Books
Gray, D.L.M. & Mulherin, W. A. & Robinson, Henry Morton & Clark, Edwin & Boddington, Ernest F. & Gill, Roderick & McGuire, Harry
A History of Russia, Volume IV (1672-1762) by V. P. Kluchevsky; translated from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth. New York: E. P. Button and Company. $4.50. THIS book is much more than a narrative of...
...There are one or two criticisms in order...
...The story it gives of the actual conditions of the Catholic Church in the United States and its protectorates, in the British dominions of North America, as well as England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in Cuba and Mexico, is for the most part heartening and adequate...
...He has rendered a high service to this department of biography by rigidly appljang to his material the same laws of critical scrutiny that he would apply to a study of Charles V or William Wordsworth...
...Miss Sergeant, who calls herself "an unaffected New Englander," has aptly taken her title from Emerson...
...Passing the Love of Women, by Joseph White (Giuseppe Bianco...
...He collates, compares, analyzes, and makes his report...
...1N A tiny compass it would seem that a history of the Church would be hardly comfortable...
...That is why the ultimate biography of Poe, Napoleon, Lincoln, and Ignatius Loyola will never be written...
...at the conclusion of others, one feels robbed of the satisfaction of detecting which of the characters is really It, possibly because of one's ignorance of the latest book on psychiatry...
...Fire Under the Andes, by ElizabetU Shepley Sergeant...
...But the picture of Mencken and Bryan at Dayton has memorable quality...
...Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...All saints have hitherto been cut from the same piece of goods, in a somewhat monotonous pattern...
...Secondly, there is the way they are discriminated against in almost every other sphere of activity, whether social, business or political...
...The groundwork of Russian historiography was laid only in the nineteenth century by Serge Soloffyoff of Moscow University (father of the great Catholic philosopher, Vladimir SoloflyofI...
...THE author of Passing the Love of Women takes the double refuge of two pseudonyms, possibly to lend verisimilitude to the journal form in which he molds this history of the transcendent love that existed between two English brothers— a love whose tragic consequences the author purports to justify to his estranged wife in the autobiographical study which comprises the novel...
...Hitherto the reader of saintly biographies has been obliged to rig up his own critical machinery, questioning this legend, discounting that superstition, with nothing but instinct as his guide...
...Her method is justified in its grasp of the feelings of things and ideas...
...It is noteworthy, though, that in spite of the author's thoroughly conservative love of country, this volume was withheld from publication until official censorship lightened in 1910...
...Omitting reports from some large archdioceses like New York, Chicago, Monterey, Fresno, Portland and Providence—the number of converts already amounts to 35,751...
...He was the first true historian of what is now called the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic...
...His pupil and successor, V. O. Kluchevsky, was trained for the Orthodox priesthood, but turned to history during the latter years of the past century, focussing his mind at the start on the Boyars' Council records, the beginnings of Russian constitutional history...
...Professor Kluchevsky's original Russian flows along smoothly and with much archaic charm...
...2,00...
...The story of the| rescue of Eva by M'Crea, of their wanderings in the jungle and of the strengthening of every noble instinct in the man during their association is an exceptional and shining love narrative which has fitting culmination in the voluntary renunciation of every thought of union when the call of honor has to be met by M'Crea...
...The Catholic Directory, 1927...
...Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which is today the centre of systematic learned inquiry and with which is bound up the great Russian network of educational institutions having a strictly scientific purpose...
...Yavorski, Prokopovitch, Trediakoffski, Dmitrieff, Sumarokoif, Pososhkoff, Tatishcheff, Schlotzer, and MuUer each did his share in the Petrine literary renaissance...
...Despite the evidences of deep research, there appears to be but little new substance in Dr...
...They do make sacrifices...
...Ic is this fiery core that Miss Sergeant has perceived and sharply projected...
...Even though church history be a special business, no worldly account of Russia's past is whole if lacking an understanding of the importance of Orthodoxy...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, May Sinclair, are sample names...
...My marriage . . . unhappy...
...Observe this prose poem projection of our native land: "America...
...Perhaps he has taken a leaf from Whitman in this hymn to America...
