Books
Bruere, Robert W. & Bruncken, Gerhard & Robinson, Henry Morton & Winkle, Cortlandt van & Brooks, Van Wyck & Maynard, Theodore
Understanding America, by Lanffdon Mitchell. New York: Georffe H. Doran Company. $3.50. IN HIS Understanding America, Mr. Langdon Mitchell follows the middle of the road, a course that is usually...
...Which is enough to explain why time will prove his friend...
...Professor Stoll gives new expression to ideas for which his earlier monographs have distinguished him...
...The dramatist has consciously prepared us by Portia's mercy speech for this contrast between Shylock's demand for "justice" and the justice (or law of Venice) tempered by mercy which is finally meted out to him...
...The section on Literature and Life is the least likely to appeal directly to the student of Shakespeare who would have preferred in its place a rewriting of the author's monographs on Hamlet and Othello...
...Now this particular early being made excellent implements, showing the possession not only of reason but of the capable hands of an artisan, and from the character of his burials he showed that he believed in a future life...
...Cboley, as chief probation ofBcer of the Court of General Sessions, has for years been confronted by the very definite, the very practical duty of dealing with the individual delinquent under the exacting scrutiny of judges whose business it is to see that the ends of justice as defined in the law are fully served...
...We can't see his enemies' point of view at all," or "We blame Madam more than we do the General," etc...
...If you are interested in understanding yourself and your personal problems, you will find Mr...
...All of us who desire to live a good and happy life—a richly fruitful life—find ourselves perpetually hampered by our inability to understand the springs of our ovra wayward impulses, by our lack of knowledge of the wise ways to conserve our energies for constructive purposes, by our ignorance of the elementary tools of self-control...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...The author has not been able to give her characters very much reality...
...In fact, Mr...
...which, one feels, is what has happened to it in Glory...
...At the beginning of the century Mr...
...0.75...
...Perhaps, in the whole course of his economic interpretation, the author never found one himself...
...In this respect his point of view is highly unusual...
...Published by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York...
...Pisaro in Englishmen for My Money is 'T)y birth a Portingal" and, when addressing Delion, he would have "church rites" for the proposed marriage of his daughter, with never a hint that he is even a Maranno...
...Material is drawn not only from archives and official correspondence, but from fishing smacks, cotton wharves and factory looms...
...One may agree or not agree with that conception, but one does not debate the balanced proportion and flooding energy of the finished mass...
...Perhaps because the book is a series of unrelated chapters composed at different times its effect is not cumulative and unified...
...Mitchell strikes his deepest notes...
...Thus Hamilton and Webster, whom the people of the United States have sound reason to remember in other and nobler terms, are hewn on a bias to fit the historian's thesis...
...Spearman's The Marriage Verdict is a satisfactory indication of the popular favor with which the book has been received...
...Though it may not possess quite the same charm as did Many Mansions, the first of her books, it skilfully avoids the early faults of construction and of a faint, not unpleasant but too facile sentimentality...
...Finally Professor Stoll tells us that the Church's prohibition against usury, i.e., the taking of interest, is "not abrogated at the present day...
...and for this, among other reasons, it deserves unusual consideration...
...Cooley's stories of men, driven by wild and blind impulses to the commission of crime, restored to themselves and to society by a technique at once scientific and humane...
...The portrait drawn of him is vivid, but is not so convincing as that of Ida, the hard, brilliant daughter-in-law of Julia Banning...
...His book is a record of solid achievement and an exposition of the methods of that achievement...
...an understanding of himself was the first step toward self-control...
...There is rivalry between the two, for Julia, after throwing over the man she loved because she had discovered that he had had a mistress, married without much emotion Palmerston Banning who had no emotion whatever...
...Several of these are New Thought or psychoanalytical quacks, and one of them may be clearly recognized as a distinguished economist who has now degenerated into a somewhat dubious mystic...
...When one observes that this must be reconciled with the outspokenly religious flavor of the story, one sees that Catholic fiction is certainly...
...Mitchell's contacts results in many agreeable paradoxes and contrasts...
...and in every human there is the possible criminal...
