Books
Middleton, John S. & Lewalys, Garret & Hull, Robert R. & Windle, Bertram C. A. & Meadows, George D. & Keyes, Edward L. & Fay, Bernard
France and America, by Andre Tardieu. New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company. $3.00. THE latest book of M. Andre Tardieu, Minister of Public Works in France, sometime High Commissionnaire of France...
...BRIEFER MENTION The Idea of Social Justice, by Charles fV...
...Your true mountain-climber seems to be urged on by that instinct for the difficult and the perilous for its own sake which appears to manifest itself whenever men become sated with the comfort and security of excessive civilization...
...And they have very few means for ascertaining the deep tendencies of the people at large...
...and, as in them, we have again to note the curiously wrong-headed conclusions at which he often arrives from the facts which he has accumulated...
...Frankness and accuracy are two qualities of extraordinary value in the field of international relations, and they are very rare because they are dangerous...
...A GENTLEMAN who preferred blondes is one M. dc Mailly, whose adventures chanced to be staged in the grim, reeking Paris of that year of alleged grace, 1700...
...His the grim duty—and joy, mayhap—to shatter this last remaining ideal of the race...
...3.50...
...Thus, practically, and by all available mediums, M. Tardieu has been able to ascertain what French people and American people have in common, and what has been the basis of their understandings and misunderstandings...
...This can be done formally only in a comparative presentation of their work, as is attempted—not without some hazards—by these anthologists...
...Otherwise his conversation, although of portentous length and frequency, is negligible...
...But it would require more than the average layman's knowledge of theological matters to enable him to appreciate many of Monsignor Kolbe's studies...
...But, oh, offspring, progeny...
...This reviewer wishes he could say as much for Dr...
...BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE...
...There is a danger that even the Catholic Church may lose its influence with laboring men unless, as Father C. C. Martindale strongly advises, the clergy preach nine sermons in favor of social justice to every one against birth-control...
...So many people are interested in preventing nations from telling what they think...
...6.00...
...In other and nobler times he was sung as hero, who "when his legs were hewn off, he fought upon his stumps...
...Now, as a book of practical instructions to the end of preparing the seminarian for his first pastorate, this syllabus of lectures, delivered over a period of some years to students of the Yale Divinity School by Dean Brown, cannot be excelled...
...I seek not the door of the alluring Premier Epilation Salon...
...Pipkin...
...EDWARD L. KEYES...
...Nor does he climb for the sake of views and scenery alone...
...The title page and index for volume V of The Commonweal are now ready...
...The business of Protestant theological seminaries, it must follow, is to turn out young men who will be able to satisfy the exacting demands of congregations, which, in the main, regard a minister as a hired man who primarily preaches for them and serves them rather than Almighty God...
...Their essential differences (we could say, according to M. Tardieu, oppositions) have been sometimes hidden and never properly adjusted...
...It is the fashion among certain authors to belittle the work of contemporary anthologists, especially in the field of living writers, and it may be conceded that only after death should an author or poet be given his final judgment...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...for the stojne is not in the soul, but its likeness is...
...In other countries newspapers are rich enough to despise the governments...
...Alas, I am a thoroughly orthodox medico...
...To say that he does all this merely to get to the top of a certain mass of uptilted strata is no answer...
...It is quite clear that some savages make the distinction...
...It is a great contribution to international good will and FrenchAmerican friendship...
...The picture he gives may seem rather black...
...The Four Mysteries of the Faith reveals vast knowledge of theology and the cognate sciences...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...2.50...
...These will be sent upon request...
...Pipkin is a worthy successor of Lowell, Dicey and Moon, though his work is quite independent of theirs...
...They have played a kind of hide-and-seek in which there was always one of the two whose eyes were blindfolded, and sometimes both were in the dark...
...Fishbein, thou eighth wife of Bluebeard...
...This story is in quite the approved style of costume-fiction, a farflung line toward the cinema...
...They may be intelligent or stupid, imaginative or matteroffact, they are rarely representative, typical of their nation...
