Books
Shuster, George N. & Ross, J. Elliot & Sands, William Franklin & McGuire, Harry & Crowey, Paul & Emery, James A. & Brunini, JohnGilland
298 THE COMMONWEAL July 17, 1929 BOOKS The Jew In Our Midst Christian and Jew: A Symposium for Better Understanding, edited by Isaac Landman. New York: Horace Liveright. $3.00. AS INDICATED...
...Fagnani's brand—there will be no more Jewish-Christian antagonism...
...The Jew imagines some of the prejudice against him in America, and makes too much of that 90 percent of the rest which arises from common ignorance...
...The status of Gray is likewise set forth discerningly, and little so good has been written about Chatterton...
...It is a challenge to our fundamental religion...
...Neiv York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...The Devil and the Deep Sea, by Elizabeth Jordan...
...There was no sign of violence, yet she had come to her death by the hand of a supercriminal who had done his work without leaving behind even a fingerprint...
...AS INDICATED by the subtitle, this volume is devoted • to bringing about a better understanding between Jews and Christians...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...3.50...
...LHE QUEST OF GOD is a journalist's view of certain fundamental religious truths, such as the existence of God, freedom of the will, personal immortality...
...The Queen's Own Time A Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780, by Oliver Elton...
...The Christian writers, on their side, are quite generous in admitting a beam in their own eye...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company...
...Fagnani has a modernist axe to grind, someone else should turn the grindstone...
...1 HOUGH La Vie Chretienne, a French series of books about the Catholic faith edited by Maurice Brillant, has long since proved its claim to distinction, the present volume by Pere Huby marks, we believe, an ascent to new heights...
...On the whole, the book is good, but I could wish Rabbi Landman had done his editing rather more vigorously...
...For first of all, as is recognized by some others in the symposium, the existing antagonism is more racial and social and economic than it is religious...
...Nothing is more natural than that her brother, John Quincy Adams, brought up by such a mother, the companion of such a father, and the intimate friend of such a sister, should succeed his father as President of the United States...
...And when Dr...
...Well— "De gustibus non est disputandum," but it is my private opinion that a ride along the Potomac in a hansom cab would be more exciting...
...Fisk himself achieved within a brief period an extraordinary business success, rising, like another and more celebrated and recent figure, from the obscurity of a Vermont village...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...No more does she indicate a possible avenue of readjustment than she promptly closes it with the obstacle of a long-established and unalterable custom...
...New York: The Century Company...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...More Darkness on India Slaves of the Gods, by Katherine Mayo...
...These diaries and old letters which are coming to light are just far enough removed from those who wrote them to make their publication possible without intruding upon the privacy of their descendants, as would have been the case a generation ago...
...THIS unusually readable presentation of an ephemeral figure in New York finance owes its appeal to the striking picture of its time rather than the importance of its subject...
...Fortunately, it was made clear that the Colonel's reckless tongue and his own unscrupulous effort to involve Mrs...
...It is a collection of short papers by men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants...
...The suggestions of legislative and judicial corruption which the careful inquiries of the author reveal and imply, make our own age seem comparatively virtuous...
...We are further mystified by hints that one of the profligate youngsters may have poisoned the old lady the sooner to come into her money...
...Indeed in her preface she accepts as justified a criticism against her first book which is equally applicable to her latest...
...2.00...
...It is a real aristocracy...
...and as there is nothing to distinguish The King Murder except interest in the identity of the murderer, the sole emotion roused by the book was pity at the author's naive attempts to get the story all raveled up...
...The Quest of God, by Casper S. Yost...
...Fundamentally, the argument is simple: the oral Gospel is antecedent to the four written Gospels, and a solution of the difficulties of interpretation which arise must always recognize this fact...
...RAPIDLY growing interest in Melville has created a demand for his less accessible books...
...In Catholic circles particularly, we need more of this persuasive writing on religious questions to put flesh on the arguments of text-books that are too academic...