...Rivalry includes many penetrating bits of writing and many felicitous phrases...
...Rivalry J by Sarah Warder MacConnell...
...He represents an acquaintance as saying to him that he had never before met anyone who cared so tremendously about the Common Law and the Constitution and Bill of Rights, who could be so passionate about Magna Carta...
...But do not look for heroes...
...Both meet inevitable disillusionment...
...So it should be said that Rivalry has a wealth of subsidiary matter and that some of the best passages in it are those dealing with the minor characters...
...CORTLANDT VAN WiNKLE...
...And this is well, for few characters (except Hamlet) have been interpreted so often with so little regard for what would appear to be Shakespeare's own intentions...
...CHARLES and Mary Beard, co-authors of The Rise of American Civilization, are historians in the best modern tradition, a tradition which they have done much to create and champion...
...The historians have etched, on the plate of their special interpretation, the flowing curve of events beginning with the first explorations, and ending only with the most recent utterances of American senators, poets and philosophers...
...Mitchell uses to illustrate the principle, illustrated only in the breach in modern America, that a people flourishes and becomes great only w^hen its citizens are in a high degree like-minded...
...It is an animated and in some respects a dramatic story...
...In his zeal to correct sentimental interpretations of that character I am inclined to think Professor Stoll goes too far...
...If it has been the object of Charles and Mary Beard to mold in the living round their sinewy, full-bodied conception of American history, they have unquestionably succeeded...
...But it is disconcerting to find that the historic idols we have always worshipped have feet of paraffin, and that gold coins may be found clinging to their boot-soles wherever they tread...
...3.00...
...Langdon Mitchell follows the middle of the road, a course that is usually productive, in social criticism, of little else than banality...
...but he does so with such fervor and sincerity that his results are uncommonly stimulating...
...The economic drama of the first volume carries the reader through the colonial period, the break with England, the establishment of the republic, post-revolutionary commerce, and brings him to the verge of that "irrepressible conflict," the Civil War...
...Popes and Cardinals in Modern Rome, by Carlo Prati...
...and he is able to enter the circle of ideas represented by Mr...
...J . T IS a pity that a book containing much useful information should be marred by the constant and undue forcing of the animal theory of early man...
...Thus Hamilton's assumption of state and national debts in 1790, and their subsequent funding in the form of federal bonds—a bold financial operation which immediately restored our national credit—is recounted by Mr...
...not always doomed to be ignored...
...The story can hardly be called genial, but it certainly is most interesting...
...He takes the simplest-minded type of American who, in the interests of universal peace, proclaims that all peoples are alike, that "the difference comes out in the wash," and that the way to make them all brothers is to assert this in and out of season...
...HENRY MORTON ROBINSON...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Nevertheless we shall be quite frank and say that it is not by any means the author's best story, and that it suffers considerably from comparison with Robert Kimberley as a study of life in the United States...
...Cooley out of his rare experience and rich scientific equipment demonstrates, is effective in the case of more conspicuous transgressors against the rules of right conduct...
...But Elena, after having resented the wealth and social position of her sister, gets her consolation in the posthumous fame of her husband, which she pits against Julia...
...History often appears an inviting field to the novelist, but it is a' perilous field in which bad history may be associated wath good fiction or good history drowned in bad fiction...
...On the other hand, though it is, as much as was One, its immediate predecessor, something of a thesis, the story is better managed and the characterization more deft...
...The economic historian would indicate that history is not merely a politico-military procession of demigods marching past a huzzaing, jingoistic reviewingstand...
...3-50...
...But see canon 1543 of the Codex luris Canonici (1918...
...In the latter instance the history might as well have been left undisturbed as such, and not swathed in a blanket of verbiage...
...One of the most illuminating of Mr...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...she explains to the last pin the curtains and furnishings of each room, and all this punctilious picture-work is couched in the most mannered writing which at times borders on flippancy, and at other times is purely sentimental...
...Rather, he was one of those human beings who act upon men directly, as the sun acts when it shines and pushes on a substance...
...Arrangements have been made for binding volume V in leather or cloth...