...A missionary in Papua was interrogating a native as to what he called the souls of trees and inanimate objects...
...was the poser offered to the native...
...The woman may continue to attend, but the working-man will be estranged unless the note of justice is heard with that of charity...
...What secular goddess inspired the sub-title: An Encyclopaedia of Cultism and Quackery in these United States, with Essays on the Cult of Beauty, the Craze for Reduction, Rejuvenation, Eclecticism, Bread and Dietary Fads, Physical Therapy, and a Forecast as to the Physician of the Future...
...The author quite openly denies that we have any direct knowledge of reality...
...But its main value consists in being a sincere inquiry and in expressing clearly what the great mass of French people think of America...
...Harriet I. Nash has made a perfect elbow possible to all by her elbow beautifier...
...The reader will find the author's treatment of the Corpus Mysticum especially interesting though he may not see any need for a week being given over to the celebration of the glories of the Church under this title...
...GEORGE D . MEADOWS...
...Tardieu is certainly right in not wishing that this mysterious sympathy which flashes at times should be given an over-emphasis, because it is merely an instinctive thing and would be spoiled if one tried to make it otherwise...
...All in all, one recommends the book highly to students of social justice as that has been expressed since the beginning of the nineteenth century...
...on the other hand, other natives, when pressed, express their inability to say which of the two beliefs represents theirs...
...Not mine the suit at law against the face-lifting, fat-removing enthusiast, not mine the complaint alleging that "the defendant attempted to remove superfluous flesh from her ankles, but that it became necessary to amputate both legs...
...A Short History of Italian Art, by Adolfo Venturi...
...2.25...
...Fishbein, as I am sure you will, you will lose the one delusion of the generation whose happiest hours of youth were spent in the company of the dog-faced boy and the ossified man...
...The Four Mysteries of the Faith, by Monsignor Kolbe...
...Arrangements have been made for binding volume V in leather or cloth...
...One concedes that the picture is relatively true—and no picture can be more than relatively true, when one bears the perspective in mind—for England ; but Dr...
...IN T H I S treatise Monsignor Kolbe reduces the synthesis of Catholic dogmatic teaching to four mysteries, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Mystical Body and the Eucharist...
...This Ralph Roister-Doister, with the ready rapier and the heart of gold, is by turn (at every turn might be the proper phrasing) duelist, roue, rescuer, abductor, cavalier and lover...
...Kindliness, charity and the avoidance of fleshly lusts may, after all, as Dr...
...His experience as a High Commissioner in war-time and afterward as Minister in France has given him opportunities not only of seeing and hearing what Americans thought, but of learning how they acted, worked and fought...
...IN ONE of those delightful essays in Hills and the Sea, Hilaire Belloc inquires concerning the emotion produced by the sight of mountains which has "bitten deeply into the modern mind...
...but the case is quite different with the Protestant ministry, since in most Protestant denominations the preacher is the centre of all things...
...THAT the worship of natural objects, the sun, the sky, the earth and so on, is common amongst primitive races and formerly was so amongst others of much higher civilization, is well known to all ethnologists...
...if it had not we could not see it, it could not be.' Such were his views of the omnipresence of the soul...
...Important newspapers with a large circulation can no longer afford to be free, and young newspapers which have to win a public for themselves would not dare to be imprudent...
...THE latest book of M. Andre Tardieu, Minister of Public Works in France, sometime High Commissionnaire of France in the United States, and one of the "coming men" of French politics, is one of the most honest and courageous volumes published for many years...
...But when they were facing an imminent danger, when they had to forget everything and go ahead, both of them had a way of throwing aside prejudices and fighting with nerves, which established between them a spontaneous and instinctive understanding...
...Brown says, conceivably be regarded as virtues more feminine than masculine...
...The wrinkles and dullness (dullness is a good word) "common to many elbows are no longer embarrassments to be endured...
...That it contains passages with which one does not agree may be taken for granted...