...There is simply the perpetual motion of every day—the demise of the canary, the exploits of Domar the dog, the politics of domesticity, the temper of Uncle Bunkle and the well-known peculiarities of human nature...
...It is rather impertinent to be told in effect that if only all of us become modernists—of Dr...
...I admit that there is more now, and yet I contend that there is not so very much more...
...If the Colonel's beginnings were obscure, his end was sensational and tragic...
...MAYO here recasts in a slightly different form the diatribes that gave substance to Mother India...
...Some of the papers seem rather irrelevant, and a few are calculated to increase antagonism rather than diminish it...
...A postscript by Charles E. Hughes pays an unusual and handsome tribute to the dead author, Robert Fuller...
...And besides, as others point out, the problem is not to bring religious agreement, but to teach people to disagree agreeably...
...John Adams's Daughter Colonel Smith and Lady, by Katherine Metcalf Roof...
...It is by a layman, to appeal to laymen...
...Such delightful, fragrant writing...
...Fisk's partnerships, speculations, promotions and litigations led him into every field of political, financial, and, indeed, social activity...
...Though several critics have traced the lineage of the Romantic poets into the eighteenth century, Dr...
...The evidence of research which lies within his easily read pages is worthy of a loftier subject and a finer theme, but he was evidently engaged by the picturesque audacity, the extraordinary success and the generous good humor that helped to obscure the utter lack of morality or responsibility in the character of Fisk...
...He did not hesitate to fight Commodore Vanderbilt, from whom he won a draw, and he found time to promote and manage the first presentations of French opera bouffe in New York...
...Although not by a Catholic, and having some things Catholics would not approve of, yet Yost's book might profitably be used as supplementary reading in our classes in philosophy...
...Elton is especially interested in these last, however, and his analysis of Fielding and Sterne combines the best research with personal appreciation...
...While commercially serving the government, he laid the foundations of a fortune in contraband cotton...
...Hughes, "the governor's secretary and confidante...
...captures, wrecks and aids in the rehabilitation of the Erie Railroad, displaying remarkable capacity for agricultural relief in the form of watered stock...
...For example, The King Murder: "In a luxurious boudoir in a New York apartment the body of a beautiful young woman lay silent and immovable...
...Colonel Smith and his lady have suffered from a too laboriously sprightly treatment, which is a pity, for the material is excellent...
...Mayo, herself, is responsible for the emotion of hopelessness which immediately follows...
...Elton's ork and so to reshape their too arbitrary stand...
...and so every detail has the feel and the tingle of reality, is conserved in a design woven by observation alone...
...One can hardly think of more engaging youngsters than Grig or Emmy, who are both lovable and troubling without having to turn into machines for the production of antics...
...Ever the showman, Fisk became the colonel of the Ninth New York, and, during the Orange riots of '69, executed a Fabian retreat in the form of a personal rear-guard action that carried him from the centre of the riot through the backyards of the West Side to obscurity and safety...
...What did Jesus know of original sin, transubstantiation, Immaculate Conception, atonement, papal infallibility, all the dogmas of the Apostles' or Nicene Creed...
...It is undoubtedly a gain to see the situation in these terms...
...These books are by no means objective (I find myself in frequent disagreement with them) but they present a point of view and a series of appraisals worthy of respect...
...2.00...
...2.00...
...Harry McGuire...
...L'Evangile et les Evangiles, by Joseph Huby...
...The Buttonwood crowd does not lose its way into fairyland or stumble upon one of those frightful mysteries which used to present themselves so conveniently whenever anybody wished to write a book for youngsters...
...Elton's remark that "the poetic senses of Collins were reborn in Keats" will probably surprise many...
...Incidentally, the blurb on the cover includes Norman Hapgood, who might well have contributed, but did not...
...But the Colonel behaved with an audacity and amusing impudence which, practised less skilfully and successfully by comparative amateurs in recent Senate investigations, resulted in drastic penalties...
...It is because of this that one is left with the possibly unjust but none the less logical conclusion that Mrs...