...and as, under his guidance, you see yourself wrestling, albeit successfully, with the same problems under which the delinquent stumbles and falls, you will acquire a new and inspiring sense of man's capacity for self-mastery...
...It is as if in telling the story of Lindbergh's heroic achievement, the newspapers had filled their eight-column streamer headlines with the words, Earth Inductor Compasses and Lost Airplanes...
...There, are differences of opinion not sufHciently dealt with as to the Talgai and Rhodesian skulls also...
...Cooley's immediate subject is the delinquent and the technique of his rehabilitation...
...Within their hypothesis they have achieved a master-work...
...This is, after all, caviling...
...Walkley, in the Edinburgh Review and the (London) Times, and, quite recently, following the lead of Professor Stoll's earlier monographs, Professor Schiicking, in Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (1922) have helped somewhat to clear away the errors in Shakespearean criticism for which Coleridge and Hazlitt in England are partly responsible, and have helped toward the establishment of a rational and scientific interpretation of the art of Shakespeare, by no means ignoring aesthetics...
...And this sense will be heightened as you follow one after another of Mr...
...But it must be added that Miss MacConnell, like nearly every woman novelist, is not quite convincing with her men...
...translated byi E. I. Watkins...
...But with Professor Stoll we leave the vagaries of the romantic critic who so often confuses art with life and we breathe, perhaps somewhat consciously, the rarefied atmosphere of a penetrating and keen aesthetic criticism and an amazing, if somewhat overpowering, erudition...
...actions and words impossible in a London or stage Jew of 1601...
...He confesses that he feels "terribly at home" in his own country...
...b) keeps one-half his entire fortune, even the fine being remitted at the instance of Antonio...
...Beard is protesting, of course, against the maudlin kind of thing we find in Parson Weems's biography of Washington, a sugar-and-spice rhapsody on men and affairs that cloys by its own oversweetness...
...It is for this reason that I so confidently urge it upon the attention of the general reader...
...The paper on Whitman is the most impressive in the book...
...One is conscious, standing in the presence of this staunch document, of its integrity and power—an integrity and power that prevent it from becoming another mere "outline of history," another volume of informational shreds and patches...
...And he not only holds both positions with equal heartiness but fills a good deal of the space between them...
...In the fashion of reviewers, I suppose I must call attention to passages to which I can give only qualified approval...
...Glory, by Leonie Aminoff...
...Professor Stoll does well to stress this point: "The dramatist's intention—that, I must believe, together with his success or failure in fulfilling it, is the only matter of importance...
...War is presented as the grappling of dissonant economies, even the biological surge is subordinated to the commercial struggle for existence...
...1 HIS volume will do much to remove misconceptions regarding the life and regimen of the Vatican...
...Until this genetic synthesis appeared, there was in our literature no single work which articulated so completely and forcefully the credo of the economic historian...
...It is true that one occasionally obtains a rather fleeting impression of the "little Emperor" with his hands at his back and his temper always irascible—save where his wife and son are concerned...
...The new studies are Characterization and The Comic Method...
...Nevertheless, even the present-day editors of the new Cambridge Shakespeare and even Professor F. H. Wright and the author of A Study of Hamlet (1926) have yet to overcome their impressionistic tendencies of criticism, and it is not a little disheartening to be told that at a great university in New England an edition of Shakespeare is still in use in which the editor suggests that Katherine the shrew had been improperly reared from her childhood by her widower father...
...Big business, little business, business as it affects art, literature, education, religion and politics— is the dominant cry of The Rise of American Civilization...
...Beard can dislodge him from his "business as usual" theory of history, we must assent to the cool indictment of the economic historian...
...Ezra Pound, in so far as it touches America, and transcend that...
...The book contains eight chapters, six of which "have already appeared in print, though these last have been entirely recast— much altered and even more enlarged...
...recounts the visit of the Pope, and ends with the battle of Austerlitz...
...NO STUDENT of Shakespeare can afford to miss this book...
...This is the economic interpretation with a vengeance...