...It relies, in the main, on "OneBook" men who appear to think that "a call to preach" and a superficial knowledge of texts out of the King James version are quite sufficient to make their ministry effective...
...but they rely on the economic prosperity of the country and they need the cordial collaboration of industry...
...Although it is recognized more or less vaguely that a minister should be a servant of God as well as of his people, the chief task of pastoral theology, in Protestant terms, is to fit the seminarian for adjustment to the people as he may find them...
...The volume is meant to be a short and light appeal to the average layman's mind—"a concise little treatise of lay theology...
...Perhaps that youthful thrill brought one nearest to an understanding of the spirit of mountaineering: it is another form of the spirit of adventure...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...ROBERT R. HULL...
...Fishbein has his way...
...The only objection I could make to M. Tardieu is that he may undervalue an element which is dangerous and difficult to appreciate exactly, but the importance of which should not be denied: namely, this disposition to understand each other in crises of great excitement which seems to be, after all, one of the characteristics of French-American collaboration...
...It also shows how united the whole of Catholic theology is—a thought that is not so often developed...
...GARRET LEWALYS...
...Brown has written an interesting book, and even Catholic priests could read to great advantage his fine chapter on The Minister Among Men...
...Also, what can this mean— "The subjective i. e. our feelings, fancies, dreams, thoughts and intentions are nothing in themselves, nor do they become 'things' until they have expressed themselves in some external form" ? These and like philosophical inaccuracies give a weak and unstable foundation to the theological presentation which follows...
...Their restraint in limiting most of the poets to one sample of their work, and a general breadth of judgment that defeats any criticism that they are forwarding particular brands of poetry, old or new, at the expense of others, give their book real distinction...
...When one reads any such book as this on primitive ideas, especially religious ideas, one is always assailed with two questions, apart from the fundamental one as to whether the native is really telling the truth to his interrogator: How far does the native really understand the significance of his statements...
...Pandora be your pyxie...
...In a critical period he had to organize the collaboration of the two nations, and this meant dealing not with idle words, but the most vital facts...
...Yet in these days of publicity incubators, new-born and unborn poets cry out for critical courts to try their cases, to hatch out their immediate ambitions...
...The book is authoritative not only through its writer, but also through the cooperation of Edward Hutton, whose translation has placed upon our English shelves a new book of reference of enduring value...
...New York: The Century Company...
...Listen to the song of our sole surviving siren: "The warm pink glow of a perfectly rounded elbow is a joy unconfined to the exacting woman whose social obligations are insistent and many...
...2.00...
...New York : Boni and Liveright...
...Shall we say that the newspapers express the feelings and judgments of a nation, or that they try to interpret them, or that they strive to mold them...
...Young's book there are comparatively few pieces of descriptive writing for its own sake and none of those rhapsodies we are accustomed to in the annual crop of books about Italian "spells" and "years" and "picturesque" this or the other country...
...Follies...
...Both the idealism of Sidney Webb and the intransigeance of Belloc are repudiated...
...Their minds, their civilizations, are absolutely different, but there is in their character a certain deep similarity which great dangers, violent joys and excitements suddenly reveal...
...With eyes all the more critical because of his narrower limitations, his congregation will scrutinize the minister's learning, personal magnetism, moral character, and practical abilities...
...Could there be a happy combination of Dr...
...was the return...
...and the conclusion is adopted that democratic institutions and democratic faith have expressed in increasingly large measure the social aspirations of the needy majority...
...The Making of a Minister, by Charles R. Brown...
...A little more knowledge of the liturgy imparted to the faithful would keep before their minds the idea of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ...
...Eclecticism and homoeopathy hold no novelty for me...
...Mordieu...
...Monsignor Kolbe further sees the Apocalypse as "the fullest manifestation of all the four mysteries which make up the Temple of God, not only in their separate glories but in their interrelation and due proportion...
...It is full of adventure, the more impressive for the restraint shown in the telling—one may instance the account of the Taschhorn climb—and of practical information on routes and on matters of equipment and technique for which all Alpinists will be grateful...