...Van Dyke has carved out a new form in biography, and has rendered impossible a return to the showier but less candid school of Lives...
...Yet this record of achievements, conflicts and aspiration has been both shrewdly and affectionately set down...
...In using that chisel...
...The book makes rather dry reading, probably because its main objective is to instruct...
...the salient features of Ignatius's character are not violently disarranged...
...That he has cast aside Russian literature and religion of the Petrine and Elizabethan times is indeed regrettable...
...In so far as it remains a commonplace story of married life and the adjustments both man and wife must make to their union, the story is not without interest...
...These and other similar statements might very profitably have been omitted without in any way weakening the worth of the book as a history of Negro labor in our country...
...In his quiet manner Emerson was a disturber...
...D. L. M. GRAY...
...The author has striven for a classic totality of effect, an effect that will be independent of rhetoric and histrionism...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...It is my eccentricity to dislike expansive emotional outbursts...
...This is unfortunate, for, aside from the fact that no scientific historian can rightly overlook the Being from Whom all deeds are| dated, the need of a religious appreciation is peculiarly evident in any account of the era beginning with Peter the Great...
...White of Kansas is also a fascinating study...
...This Catholic Directory is an essential volume in any office, whether business, educational or institutional, touching upon the interests and conditions of Catholics in the English-speaking world at large...
...The list of eminent authors—most of them young Englishmen—^ who contribute stories to The Ghost Book is warrant enough of the literary distinction with which the spirit world is therein treated...
...This classic low-relief can scarcely be avoided, however, where the critical chisel is sincerely employed...
...2.50...
...The Crescent Moon, by Francis Brett Young...
...The author has realized her understanding with a craftsmanship that would be worthy of her gifted group of subjects themselves...
...Professor Kluchevsky, however, slights the religjous side of Russian history...
...It is kindly and critical, universal in scope, and familiar...
...Extraordinary as this may seem, it is not an isolated outburst, but typical of the whole manner of this book...
...Hector M'Crea, son of a father whose life "kept inside the Old Testament," but who himself confesses to having "played skittles with the Ten Commandments," knows James and his kind...
...Until 1917 Orthodoxy was the soul of Pravoslav civilization and had done more than any other human establishment to shape the distinctively Russian mind...
...Her work has made Catholic readers, particularly those who have undertaken the task of teaching history, her grateful debtors...
...1 N England and America, the praises of Yone Noguchi, the Americanized Japanese who won the general applause of our now bald or grey-haired critics, are well remembered...
...In short, we receive once more from Dr...
...from Harvard with this treatise) reviews chronologically the story of Negro labor...
...on the other hand, when faced with such major incidents as the husband's unfaithfulness in France, the characters are so readily manipulated to the author's needs that the superficiality of their conception becomes evident...
...Yet the narrative itself grows sleepy, and the psychiatric problem itself develops in the journalist's hands depths so slight that one is absorbed chiefly in the background of the English countryside, redolent of farms and beasts...
...It i^ no disparagement, then, of Paul Van Dyke's work on Ignatius to say that it is a typically modern redaction of a perennial theme...
...And this voice of Chung Park Lum sings of The Flower Girl, The Cat, The Blue Lantern, Chinese New York, The Butterfly and Wild Geese—phrased and metred in the language of China and New York, with a naive frankness and earnest simplicity that disarm criticism and awaken a personal interest in the poet and his books of instructing in "AngloChinese Commercial Conversation"—^works which, he tells us, are intended for Chinese laundrymen in this country...
...The work purports to be, and in the main is, a history of the rise and advance of Negro labor in the United States...
...HARRY MCGUIRE...
...What could be more noble than a concept of life which reads like this: "A Daughter of the Visitation should respect and honor all kinds of persons, not showing contempt to anyone however poor or abject, accustoming herself to consider all christians only as children of God and members of Jesus Christ, cordially embracing them in the unity of His divine Body, in which all distinctions of poor and rich, master and servant, learned and ignorant, are forgotten and lost...
...And it has been difficult sometimes, while bogged in the saccharine brackishness of most saintly biographies, to come to an estimate of the saint's real character...
