Books

...it is inevitable that so gradual, complicated and irregular a growth as that which civilization represents must make for differences of interpretation...

...And here, in simple language comprehensible by any person, we have the story set forth for us as, I think, it is not set forth an3rwhere else...

...Such details, however, are usually of less interest to the general reader...

...If, for instance, we compare the two versions of Mohammedanism and Arab civilization, Wells's detailed account is more glowing and picturesque, yet Thorndike in eight pages offers a clearer and yet a colorful summary...

...It may amuse but it has nothing to do with truth...

...THE note on the jacket of this book begins with the following sentence: "This volume is an excellent example of the modern method of writing biography—it aims to give an unretouched portrait of the subjects, with all their virtues as well as their foibles and frailties...

...But whoever writes the life of another human being is bound in honor to express that truth to the best of his ability...

...herself possessed a mind of an extraordinary quality...

...What Mr...

...He has seen a beautiful girl, Opal Jevons, and become instantly and intensely interested in her, only to learn that she is the daughter of a woman wtio had been the wrife of his own Uncle Johnny...

...Now even fiction which, for the sake of momentary sensationalism, distorts historical figures is often unfortunate in its effects...

...Here and there, individual preference or conviction may lead one to question certain of the author's theories or conclusions...

...A Case of Conscience, by Isabel C. Clarke...

...Why is it that we meet with that note so seldom in such writings...

...Modem Scientific Ideas, by Sir Oliver Lodge...

...He owes it both to his own integrity and to the integrity of his art...

...Two hundred and fifty million atoms placed side by side would measure just one inch...

...THOMAS WALSH...

...But the knowledge of Opal's connections comes too late to save Timothy, who goes mooning through Italy, wondering how he can possibly wait until his love shall pass beyond the too youthful confines of seventeen...

...Wallace been a Strachey, or even a Guedella, he might have produced a book which would have been unforgettable...

...2.50...

...Throughout this "complete survey" of civilization from prehistoric days to our own, man's constructive achievement is stressed...

...The Minor Poems of Dante, translated into Enfflish verse by Lorna De' Lucchi...

...and you can buy it for a little more than a dime...

...The fascination) that has won the name of Siren for the capital of the Bosphonis is well borne out in Mr...

...If a list of great modern inventors, men of letters, and scientists should be made out, it would be found that they were about equally of Protestant and Roman Catholic origin...

...The first two groups present the poems from the Vita Nuova and those which, while not contained in the Vita Nuova itself, belong to the same period...

...This may be one modern method of writing biography— it certainly isn't Mr...

...And as regards relative size ? Suppose the tiny atom described above to be enlarged to the size of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, then the electrons would be to that building like gnats flying about in its vastness...

...Signora De' Lucchi has done well, and in the case of poems already translated by Rossetti and others, she has nothing to fear from comparison...

...Strachey's—^but it is a method which inevitably results in caricature...

...We note one, out of the many interesting disclosures of the book, that in which we learn of the great persecution of the bloody Mourad IV against coffee-drinkers and the coffee-houses of the seventeenth century, and of the attempt to substitute a sort of Postum made of bean pods, all of which terrors and substitutes proved abortive...

...Go out and buy it and when you have read it you will have no reason to regret your extravagance...

...He is a soi-disant Catholic, claiming kinship with a martyr namesake...

...Surely it is a note obvious to all...

...In the physical sciences, there is no one who approaches Sir Oliver Lodge in helping the uninstructed to understand the overwhelmingly marvelous discoveries of the past quarter of a century in this portion of the scientific field...

...To each poem Signora De' Lucchi has prefixed a brief explanatory paragraph and the first line of the Italian original with references to the Oxford Dante (1924) and the Critical Edition of the Societa Dantesca Italiana, published by Bemporad in 1921...

...C. R. D. MILLER...

...It is a manifestation of law and order and beauty, which appeals to our highest faculties...

...There is no chance, nothing haphazard, in any part of the universe...

...Of course it is unfashionable and there are fashions in science just as there are in millinery, but none the less, the conclusion is unavoidable for any man who will look straight at the facts as they are set forth for us in this most fascinating little book...

...Be it also said that a truly American writer like Mr...

...But Professor Thorndike has done a real service, especially in such sections as Early Modern Times, and The Genesis of Our Present Civilization, in showing the fallacy of many time-worn but still largely accepted generalizations, and (in sections precedent) establishing the antecedents of the civilizations of today—Oriental as well as Occidental—on an actual, rather than a sentimental basis...