...In discussing philosophy from Berkeley to Monboddo, our author is possibly a little rationalistic, but he compensates for this by dealing competently with the Wesleys—indispensable links, certainly, in the development of Romanticism...
...George N. Shuster...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...They are really a very valuable contribution to American history besides being material for a first-class biographical novel...
...Among the contributors are Father Duffy, Senator Thomas Walsh, Zona Gale, Rabbi Wise, Dr...
...Paris: Bernard Grasset...
...Few standard commentaries have either the charm or lucidity of this now famous work, which welds scholarship and literary skill with a success quite infrequently achieved...
...He must try to correct these, not to bristle at their mention...
...STRACHEY and Andre Maurois will have to expiate much, I am afraid, in the purgatory for authors, if there is anything in the theory of responsibility by good example...
...The favorite topics—Johnson, the essayists, comedy—are likewise set forth in a manner the students will commend...
...New York • Harcourt Brace and Company...
...The author hoped to interest the reader by having a rich old spinster die and leave her fortune to her wild young relations only on condition that they live together in her house for a period of months after her death, observe punctual hours, dine together, July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 299 and—the piece de resistance—listen in solitary darkness to speaking records full of advice which the old lady was so thoughtful as to perpetuate before her departure from this wicked world...
...She has added nothing new to her onslaught against the conditions she has observed and so vividly described...
...A journalist of unusual gifts, a keen observer, a man of integrity and capacity, he became, in the words of Mr...
...the sort of family from which the founders of America came as a matter of course...
...But so enamored was he of uniforms that he ran the Fall River Line, which he organized, as "Admiral Fisk," in gorgeous trappings of his own design...
...Channing Pollack puts it well here when he says: "A good deal of most persecution is in the minds of the persecuted...
...They acknowledge most of them, a deal of prejudice and injustice...
...Nevertheless it is a puzzling, compelling, deeply moving book, having some of the romantic essence which later flavored Rimbaud, Baudelaire and their ilk...
...July 17, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 301 Domar and the Rest A Buttonwood Summer, by Aline Kilmer...
...It will prove useful, too, for the parish priest who wishes to hand a modern treatise to some average unbeliever...
...Leighton Swift, the detective, as he unravels these baffling enigmas...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...Material adjacent to these central concerns has not always received the attention it merits...
...In some respects, indeed, it is more attractive than the subject-matter it discusses...
...Read a few chapters and you will see that Melville was here headed straight for the deeps, unconscious of the looks of his story and sometimes even indifferent to his diction...
...Cast in the form of a biographical novel, it presents vignettes of many figures which held the front page of their day but left little permanent impress upon the country, however large (and in many instances maladroit) the influence they exercised upon the financial, political or social life of the hour...
...And some very good advice is given, such as that by John Erskine, to judge Jews as individuals...
...A few disagreeable experiences should not be generalized...
...Paul Crowley...
...The publishers say that this book is intended for children between the ages of eight and eleven...
...THE eighteenth century was not particularly distinguished for spiritual vitality or philosophic depth...
...8.00...
...Elton's present offering of two volumes is in the nature of a succinct critical outline...
...In the present instance, which includes a number of children, an uncle, a police dog and incidentally a mother, the question is never definitely answered...
...Whether many people will actually read through Pierre, a sombre and darkly allegorical study of frustrated idealism, is a query the optimist should hesitate to confront...
...And if such advice would come with better grace from a Jew to Jews, my excuse must be that I have said substantially the same thing to Catholics given to complaining of prejudice and bigotry and injustice...
...He has a lot to answer for...
...1.50...
...Such elvish, genuine lore about children is as rare as good gingham and not less precious...
...If, instead of meeting wrong with resentment, the Jew could learn to have better manners than the Gentile and meet wrong with indifference or dignity, or even courtesy, no American Gentile could withstand such an attitude as that...
...MRS...
...Montagu are almost as significant as the novelists themselves...