...Pardieu...
...That is a feature which this book shares with his other works...
...And how far does his interlocutor understand the native turn of mind ? For an example of the first: A sky-god is a commonplace of comparative religion—Zeus was one and there are hundreds of others...
...While reflecting to some extent the "democratic optimism" of the Oxford School, he provides a comprehensive and accurate panorama of what has been done abroad during recent years on behalf of social justice...
...It is extraordinarily rich, full of facts, ideas, suggestions, historical views and predictions...
...Note how erroneously the author states that "we only have direct knowledge of the soul...
...Not if Dr...
...The missionary appealed to the labors of the carpenter, but his servant scraping a little dust from under the woodwork said that the table would go on wasting away thus and when it had completely wasted then and not till then would its soul depart...
...There should be more emphasis on the manly courage of Christ...
...The great value of this experience is due not only to outside circumstances, which gave such importance to M. Tardieu's mission, but also to his personal disposition and mental make-up, which enabled him to keep his head clear and to register everything accurately at a time when he worked and fought strenuously...
...and the Catholic pulpit also should resound with denunciations of that capitalistic greed which denies a living wage to the laborer...
...International bankers, pacifist propagandists, great preachers, fashionable travelers, although they differ on all points, agree on the necessity of being polite rather than accurate...
...Psychoanalysis tinges no dreams of mine...
...The New Medical Follies, by Morris Fishbein...
...But, even as East and West can never meet, so neither can modernist and fundamentalist meet except in the supernatural alembic of Catholicism...
...Volume I. $4.00...
...The Misses Mikels and Shoup's collection of Poetry of today admirably meets these local and modern conditions...
...In many countries the newspapers are not free from financial preoccupations, which seem to oblige them to be on friendly and even intimate intercourse with discreet agents of foreign governments...
...Brown's doctrinal soundness...
...He discusses "how these mysteries were revealed, how and why they have ever here or there been lost, what their relations are to one another, and what our attitude should be toward them...
...On Hiffh Hills: Memories of the Alps, by Geoffrey JVinthrop Young...
...So go to Dr...
...but the conviction that the Virgin Birth and Bodily Resurrection of Christ are vital elements of Christianity is inescapable...
...Of the interlocutor's inability to comprehend the native mind there is also an excellent example in this book...
...otherwise the objects of the sciences would not be things but only intelligible species...
...It is, of course, one which must join them on the shelves of any good library...
...M. Tardieu has been in a position to feel and to realize the reactions of France and the United States toward each other...
...In the 364 pages of Mr...
...I. M. Haldeman, pastor of the First Baptist Church, New York City, a most effective and edifying type of the Protestant ministry would be produced...
...How else are we to explain the modern Alpinist—his arduous training, his daily and even hourly risk of life and limb, his ready acceptance of pain and discomfort...
...Brown's conception of ministerial dignity and purposefulness with the orthodoxy of such a divine as Dr...
...In his view, the philosophical basis of this treatise is, to say the least, a little unsound...
...Pipkin is not nearly so much at home in French social action, although his work in the field is conscientious and vast in scope...
...A few years ago one might have hoped that survival of a dreadful childhood, through whose windows in the grey of the morning no pyxies ever flitted, might win for our children the right to a specified freedom (of the July Fourth type) in their adult years...
...In the book he gives us today we find traces of all that...
...But Mr...
...But the Protestant having never studied scholastic philosophy misunderstood his servant or at least in no way appreciated the profundity of his thought...
...BERNARD FAY...
...Without the Incarnation by the Virgin Birth, one may say with all due reverence, it would have been impossible for God to give to man so great a salvation...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...And they may be often right...
...The Secret of Staying Young as published for a small consideration (and cheap at the price) by the Vital-O-Gland Company, with testimonials from men eighty-two, eigbty-three and eighty-four years of age thrown in, does not clutter up my shelves...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...These two countries have never known each other well and have never approached the great problems of life from the same point of view and with the same method...