...yet, though few of the stories are trivial and almost all possess personal flavor and narrative fluency, one is disappointed to find the ghosts themselves so discreet and unexciting...
...In this same Body she should consider herself, and the happiness of belonging to it ought to constitute her glory...
...If so, it might be well to remember that a single leaf makes neither a Whitman nor a green bay tree...
...While by no means justifying Negro laborers for threatening to align themselves with out-and-out radicals, still one can see many extenuating facts...
...The book is tranquil, too tranquil perhaps for such a passionate hero as Ignatius...
...the type is painful to read, the translation wretchedly contrived...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...Later we have had the purer Japanese and Chinese studies of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Arthur Davison Fiske, and Witter Bynner: and now the voice of the Chinese-American is being heard in the land...
...an English sentence of no less than 121 words mars page seventy-one...
...Her book is comprised of fourteen contemporary portraits...
...the index is limited to proper names...
...and these portraits' subjects are, too...
...Masterfully he thrusts aside every unserviceable document...
...he sets out to tell the early economic story of modern Russia: the period from the childhood of Peter, the first emperor, to the uprising that brought Catherine II to Rurik's seat of might...
...2.00...
...IN THE peculiar gentry who pass on others in review, there is a blemish known as a blind spot...
...But Paul Van Dyke suggests that Ignatius had a personality and shows that personality operating in a world of other personalities...
...1.25...
...SO HARMLESS a book deserves to be listed in better company than appears in the advertisements on its cover, including, as they do, such radicals as Tolstoi, Marx, Lenin, Kropotkin, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair and the like...
...First of all, there is their exclusion from full and equal rights in the American Federation of Labor, an exclusion that might almost be said to drive them into the I. W. W., which receives them with open arms...
...No wonder, therefore, that Professor Kulchevsky's utterly secular history has become the handbook of Soviet history students...
...2.00...
...Kluchevsky might have made use of the Caves Monastery chronicles in Kiefl...
...In some stories the ghost himself is only hinted at...
...Miss Sergeant has written intimate, deeply felt, short biographies of a diverse group of Americans who are contributing the force of finely devoted lives to the richness of our national life...
...There is a gratifying decline only in the number of orphans in the Catholic Homes...
...He was the first remarkable poet of his time...
...Therefore the little book of which a new translation is offered the American reader is a great spiritual classic...
...However, only students of the labor problem need linger over the numerous columns of statistics...
...They are, however, not at all alike...
...The sketch of Cardinal Carafla is excellent, and Diego Lainez moves most convincingly...
...This component of East and West breaks forth from the Bowery of New York, associated in the minds of sight-seeing Westerners and Southerners with all that is horrible in the moving pictures—a region of joss-houses, laundries and tongwars...
...And it is a redaction for which we are grateful, not so much because of the material, but rather for the essentially modern method of handling that material...
...Van Dyke narrowly escapes what some readers will call tepidity...
...We know that...
...too many French, German and Russian words have been left unaltered...
...An institution contemporary with the foundation of Christianity throughout the various races and nations of the whole world would seem to call for voluminous breadth...
...Elizabeth's eyes saw the beginning of the first Russian university and the rise of modem Russian literature and learning in Lomonossoff...
...Van Dyke's book those swift intimations of wonder that have always clustered about Ignatius's name...
...Altogether this is a report to cheer on the worker in the Vineyard toward yet greater achievements...
...And if the background of this new story is more vivid and more suggestive, the characters who emerge from it *re also more dominating and the drama they live is more arresting than any others hitherto presented by this author...
...The Senator from the Bronx has naively written this book as though it were to be read on a soap-box...
...It is perhaps at once the most instructive and the most amusing bit of the book...
...Incidentally he asks questions such as "Will the Negro work...
...here is another...
...It takes heroic virtue to remain patient and resigned when struggling against prejudice resting solely on color...
...His powerful mind and healthy patriotism were brought into the realm of learning in such manner as to render a very great help to later Russian scholarship...
...The Gentleman from the 22nd: An Autobiography, by Benjamin Aniin...
...1.00...