...while the bitterly acidulous Elena who, until an accident crippled her for life, had meant to become a dancer, married an architect of remarkable talents but of ambitions of the kind that necessitate poverty in a materialistic world...
...Had they the occasion they would find here the materials for an equally thrilling story...
...New York: The Macaulay Company...
...He was not, by nature, or not solely, an artist, a writer of books, a writer at all...
...The Marriage Verdict, by Frank H. Spearman...
...Rivalry is, however, a book primarily for women, despite the fact that the novelist handles her sex with an irony that verges at times upon acrimoniousness...
...One also sees and partly understands the childlike and wondering Josephine who, in spite of her apparent simplicity, was instinctively shrewd in the employment of her feminine charms...
...Whitman is undoubtedly a philosophical poet, though he is something more too...
...Nor indeed is Mammon in lacke Drums Entertainement, though a "Vsurer, with a great nose," a Jew...
...Or again, he contrasts the false culture for which so many Americans go to Paris with the solid culture, solid because fundamental, that produced the mind of Lincoln...
...and the variety of Mr...
...Beard for no other purpose apparently, than to show how it "enriched thousands of good federalists...
...Madame Aminoff is the author of the entire series, known as the Torchlight Series of Napoleonic Romances...
...Madame Aminoff attempts to paint a vivid picture of the period about which she is writing...
...Beard's economic acid...
...Again: Daniel Webster is introduced as "the hope and reliance of the moneyed and conservative classes, the merchants, manufacturers, capitalists and bankers...
...And this something more that he is, in his work, is related to the man himself...
...For Mr, Cooley has explored new reaches of human nature and has set new records in man's endless quest to understand and master the laws governing his own behavior...
...Beard's whole conception may be said to pivot on the gold tip of business...
...The two main divisions of the work are entitled The Agricultural Era and The Industrial Era—an arrangement that would seem natural in any survey of American civilization...
...Cooley's explorations of the springs of human behavior helpful and comforting...
...Cooley's many penetrating observations is that "often the mere discovery by the delinquent himself of the true reasons for his misconduct proved sufficient to effect a cure...
...If you would have eyes to observe the forces byi which your own life is governed, you may find them by looking with Mr...
...Since I have not space to consider all, I shall limit myself to a few from the chapter on Shylock...
...and further (c) he is to become a Christian (and save his soul in his despite...
...The conflict is not limited to the sisters...
...but there are greater compensations in the concentration of attention upon single and complete topics...
...or perhaps it would be better to say this breadth...
...But his method of action was theirs: direct and immediate, not by the printed word...
...These characters are usurers, to be sure, all more or less partaking of the usurer's unpleasant qualities—but not Jews...
...Here, too, we find a thesis, even perhaps a controversial thesis, i.e., that the American people hitherto have been right in not accepting Whitman, since every people must protect itself from what is alien to its natural culture or its culture dies...
...and among these should be mentioned especially three...
...And it is upon this general hypothesis that we should expect Charles and Mary Beard to predicate their utterance...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...VAN WYCK BROOKS...
...To talk of such a being as "only just human" is to ride a theory to the limit of folly...
...And most of the glamour surrounding our period of colonization and expansion has been pretty well drenched by the same wave...
...William Allen White, and transcend it...
...Information on binding will be given upon application to the offices of The Commonweal...
...On the other hand, he is entirely sympathetic with the more youthful rebels who feel that something is wrong with America, "unconscionably wrong...
...The difference between the normal good citizen and the criminal is in general a difference in self-knowledge and a capacity for self-control...
...The last is appealing in its quotations of noble inscriptions on tombstones in Charleston, South Carolina, which Mr...
...Each struggles for domination with her husband, and Julia has, in addition, to compete with the frigid Palmerston for first place in her children's affections...
...and that is nearly all that matters...
...His book is somewhat sketchy and miscellaneous, but it returns invariably to one point, the problem of American society in its innumerable aspects...
...The story concerns itself with two sisters, Julia and Elena Doane, beginning in their late teens and ending in their middle-age...
...The first of these is interesting chiefly perhaps as coming from the author of that quasi-classic American comedy, The New York Idea...