...From these conversations and from her own experience she has not evolved a single suggestion looking toward an effective remedy of the evils she inveighs against...
...WHAT does a family do when it leaves for its summer home...
...The whole is almost as tangled and entertaining as a three-ringed circus...
...They have a biographical style which seems very easy to imitate and is anything but that...
...He and Jay Gould, in a curious, perverse and extraordinary background of political intrigue, started the famous "gold corner" that culminated in the "Black Friday" of '69—the crisis which threatened widespread commercial ruin, ultimated in disaster to himself and Gould, and, under the mutterings of the frustrated Colonel, sought to involve the good name of General Grant...
...He must not stand aloof in bitter superiority, sensitive to silly hatred and quick to hate in return...
...we learn that the old lady died of her own good reasons, and meanwhile the young people reform and all ends happily—except for the afore-mentioned reader, the supposed courteous gentleman who has valorously resisted sleep right through to the end...
...The victim of the jealousy and envy of an ungrateful beneficiary, he died to find monumental fame under a marble shaft reared by his fellow Vermonters...
...If our whole literary history could be rewritten n the same spirit, delving into it would become a pleasure ew would willingly forego...
...In England I thought that it did not exist, and truly I believe that there was extremely little of it...
...302 THE COMMONWEAL July 17, 1929 Briefer Mention Pierre, by Herman Melville...
...No doubt the many readers of his A Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780, will turn to it eagerly...
...The new survey may, I believe, safely be described as superior to its predecessor...
...But, at least in England, it was a great literary time, when the native exuberances of the race had been curbed by respect for classic norms into a fine humor and a captivating realism...
...With him, about him, against him, around him, appear, as the play progresses, sinister political figures, dominant railroad developers, the shrewdest, the most daring and the least scrupulous commercial gamblers of his day...
...5.00...
...Tell-Tale Clues The King Murder, by Charles Reed Jones...
...Why should Dr...
...One would like to hear more of her association with her father's friends "the three abbes," who are "persons who exclude themselves by their vows from marrying," and who were such brilliant and witty conversationalists, present so frequently at the intimate gatherings with Jefferson, Franklin, John Paul Jones and all the rest...
...300 THE COMMONWEAL July 17, 1929 Robert Fuller, author of this unusual method of treating a man and a period, did not live to see his work in print...
...Cadman and Norman Angell...
...The lady's comments on her life in France and in England, when she and her mother had joined John Adams in Europe, portray a clear-sighted and charming little person, very sane and self-possessed, quite ready to welcome the pleasures of the great capitals, but distinguishing perfectly between their pleasures and their dissipations...
...And yet I am convinced that one of the best ways to overcome anti-Jewish prejudice is for Jews to keep their estimate of prejudice strictly within limits, to minimize antagonism as far as is consistent with the facts, to talk about all the fine relations between Jews and Christians rather than about the friction and misunderstanding and injustice...
...12 francs...
...AFTER reading two of the latest detective novels, one ¦** cannot but reflect that it would not be pleasant to be in S. S. Van Dine's shoes when that worthy popularizer of crime fiction steps through the pearly gates and is introduced to W. Shakespeare, G. de Maupassant, E. A. Poe, et...
...The Colonel's appearance before congressional investigating committees is suggestive of recent events...
...Zona Gale puts the matter thus: "The fault of the Jew seems to me to lie in his cult—where this exists—of resentment for his wrongs...
...What can be done about that, except to repeat it in season and out of season...
...If report can be believed, she has spent a good many years in India...
...This is a large order, but does not the very largeness of it imply a correspondingly large estimate of the spiritual possibilities of those to whom it is addressed...
...Undoubtedly it will prove helpful to many a troubled soul...
...Collins's gibes at the conception of God held by many Jews and Christians have found a place here...
...The present reprint has the advantage of a chatty preface by H. M. Tomlinson (who hardly does himself justice) and an introduction by John Brooks Moore (who well-nigh challenges the intelligence of his fellow-men...