...The larger page and the clearer types will make it grateful to all who musti frequently consult its authority...
...There is a directoryl of Diocesan Agencies of Catholic Charities: Missionary Activities and Communities are catalogued with a general summary of Catholic hospitals and a list of converts throughout the United States...
...The Ghost Book, edited by Cynthia Asquith...
...Writers share her pages with two doctors, a painter, a dramatist, a professor, an editor, an actress, a singer, and a jurist...
...RODERICK GILL...
...A Book of Church History, by Susan Cunnington...
...On the onq side, of their sacrifices...
...The Soviet government has printed the fifth volume and nationalized the whole series as a common belonging of the Russian people...
...If there are descriptions of nature in many moods that are vibrant, there are also portraits of men and women under stress which throb and palpitate...
...for the man and woman involved love one another intelligently, manage their slight economic and temperamental difficulties successfully, and would not seem to be in dire straits in the least if the author, for the sake of posing a "problem," did not have them pause dramatically at regular intervals and exclaim, "Oh, yes, my problem...
...HENRY MORTON ROBINSON...
...Secondly, more than any other race the Irish are specified as exhibiting unreasonable race prejudice against Negroes...
...Professor Kluchevsky assumes in his readers such knowlejige of detail as would be looked for in a Russian secondary-school graduate...
...Looking upon the world at large, with the rosy glow of the inspirational school, he remarks life in a torrential foment of simple passions and prejudices...
...This increase is only partly accounted for in the gain of the Vicariate-Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands—a gain of 103,100 souls...
...To some phase of life they are unresponsive...
...New York: Boni and Liveright...
...Just before the List of Places is to be found a colored map show;ing the Church provinces of the United States and the limits of each archdiocese and diocese...
...New York: Lop Quan Company...
...But if the material is graciously familiar, the method of handling it is, refreshingly new...
...Ignatius Loyola: The Founder of the Jesuits, by Paul Van Dyke...
...Baltimore: John Murphy Company...
...Robert Frost and O'Neill seem impalpably to escape her...
...ever seeking tq prove by facts and documentary evidence that, given like circumstances, equal educational and cultural opportunities, the Negro is essentially as much a man as the Caucasian...
...The result is a beautiful book of imagination and contemporary ideas...
...There are several new and important features in the Directory for 1927...
...But you must remember that a man who has once lived in the wilds of Africa doesn't take kindly to life at home...
...The background of the story is psychological inasmuch as the narrative is motivated by the phobias which have from youth obsessed the younger brother, and from the results of which the older brother has tried to protect him...
...Moreover, the author uses the critical pruning-hook with reasoned calm...
...This legislator, he would have us know, is strong for the people, and in rehearsing his battles with popular abuse, he takes it for granted that his readers are familiar with the facts, omits the details, and gives vent to his feelings...
...Desmond MacCarthy pictures a man's evil past in the performance of spirit tricks that balk his turn to virtue and happiness...
...The figure of James Burwarton, missionary and martyr predestinate, developing in the face of impending tragedy, growing more human and more loving under sacrifice, yet bewildered by the discovery that sacrifices to Moloch and Ashtoreth are not merely stories of the defection of certain of the people chosen of God in their early days, but realities of the present in this Africa he would aid in converting, is etched truly and deeply...
...Hogarth's English wends its way irksomely, haltingly, sometimes, as on page 148, failing altogether to give the true thought of the Slavonic idiom...
...Fire Under the Andes contains portraits that are a revelation...
...We see him falling into human error—^writing an infelicitous letter, or occasionally failing in his choice of a lieutenant...
...to foreign policy he seems sometimes to be blind...
...It is an institution in itself and one to be highly commended for its dignified character and the noble fairness with which it is conducted...
...Negro Labor in the United States, hy Charles H. Wesley, New York: Vanguard Press, Inc...
...such remarks as "When Charles hadi settled August's hash and decided to march on Moscow" seem unfitting...
...All his tones are either sonorous or dulcet as he discovers Republicans predatory and Democrats noble...
...Peter the Great founded more than the Russian Senate and the Holy Synod: he brought into being the St...
