the main...

...The reader comes to realize that "something was doing" in the hundred years prior to Dante and Aquinas, and to acquire an insight into the human circumstances of those who carried on the work...

...but letting that pass, and granting that we have the urge, what follows...

...If a school-child must have 240 cubic feet of air in order to breathe, a masterpiece needs 500 to be seen...

...The Golden Complex is a book which it was evidently fun to write, and, in the main, it is a book which it is fun to read...

...and the cumulative effect is to make the drama of lives dominated by the sympathetically depicted scene against which it moves and on which it draws for so much of its incident and character, color and appeal...

...In this he has amply succeeded...

...Adler's philosophic vkw—not obliquely derived from Nietzsche—the instinctive goal of every individual is infinite superiority to his fellows, the possession of absolute, godlike power...

...he might as well have chosen— as he would instantly grant—anybody else...

...The Thomistic hymns (which, it has been predicted, mankind will continue to sing in heaven) the poetry of Jacopone da Todi and of Saint Francis himself, even the flowering of English religious lyricism, certainly lend weight to the claim that the thirteenth century was the greatest period of spiritual song...

...Or, you may acquire your golden complex just as readily by beginning as one of many children in an overcrowded, quarrelsome, competitive home...

...But beyond this treat there is, in her story, a great beauty and order...

...Simonson traces the mad rush of new schools in painting—cubist, futurist, orphist, synchronist, vorticist— to the bewildering array of historic traditions that has taken the place everywhere of immediate native traditions, resulting in a panic-stricken effort to recover our lost innocence of the eye, a frantic endeavor to achieve abstract art, a reaching back to the primitive, a contempt for the object and the visible world, an eagerness to rend the veil of appearance and attain the hidden essence of being...

...There are thirty-one in Leningrad and thirty-nine in Moscow, including a Museum of Musical Instruments, a Museum of Military Uniforms, a Museum of Royal Harness and State Coaches, five separate museums for the literary remains of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoievsky and Pushkin, and a Museum of Toys, directed by its former owner whom the children, running after him in the streets, call Uncle Museum...

...The book abounds in happy aperqus and vivid, picturesque and incisive touches...

...The discussion of Latin classics, language and poetry as they figured in the intellectual life of the twelfth century is, perhaps, the most valuable portion of our book...

...Carrington has realized that the curator is in the position of a manager with a newly accepted play: he must stage it, appealing to the psychology of attention as preliminary to the psychology of appreciation...

...if fortunate, in art, but more generally in pietism, neurosis, or crime...

...Miss Coyle sometimes resorts to vigorous methods which, considering the general nature of her material and the experience reflected therein, convey a sense of undue exaggeration and awkward force...

...He says that one summer a friend of his who had taken a seaside cottage and found the white walls unpleasantly bare, asked him to rent him for the season four pastels of flowers that he had just completed...

...Simonson describes most picturesquely from personal experience the role which the Soviet government is playing as the guardian of Russian art and historical monuments...

...This happy idea has been taken up and worked out practically by the Chicago Galleries Association, and is certain to be adopted more and more widely as time goes on...

...Aside from these papers, the most interesting is that entitled Panic in Art, in which Mr...

...He began," writes Mr...

...ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES...

...It is idle to expect the public as a whole to acquire new experiences at a cost which penalizes their willingness to experiment...

...As his first examples he chooses Cain, Byron and Saint Francis...

...These achieve for Shule Agra its real claim on the attention and its basic strength...

...and her best modern critic, Rudolf Wolkan, say« positively that manuscripts of Terence were then to be found in almost every monastic library...

...The certainty," says Mr...

...Much has been written about mediaeval intellectual centres, for instance...

...VAN WYCK BROOKS...

...Miss Coyle has, moreover, mastered the difficulties of essentials...

...I do not know if he eliminated sculpture and art from his purview because of the fact that these subjects have been dealt with so well by Emile Male...

...Dodd's purposes, is that it is universally applicable...

...Why one should have an instinctive urge toward anything so impossible of attainment it is a little difficult to see...

...All such details are of minor importance, however...

...His general position is that of one who regards art as having a function to perform in society—"the specific purpose of housing and adorning human activity," beauty being "essentially a by-product, the record of that appropriateness, of relevance outlived...

...THOSE who are familiar with Professor Haskins's Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science need not be told that his new volume is on a par with the best in contemporary mediaeval scholarship...

...On the other hand, the annual rental of even twenty pictures at five dollars a month would produce for the painter an assured income of $1,200, enough to keep him going without the necessity of compromise until his growing reputation assured him adequate prices...

...New York: E. P. Button and Company...

...The field is further restricted "to the history of culture in this age" and finally to "the Latin writings of the period and what they reveal...

...Museums are a passion with this oligarchy which is as careful to preserve the tradition of the taste of the individual as it is hostile to his political freedom...

...This is, of course, a vastly suggestive theory—suggestive, to Mr...