...The author has pieced together from letters and diaries the sort of family life which has been forgotten under the new dispensation...
...One wishes, however, that every mother would read it for enjoyment's sake...
...At least one Jew in the symposium actually does this very thing of minimizing the amount of misunderstanding...
...The Right Reverend Henry Whitehead, for twenty-three years Lord Bishop of the great Indian diocese of Madras, wrote her that Mother India "leaves an impression of hopeless pessimism...
...What could more successfully intrigue the intuition, puzzle the sense with tortuous involvements, and curdle the blood with scenes of deathly horror than this tale as one gropes through its tangles of dark, lurid crime...
...He begins to carry a chip on his shoulder...
...Memoirs and letters formed an important part of the period's literary effort, so that Lord Chesterfield and Mrs...
...One feels that every incident she relates cries for rectification of the conditions that brought it about but Mrs...
...Claude G. Montefiore writes: "In my young days ill-will between Christian and Jew was, so far as I was concerned, and in my own environment, unknown...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Now what could be more thrilling than to follow Mr...
...The doughty Colonel lacked neither business courage nor versatility...
...The Devil and the Deep Sea is the title of the second volume —indeed a suggestive title for such a tepid tale...
...By turns peddler, commercial traveler and department-store organizer, he became one of the first war profiteers of the Civil struggle...
...But the problem still remains of getting people in large numbers to take this advice...
...It substitutes actual closeness to the lives and minds of children for the attempt to drug their imaginations...
...William Franklin Sands...
...New York: Fleming H. Revell...
...James A. Emery...
...But even Rabbi Landman is not entirely guiltless of an unnecessary prick when he speaks of Christianity as a sect of Judaism...
...Nor does it make us Catholics feel any better to have Rabbi Simon tell us so dogmatically: "There is no doubt that the religion of Jesus is not the Christian religion...
...Colonel Smith's lady, John Adams's daughter, is a typical American girl and matron of her period, the completely American product of the English colonies in America...
...It is a satisfactorily complete, well-documented outline, .vhich will doubtless be given a welcome commensurate with ts deserts...
...2.50...
...The very fact of such a book assumes a misunderstanding between Jews and Christians, and we need not blind ourselves to its existence...
...The son of an itinerant tin peddler, he began, within the confines of a traveling circus, the development of those versatile talents as a showman which characterized throughout his life his Barnum-like gift for publicity...
...Grant's relatives in his dealings were the sole basis for his unfounded charges...
...she has talked with many other men and women who have seen much more than she, who have given a lifetime to the work of helping India's masses...
...He must not deny the faults and the objectionable traits that are his—as there are faults and objectionable traits in every race and in every individual...
...In short, I had the misfortune to guess the solution before the enthrallment had really got under way...
...I am also very fond of Domar, who seems to get a great deal of fun out of simply being a police dog uninfluenced by the movies...
...May one not hope that some f those who now feel convinced students should be fed on Kcerpts, presented in a more or less arbitrary anthological )rm, may be led to investigate the solid charm of Dr...
...2.50...
...The distinguished author of Christus, which is still almost the best work on the Christian sources to have been written by a Catholic scholar, here discards most of the paraphernalia of research and gives the "average reader" the gist of all that is known regarding the Gospels...
...Mayo is not particularly concerned with solving a problem but is merely bent on capitalizing an experience...
...That shaft, thought his biographer, fittingly commemorated in its chipped Italian marble the Colonel's odd career, "striking from many aspects, picturesque, but blemished...
...In the late sixties he joins the then unknown Jay Gould, cuts his financial wisdom teeth under the severe dental direction of Uncle Dan'l Drew, loses a fortune to him, and in turn takes one from him...
...Despite the reader's courteous efforts to rouse some feelings over this lead, however, nothing comes of it...
...Fortunes in Contraband Jubilee Jim: The Life of Colonel James Fisk, jr., by Robert H. Fuller...
...the sort of life in which character was formed and strengthened...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 11