...Antin has written his own story of the rise of an immigrant politician in such a manner as to make the State Assembly appear to be the theatre of stark tragedy where Gargantuan figures toy with the fates...
...and in the intimate, ruddy Anglo^Saxonism of the style, a quality which gives warmth and reality to a tale in other respects tepid...
...There are but six misprints in this work of well-nigh four hundred pages, but that fact does not atone for a very second-rate rendering of a literary and historiographical masterpiece...
...As far as the reviewer (born and reared in the South) is concerned, this thesis needed no proving, but there are only too many Americans, even today, who cannot or will' not face the facts and recognize that under a skin of another tint than ours, the Negro is substantially as human as we are...
...Hogart's tranliterations from the Russian are neither phonetic nor consistent...
...Finally, it was a pleasure to see Mr...
...THIS book is much more than a narrative of the land of folk-song and Socialism: it is, in many...
...EVERY age recreates its traditional heroes after its own likeness, writing large its own character into the portrait...
...The dialogue, too, despite an occasional flair for idiom, is stultified by its lack of individuality, and, in emotional crises, by that unnatural sentimentality out of which the Gene Stratton Porter kind of writing is made...
...Which, if either, seems to concur with what we know of Ignatius, his environment and his associates...
...The answer is always just, invariably sympathetic...
...In the first place, quoting newspapers to substantiate statements is not very convincing, e.g., to quote a newspaper as authority for the statement that in a minor riot in New York a gang of Irish laborers fled from a gang of Negroes...
...The character sketches of Elizabeth and Anna are remarkably well wrought...
...0.50...
...AS ONE closes the cover on the final page of Francis Brett • Young's latest novel, the last words echo and the reader finds himself exclaiming with the author: "This...
...Of the six direct followers of Peter I, three were women, one a boy of twelve, one a babe, and the other an idiot...
...But there's the other side...
...ways, a masterpiece of history writing...
...Antin's autobiography may be said to be a rhapsody on the promised land...
...He has applied the scientific method of history to a great historical figure who happens to be at the same time a great saint...
...Its data and information, derived from the reports of the ecclesiastical authorities of the dioceses concerned, is as authoritative as may be obtained...
...De la Mare arouses in our breasts a mild agitation over a mysterious recluse...
...This is why Kluchevsky was called by the emperor to help draw up laws for the new Russian Duma...
...ERNEST F . BODDINGTON...
...BRIEFER MENTION The Interior Spirit of the Religious of the Visitation of Holy Mary, from the collection by the Bishop of Evreux, according to the French edition of igi4...
...Chinese Verse, by Chung Park Lum...
...At times it is almost impossible to draw the line between the Russian's love of God and his love of homeland...
...In many instances the conclusion is wisely left to the reader...
...Miss Cimnington's 250 pages present a marvel of condensation, not only in the organization of facts, but also in their coordination...
...In view of its defects as well as of the simple expression and sincere feeling of the book, it would not be surprising if the record turned out to be in all respects genuine...
...3.50...
...Van Dyke introduces in Ignatius Loyola a new technique in the writing of saints' biographies...
...He felt that Providence guided him most carefully in the attempt to found an order which would revive the mystical heroism of early Christian days...
...Lacking accurate tools, he has been obliged to isolate by guesswork the probable facts of the matter...
...After reading this work, we know approximately what we knew before: that Ignatius was dominated by a single noble purpose...
...Peter made the Holy Synod and laid down laws for the Orthodox Church of Russia...
...The above two books are biographical portraits written with an emotional bias...
...The little book will profit all who take it up, revealing as it does both the holiness and the gentility of Geneva's great saint...
...2.50...
...EDWIN CLARK...
...Avoiding the sentimental and hysteric, Dr...
...Though intended primarily for those who have elected to follow the holy rule, it will enlighten and benefit all who read its compact but wealthy pages...
...The sketch of Amy Lowell is the best of the collection...
...The summary of gains in Church membership for 1926-27 gives an increase of 604,574 Catholics, making a population of 19,483,296 members of the Church in our country...
...They are just as wide of the mark as the others...