...Stated in this bare form the thesis of the book emerges too obtrusively...
...For this reason, it is of the greatest value to professional workers...
...and he shows that nothing leads to war more quickly than failing to understand how profoundly different other peoples are...
...And it is typical of Mr...
...Comedy and the American Spirit, Walt Whitman, and The New Secession...
...But beneath and through his study of the delinquent he reveals the broad springs of all human conduct, your conduct and mine...
...THEODORE MAYNARD...
...It is the result of Mr...
...The sections on CardinaL Matthieu and* Cardinal Billot are particularly enlightening...
...3.00...
...Undoubtedly the years Mr...
...He is thus able to enter the circle of ideas represented, let us say, by Mr...
...However, there is compensation in a highly interesting chapter on the cardinals of the Curia, showing what misinterpretations of their character often prevail and describing the real simplicity and devotion that govern their acts in private as well as in public...
...He assumes and records the shifting antagonisms of capital and labor, seaboard and hinterland, farmer and manufacturer...
...He is an acknowledged suitor of Katherine serenading her as -openly and elegantly as her other wooers, and later he cries out against his enemies: "Villaines, Rogues, lewes, Turkes, Infidels...
...And until a greater than Mr...
...For at the end Shylock (a) retains his life...
...but rather, a cool-blooded demonstration in terms of commerce, crops, inventions, money-rates and labor movements, of the compromises that have formed (or changed the form of) the existing social order...
...To know other nations, he says, we must first know ourselves...
...He says, and repeats the thought more than once, "Most readers and critics nowadays resent the despoiling of Shylock at the end...
...But it is in showing that the future is with Whitman that Mr...
...For criminals are human...
...The era following the Civil War is a fair plate for Mr...
...That, as a matter of fact, would have been an appropriate title for Lindbergh's first statement to the reporters after he landed at Le Bourget...
...You know what the feature writers made of it...
...You will not find them because the author did not intend you to find them...
...Cooley's book, it is to you that I address this note...
...1 HE issue of a "cheap edition" of Mr...
...Surely Abyssus of Timon, a "cittizen of Athenes," is no Jew...
...Thus, for instance, he retorts upon the foreign-born critics who reproach native Americans with being intolerant by showing how excessively intolerant these foreign-born critics themselves are with native Americans and their ways...
...The multiplicity of inventions, the accumulation of vast fortunes in railroads, oil and steel, the upward rush of technological development—these, as well as America's imperialistic policy and its international involvements —are all swiftly drawn against a background of business...
...Two volumes, $12.50...
...In all these contrasts he aims at the golden mean, and he strikes it without diminishing its lustre...
...Shakespeare Studies, by Elmer Edffar Stall...
...He is no idle theorist...
...Our problems are not so gross as those in which the criminal has enmeshed himself, but they are like in kind and require essentially the same treatment which, as Mr...
...It is as though a sculptor should carve Venus as a babe in arms that the public might the better appreciate the dignity of the Melian statue...
...But more appealing and more profound than his controversial papers are those in which he lingers over some aspect of American life that he has loved for its own sake...
...Probation and Delinquency, by Edtmn J. Cooley...
...THIS is Miss MacConnell's fourth novel and represents in every way a distinct advance in her art...
...We have here the usual anthropoid ancestry (which, by the way, is abandoned by some authorities) and are told that Moustierian man was "only just human...
...its conclusions based upon experience are objectively inductive conclusions...
...Beard's method that there are no generals and no whiffs of double-grape in his wars...
...Two characters, Shylock and Falstaff, have separate chapters devoted to their exposition...
...and this instantly leads him, on the other hand, to adopt the standpoint of the foreign-bom critic and inveigh against "prejudice and propaganda...
...Charles Beard's economic interpretation of history is already familiar to most American readers as the direct antithesis of the Carlyle "hero" and the Macaulay "literary" schools of historical writing...
...We are not long in discovering the basis of this duality, if one chooses to call it so...
...Spearman based his narrative upon a "case" of the Pauline privilege, as outlined to him by a well-known priest...
...Cooley into the life histories which he has so searchingly, so wisely and sympathetically explored...