...It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the missionary was not a Catholic for, had he been, he would have appreciated the figure of Aristotle in the native's loin-cloth as Tacitus did the figure of Pythagoras under the cloaks of the Druids in Britain...
...Within the pages of conscientious record, calm description of external nature and of human moods and states of mind, humorous reminiscence and technical details, one senses the spirit of asceticism and the embracing of a set of values and criteria which make light of ordinary prudence and common sense...
...But read him anyhow and have a good time laughing at our fellow-guUibles...
...JOHN S. MIDDLETON...
...and one is not surprised to find those individual qualities usually covered by the term "personality" over-emphasized...
...In emphasizing "the moral and spiritual" aspect of the life of Christ, rather than the "magical," it is true that he is in agreement with the best Protestant minds of today...
...Yet it is the stone which is understood, not the likeness of the stone, except by reflection of the intellect on itself...
...Father De la Taille, in his criticism of the work, states that "the general trend of the doctrine is not only orthodox but strikingly true to the inner sense of Catholic dogma...
...It certainly gives a brief synopsis of a theological course...
...Brown rightly insists on real scholarship in him who would sow the seed of the kingdom...
...In this connection, one is grateful to the author for establishing a relation between adventure and discipline at a time when the spirit of adventure, whether in the physical or spiritual sense, is often regarded as concomitant with the rejection of all discipline...
...4.00...
...It is pretty obvious that they have not learned it from missionaries of any kind: may it not, therefore, be that the early Jewish writers learned this myth (as he describes it) from Negro sources...
...CATHOLIC clergymen are occupied with duties even more important than preaching and pastoral visitation...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...AS I look at my grandchild playing casually in the sun I cannot suppress a groan, for I realize the inadequacy of any false white beard of mine to counteract the devastating materialism of a generation that knows all about sex and Santa Claus (through juvenile ignorance of the essential spiritual significance and symbolism of either...
...Brown is more exercised with "the form" of Christianity than its power...
...I only murmur "Shades of George M. Pullman...
...and pass on...
...He seems to forget that "the gospel is good news, not good advice...
...The Christ of the modernist is "Divine" only in the sense that He was morally better than all other men and was able, because of His extraordinary personality, more effectively than all other religious teachers to arouse the moral sensibilities of mankind...
...translated by Edward Hutton...
...Not if his cunning can prevail...
...Mawu is not the sky, but he has his dwelling in the sky"—such is the pronouncement of the Ewe-speaking peoples of western Africa as to their Supreme Being...
...As Saint Thomas puts it: "What is understood is in the intellect, not according to its own nature, but according to its likeness...
...and, taking it bye and large, here fundamentalism is helpless...
...For the whole philosophy of matter and form was in this savage's mind...
...The parallelism that is drawn between the actions of the Mass and those of the Apocalyptic "scene" is ingenious, but it does not succeed in being convincing...
...Drinking a great deal of '76 Spanish red, he smashes through many pages —far too many, in fact—playing at the usual high stakes, scattering the inevitable epithets of that beleagured day: "Peste...
...The Protestant minister's success or failure is almost entirely dependent upon his sheer personal ability to inspire the positive love of his parishioners...
...But the present book, by a well-known English Alpine elimber, suggests lines of thought leading to a deeper analysis...
...However, he hazards no explanation of this "modern attraction in mountains," nor does he go on to analyze the impulse lying at the root of the modern sport of mountaineering...
...Moreover, who can be sure of knowing the people's opinion...
...but when one talks of the worship of the sky, does that mean the material sky, or the sky as the symbol of Deity or the sky as the residence of Deity...
...Within these limitations Dr...
...He has a well-controlled sense of humor, and he is admirably sound...
...Never a beat skips my heart at osteopathy, limpio-comerology, geotherapy, poropathy, vita-o-pathy and its thirty-six young pathies, from prana-yana to chirothesia...
...and it was by the Death and Resurrection of Christ that the Divine identification with man became complete and salvation man's assured possession...
...1N A handsome volume with 300 excellent illustrations, Adolfo Venturi traces the history of Italian art from its Christian beginnings in Rome and Ravenna down to the days of Canova...
...His the little gold key that opens the forbidden door...
...It gives a complete and fair idea of what French-American relations have been since 1770...
...It can only keep its value if it is spontaneous and disinterested...
...STILL another contemporary anthology—an intelligent, painstaking collection distinguished by taste and decorum —for the education of readers who desire to be informed of that strange activity called poetry which is supposed to be the fine flowering of the human soul and intellect...
...but Dr...
...Diplomats have been created and are kept precisely for that purpose...
...2.00...
...Poetry of Today: An Anthology, edited by Rosa M. R. Mikels and Grace Shoup...
...Hardly ever have the two nations been well informed about each other...
...Aye, and vanities and scandals, all in one...
...The psychological analysis of M. Tardieu is clear, strong, convincing...
...Progress, in the sense of change for the better, depends upon the survival among us of this unrestful spirit, and upon each individual finding for it a disciplined way of service...
...It is a practical course in art study that is laid down clearly and simply by a master-hand, with a knowledge of the essential masterpieces of each epoch and an emphasis upon the salient points of advance and decline in Italian architecture, sculpture and painting...
...It gives an idea not only of what Americans and French people happened to think at special times, but of their general methods and habits of thinking, acting, working...
...The Worship of Nature, by Sir J. G. Frazer...
...Some notes on versification indicate that the editors have had the educational problem well in mind in compiling their book...
...If you read Dr...
...How can the table have a soul since the soul of the tree fled when it was cut down...
...A MERICAN students of economics have provided the general reader with a series of good books in which political, economic and social conditions in modern European countries are surveyed...
...It is not merely an intelligent summing up of a difficult problem, but a powerful confession, and it reads like a novel...
...They have enthused over things and people they did not know, and consequently have always been the prey of strong reactions after the periods of most ardent love and common idealism...
...B., How are we degenerate...
...This attempt to isolate one or two aspects of the mountaineering spirit as it is displayed in the present work must not give the impression that the book is merely or even to any extent a piece of subjective writing...
...Information on binding will be given upon application to the offices of The Commonweal...
...The object is known before the idea of the object, though the object is known according to the knowing faculty's mode...
...Instances are periods from 1775 to 1782 and from 1916 to 1919, as well as the fresh example of the Lindbergh flight to Paris and his reception by the French public...
...It is, after all, a venerable spirit of adventure which drives us out to find, as we may, the discipline which alone can make a useful—or what once was called a manly—^business of our short life...
...Some of us who were boys when Tyndall's name was still one to conjure with—what a memory of late Victorianism!— remain grateful for the thrills enjoyed in the reading of those Alpine adventures which represented the "scientist's" lighter, and more valuable, interludes...
...Moreover-^"he stretched his right hand to me and said: 'Each of these little pellets between my fingernails has its soul...
...but they and all serious readers are indebted to Sir James Frazer for the immense stores of learning which he has placed at their service on this topic...
...The minister of God will find it necessary to grapple with the complex problems of a highly industrialized civilization...
...Their reporters and editors are technicians who see mostly their colleagues and the small group of intelh'gent people, eager to hear about what is going on...
...The writer claims that his book is in substantial agreement with Scheeben's Mysteries of Christendom...
...1.20...
...New York: Robert M. McBride and Company...
...Such authority is not to be taken lightly, but the reviewer is left with the impression that Monsignor Kolbe reduces to a minimum the importance of nature and the natural in God's plan...
...How could the table be here, as such, if it had no soul to hold it together...
...There is a kinship on the natural plane with supernaturalized adventurers like Saint Ignatius Loyola and Father Ricci or the French Jesuits in seventeenth-century Canada...
...Corbleu...
...He seems to forget that knowledge is an assimilative process...
...Certain black races in Central Africa have a story of the fall of man...
...It is not necessary to press the importance of this book on those who know the author's other works...
...A Blade for Sale, by David Lindsay...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 7