...And a statement like the following, in connection with the Reformation, clearly reveals Professor Thorndike's breadth of viewpoint: "Protestants often think that their faith has led to greater enlightenment and progress, but this is more probably due to the advance of modem science...

...Dwight's pages: the pictures illustrating his book are highly interesting and well-chosen...

...and, in moments when we can realize even one aspect of that revelation, overwhelms us with wonder, love, and praise...

...And again: "The splendors of observation and inference, now possible to man, speak of an all-controlling and all-designing Mind...

...As a study of Liszt, Wagner, and the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, Mr...

...a conclusion emphasized by the fact that a work like the Cambridge Mediaeval History, for example, devotes a thousand pages to a few centuries...

...FREDERICK H . MARTENS...

...It takes Timmy months to realize what everyone else knows—that Elizabeth is his true love, of soul as well as heart, and Severnside is hers as well as his...

...It is all very well to affirm that no man can fully visualize the truth about another human being...

...a woman who had heartlessly deserted her husband and her first daughter, Elizabeth, then six weeks old, to share the name and "anticolitis" fortune of Sir Joshua Jevons...

...Liszt, Waffner, and the Princess, by William Wallace...

...It is then merely the clash of two superficialities...

...Wallace's book is neither clever enough nor venomous enough to call for comment...

...What he looks for in a book is reading interest...

...Professor Thorndike has proven he can supply it, while avoiding that "romantic" equation the blurbist of history books loves to ostentate...

...New York: Benziffer Brothers...

...In this sense the author's book in some ways offers a more coherent and logic panorama of human development, perhaps, than does the Wellsian Outline...

...Nothing too small, nothing too big, for that infinite Mind's understanding and fostering care...

...and for chapter twelve, P. Jouget's L'Imperialisme Macedonien et I'Hellenisation de I'Orient...

...Sonietimes when the subject...

...Excellent also, is the general bibliography and a chronological table of Steps in the Development of Civilization...

...And so while everybody in the Jevons household is accusing Elizabeth of exerting undue influence over Timmy, and Timmy is eating his heart out down at Severnside trying to frame his answer within old Josh's time limit of one week, Opal, in Paris with her doting father, decides matters for herself and accepts the ring offered by Lord Alfred, devoted but poor second son of a famous family...

...but what can be said for such fiction masking under the name of biography...

...Then fate, which aids and abets Miss Qarke to perfection, places Timothy on the spot, just as Elizabeth's father dies in his Lake Como villa, leaving to the young man the entailed English estate of the Lovels...

...Yet amidst all these incredibly minute marvels, just as amongst the equally incredibly immense marvels of the universe revealed to us in the skies, the physicist, so to speak, walks, with his again incredibly ingenious instruments for detecting the wonders, minute or far away...

...In the main thread of his narrative the strands of cultural and political history are interwoven and their interconnection shown...

...These, as Signora De' Lucchi remarks, "are the ardent, often bitter, outpourings of a heart in the toils of an intensely sensual passion for a woman of flesh and blood, and afford a lively contrast to the poet's delicate, mystical, and restrained creatures of heaven and abstract virtues...

...Sir Joshua has never learned to yield, and Opal, when she comes to consider the matter, "doesn't want her kids brought up Catholic...

...Dwight, who happened to be born in Constantinople and has spent the principal part of his life there, observing and studying its history and art, publishing such excellent books as Constantinople Old and New, and Stamboul Nights, is a refreshment after a long series of works by British and French foreign residents and journalists...

...IN THIS admirable volume of fewer than two hundred pages, Signora De' Lucchi gives all the poems definitely attributed to Dante by modern scholars, with the exception of the Divina Commedia...

...But one might ask how often such works are produced merely because the cynical method is the easiest one foi' immediate effect...

...in the infinitude of space...

...T. M. WILL...

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

...The story of the friendship of two great musicians and their relations with the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein is assuredly suited to this type of treatment, and had Mr...

...Wallace displays...

...Italy and Elizabeth, all unconsciously, revive Timothy's sleeping Catholicism and there is war when he returns to Sir Joshua to ask his permission to marry Opal in the Catholic Church...

...But the bibliographies are in all cases adequate, and in view of the fact that they are necessarily brief, very well chosen...

...A gift for pat phrasing, the suggestion of a touch at once light and a bit bored, with the corollary that nothing after all much matters—and the job is done...

...To follow Mr...

...The ninety-one poems (including three by Forese Donati) are divided by the translator into eight groups...

...There have been few books, no matter at what price published, which convey so much information, and convey it so pleasantly, as this report of the six radio talks on Atoms and Worlds which were given in England last fall...