...Kluchevsky likens Peter's westernizings to a sequence of April showers that, though boisterous enougjh to strip trees of their boughs, yet freshen the air and enliven growth...
...Perhaps she is happiest in portraying women...
...Here the vital forces have been tempered to viable images...
...1 HE analysis of the spirit of the religious community for women he established was undoubtedly a task which Saint Francis de Sales accomplished with especial love and fervor...
...4.00...
...Avoiding on one hand the facile piety of the Sunday-School Lives, and on the other the neurotic sneering of the Strachey cult...
...Nevertheless, as Father Hugh Pope of the Dominicans declares...
...New York: Charles Scribne/s Sons...
...Never Give All, by Maude Radford Warren, is another marriage-problem novel, distinguished chiefly by the lack of foundation for any serious problem at all...
...A dance—a song—a light—a laugh—a child on the hilltop of the universe crying for the moon—reaching for it, begging for it, ever nearer, ever closer, closer, closer, there it is—touch it—feel it—hug it—keep it—the moon, the stars, the sky, the blue, the pale blue, where there is peace—peace and quiet...
...For if in previous books this writer has conveyed some of the sombre mystery, some of the inherent savagery, some of the spaciousness and some of the strange and untamed beauty of the continent called dark, he has intensified and made more acute in The Crescent Moon every picture he projected in these earlier works...
...the people who laugh at all missionary work and talk about the folly of ramming Christianity down the throats of people who have good working religions of their own...
...Denis Mackail writes charmingly about Shakespeare returning to save his reputation from the blot of one undestroyed copy of Alexander the Great...
...S'00, IT IS a gratification to find The Official Catholic Directory for 1927 in the handsome format given it by P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...I suppose in the class from which he came there are any number of young men of this kind," says the etcher, "born mystics with a thirst for beauty which might be slaked in any glorious way, yet finds its satisfaction in the only revelation that comes their way in a religion from which even the Reformation has not banished all beauty whatsoever...
...is Africa...
...And in comparing these intimations with, let us say, Francis Thompson's study of Loyola, we find that the factual outlines of the man and saint remain pretty much as they were...
...This is Africa...
...Oliver Onions tickles one's risibilities with a humorously realistic conception of ghosts with names like Sir Egbert the Dauntless—and so on...
...As he says to Eva Burwarton, in speaking of her brother and his predecessor at Luguru: 'Teople at home talk more nonsense, I should imagine, about missionaries, than about any other body of men...
...Never Give All, by Maude Radford Warren...
...Such being the new (and very mild) conception of ghosts, one might be pardoned for putting Ghost Stories down with a wistful sigh and turning to someone like Poe, who understood that the real function of a ghost is to make one afraid, after having read about him, of that ten-foot space between the light-switch and the bed...
...She says that "they are all fighters, Americans in conflict with something—^with the age, evil or ignorance, as they see it—with themselves, if they are artists...
...Van Dyke's study...
...W. A. MULHERIN...
...The Crescent Moon is high romance which not only thrills, but compels to thought...
...Beginning with slave labor in colonial times, Mr...
...This peasant broke ground in fields of sundry kinds: philological, historical, economic, and scientific...
...Nine chapters are given to the military, economic, fiscal, commercial, industrial, and administrative reforms of Peter the Great, two chapters to his immediate achievements and their meaning, and the four remaining chapters to the reigns of Catherine I, Peter II, Anna, John VI, Elizabeth, and Peter I I I . The second chapter is a keen weighing of Emperor Peter's mind, build, and way of doing things...
...and though her feeling toward her sympathetic subjects gets out of hand occasionally, on the main she persuades me from my prejudice...
...Wesley admit that after the Civil War, the majority of the white people of the South were favorably disposed toward the Negro, and it is to be hoped that eventually time, the great healer, will bring about a perfect cooperation between the two races, based upon a sympathetic understanding of each other...
...Wesley (who earned his Ph.D...
...Here again are Castle Gardens and the Jewish East Side...
...that to the execution of this purpose he brought a paramount genius for organization and a terrifying patience as a fisher of souls...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Here is one account of the matter...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 4