...In this he has demonstrated his competence...
...GERHARD BRUNCKEN...
...Jeans's view (that most commonly held today) is that a long filament was drawn out of the sun by the passage of aj great star, a portion of which became the earth and the remainder the other planets...
...With patience and laborious detail as though aware that the palladium, of the older school is still secure within the citadel...
...Moreover, Professor Stoll exaggerates the number of Jews in Elizabethan drama, though he fails to note lacuppus of Machiavellus (1597...
...BRIEFER MENTION Prehistoric Man, by Keith Henderson...
...ROBERT W . BRUERE...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...And he is able to reach back to the sources of American character in Washington and Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and by so doing leaven the whole mass of his reflections and criticisms...
...Beard has spent in preparing this work have convinced him that the economic motif is dominant in the historical symphony...
...New York: Grosset and Dunlap...
...History, according to this formula, becomes an aggregate of sociological forces, conditioned by the clashing necessities of groups and individuals...
...She employs the editorial "we," magnanimously letting the reader in on her story with such phrases as "Napoleon . . . had a jjoetic conception of life and death and—tinsel aside—an arresting personality...
...But to me, as I have indicated, its outstanding merit is that it contrives to make the conduct of the delinquent a window through which one may look out upon the forces that motivate all human conduct, and by bringing to bear upon the problem of the delinquent all the available resources of science, tends to dispel the fog of superstitious mystery that has kept "human nature" a dark and unexplored continent...
...The title page and index for volume V of The Commonweal Or'e now ready...
...Incidentally, the theory that the sun spat out the earth as a single great gobbet of molten matter is one we have never met with before...
...But these impressions are transitory and fade as we go through the book...
...All of us are transgressors in a greater or less degree...
...The Rise of American Cimlization, by Charles and Mary Beard...
...But I think he errs when by his emphasis he would make us believe it is the only one...
...The title does have a rather forbidding sound...
...4.00...
...In doing so she enters into detailed descriptions of the gowns that her women characters wear, descriptions that might interest dress designers but hardly the casual reader...
...Its chief merit—and it is a merit that richly compensates in any novel for any incidental defects—is that from start to finish the book is alive...
...2.00...
...She writes of Pius VII as the "Pope o' Rome," and refers to the "Land o' Dreams" and to "King Frost" and "Summer Wind...
...But surely despoiling is hardly the word...
...Again concerning the Taungs skull, the animal to which) it belonged was not "a super-ape," but an anthropoid remarkable only because found in a spot where such no longer live, as Sir Arthur Keith pointed out at the time of its discovery...
...I do not recall any Shakespearean study of this century which is at once so thoughtful and so thought-provoking, which is so acute in' analysis and withal so rich in illustrative material, and which is, in the fundamental conception of dramatic interpretation, so painstakingly thorough, so just, so eminently right...
...Dynastic or racial eruptions have been swept away by the dismal groundswell of economics...
...and he admits himself that he may have been "warped and perverted" into patriotism...
...GLORY is the seventh book of a historic dozien based on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte...
...GENERAL reader, you that have no professional concern with charities, no technical interest in the specific subject of Mr...
...The historian then proceeds to prove that 100 years later, papers were discovered establishing the fact that no less than twenty-nine members of the First Continental Congress dabbled in public funds...
...Look for much that is factual, close-clipped and unsentimental in this essentially "tough-minded" history of American affairs...
...and caviling cannot and does not detract from the principles expounded in Professor Stoll's distinguished book, remarkable, moreover, for its accurate printing...
...The present volume of 427 pages takes Napoleon through his coronation in Paris...
...These will be sent upon request...
...There is also considerable matter that will appear obvious to the wellinstructed Catholic, and some anecdote that may strike the reader as gentle to an infantile degree...
...Mitchell's somewhat unusual experience, among American writers of criticism, in having had an ample taste both of the pioneer life of the West and European life, while having at the same time, as his natural milieu, the normal life of a well-placed American citizen...
...The sum of these 427 pages is not, on the whole, very convincing...
...2.50...
...He was not a saint...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 8