...Nor will the average intelligent American who wishes to gain a valid, unified idea of the whole course of civilization's historic and intellectual development—and to this reader the book addresses itself—find that the author has a sentimentalized outlook on the world war, "that old, old sickeningly monotonous and heartrendingly antiquated, oft-repeated experiment of militarism...

...Hear the conclusion of the whole matter as it appears to the distinguished writer: "Depend upon it, there is some Mind that really comprehends the whole, that can attend to the smallest detail— to every human being, to every bird, every sparrow—and can yet feel at home...

...IT IS Timothy Level's story, and Tinmiy has red hair "with an adorable kink in it...

...Nem York: Harper and Brothers...

...He summarizes it in brief, for, as he says, "we are writing a history of civilization, not of human sacrifice...

...His long residence and familiarity with the daily life as well as the tradition of the people make his book one to be delighted in by those of us who are not to return to the Golden Harbor...

...BE IT said at the start that so fine a piece of bookmaking hailing from our own United States (not imported in sheets and bound up with the name of an American firm) is a real delight to the book-sense of the reviewer and a proof that our own presses can produce excellent volumes, if given the chance...

...Dwight through the highways and byways of Constantinople is an opportunity that must be highly profitable as well as enjoyable...

...There were things that were ridiculous in their lives, and in the case of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein there was even an element of farce...

...To the thoughtful man it is of interest only as an example of what happens when a school of biographers throw the responsibility they owe to their subjects to the winds and proceed under the guise of biography to produce works of fiction...

...But the judgment of such figures as Liszt and Wagner is a very different matter, and it takes a firmer and a subtler mind to deal with them than Mr...

...Yet the interior of each is a solar system with its nucleus of positive (and some negative) electricity, around which revolve like planets the electrons of negative electricity each 1,850 times smaller than the proton or positive element...

...Numerous illustrations and maps, marginal paragraph summary heads, and, for each chapter, a short bibliography are features of the presentation...

...A HISTORY of civilization in some six hundred pages must of necessity be "short" and short in more than one sense of the word...

...London: Ernest Benn and Company...

...One might wish that one or another newer valuable reference book had been listed, as for chapter fourteen...

...Wallace really express their writer's idea of the figures portrayed, we can only pity the limitations of the writer...

...and it is refreshing to find a historian who gives as a first cause for the religious change of the sixteenth century and the breaking away of territorial sections from the one Church ". . . the rise of modern nationality with its selfcomplacency and hatred for foreign nations in contrast to Christian unity...

...At the same time...

...4.00...

...GRENVILLE VERNON...

...Wallace has done has been to emphasize only one side of both Liszt and the Princess, and to reduce Wagner to pitiable proportions...

...An enlarged model of the hydrogen atom—the simplest of all—may be imagined as a one-cent piece revolving round another onecent piece at the distance of half a mile...

...The chapter on Imperialism and Expansion, too, is excellent, and the wrongs done the Asiatic and African native by the economic exploitation of the western powers, nullifying the "foreign mission activities based for the most part on highest and more disinterested motives," is tersely and graphically pictured...

...On the Etruscans, Pericle Ducati's Etruria Antica...

...but certainly it was not comedy which was at the base of either Liszt's nature or Wagner's, and the Princess...

...New York: Oxford University Press...

...itself is neither very deep nor very important, as in Thomas Beer's The Mauve Decade, the result is amusing...

...Constantinople, by H. G. Dwight...

...GREAT is the gift which enables a scientific man to make clear the mysteries of his subjects to those with little or no scientific training, and great should be our gratitude to those who take the trouble to use that gift...

...When works such as this of Mr...

...Books two and four of Signora De' Lucchi's volume contain the sonnets (not creditable to either) exchanged by Dante and Forese Donati, and the poems from the Convivio...

...The translator adheres to Dante's metrical forms, except for the substitution of the freer English sonnet form for the classical Italian model...

...2.50...

...Professor Thorndike's book is a good example of how admirably a professional historian when, like the author, he has the gift of lucid prose and a broad cultural and aesthetic background of knowledge and sympathy, can go the more imaginative but less scholarly lay writer one better as a popularizer...

...The trouble is that the method has already begun to harden into a pattern, a pattern which any author possessed of a cynical freedom from human reverence can make effective on the surface...

...In the seventh group are the violently passionate verses written to celebrate an unidentified maiden Dante calls Pietra...

...Sixpence...

...Purgatorio, XXVI, 117...

...Most people doubtless are aware that there is a chemical object known as the atom and some, at least, will know that it has recently been found to be a universe of amazing complexity...

...Dante seems to have taken for his model the Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, "who in rhymes of love and stories of romance excelled all others...

...BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE...