Books

...2.$0...

...It is hard to deny that an effort must be made in order to appreciate Three Reformers...

...2.00...

...Facility has ruined more writers than it has created...

...Lewis confines himself to a straightforward recital of events, his prose is distinguished by all the welcome virtues of journalism...

...One would like to know just where and from whom the ancient Greek and Egyptian deities still collect their sacrifices...

...One is grateful to the publishers for their courage in giving us an English version of this notable work...

...Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the fact that Obregon and his friends, who promoted the disturbance, had now arrived in power...

...In their individual moments they live and suffer, and yet in their final synthesis there is a certain weakness of impression...

...He has goodness, he is high-minded, he has faith...

...It describes the extraordinary thousand-mile funeral pageant, aptly labeled "half-circus, half-heartbreak...

...No such careful study of the actual distribution of rural population and landownership in Mexico has hitherto been available in English...

...unexpected thousands of us have been seduced by the facile Dr...

...How many of us are willing to make the effort necessary to follow M. Maritain's closely reasoned analyses of three men whose importance we are accustomed to take on trust...

...But when he interrupts his narrative in order to put on display his own personal critical comments, he collapses in enervation...

...The newer type of history and biography, aiming to be both pungently critical and highly popular, depends for its effectiveness strictly upon the learning, background and personality of the writer...

...Will Durant into the belief that we can easily understand all of philosophy that is worth bothering about...

...and of Memorial Day...

...Channon, skilful in revealing the numerous little trivialities of daily life which caused Ralph and Joan to jangle on each other's nerves, has also done particularly well in making Ralph, who became Anglicized very readily, completely oblivious of the complicated difficulties that beset the transplanting of his wife to America...

...He refers to the despoiling of the Jesuits in 1767 as the beginning of the break-up of the big estates, but neglects to mention that the net result of that liquidation was the destruction of the endowments of a score of excellent colleges and the consequent collapse of the system of higher education in Mexico...

...Strachey's brilliant psychological analyses...

...translated by Nathan H. Dole...

...in part to reactionary and unprincipled landowners, and in part, to the ignorance and indolence of the agricultural laborers whom sixty years of liberal rule in Mexico had degraded below anything known in the earlier history of the republic...

...2.50...

...Grenville Vernon Anti-Modern Three Reformers, by Jacques Mantmn...

...New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company...

...A man who started his literary career as the possessor of one of the most promising talents in England, he has never quite fulfilled that talent...

...Lewis, "was like a child that rejoices to walk alone, but who subconsciously remembers the womb with a wishful pang...

...Joan Kennedy, by Henry Channon...

...Yet his output has been prodigious...

...All the characters—if the medley of figures can be thus called —are shallowly conceived...

...Sound methods of scientific induction in the amassing of data are here combined with that most difficult form of generalization which aims, in the author's words, at "the manifestation in certain representative types of the spiritual principles which it is most necessary to distinguish...

...Such a distinction is urgently needed, especially for the enlightenment of the non-Catholic reader, and would have made Maritain's rational refutation of his reformers' errors more obviously self-sustaining...

...T. Lawrason Riggs...

...It is then, as we look back, that we see they are rather improvised as the moment arrives than inevitably led up to the moment...

...also that it was not the Church but the so-called liberals of 1856 and following years that destroyed the ejidos, or communal holdings of the villages which the revolutionary government for the past eighteen years has been professing to restore...

...Mexican Farm Problems The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, by Frank Tannenbaum...

...The Jesuit properties, needless to say, were not divided up among the agricultural population...

...Myths after Lincoln thus makes its debut as a novelty-volume of more than ordinary value...

...The very fact that Chris320 topher could have so easily lost his faith is explicable by the fact that worldly position should mean so much to him, though he is not at heart a snob...

...The fact that the new owners have made use of only about one-half of the cultivable lands placed at their disposal reveals the difficulties which even an honest administration would have met in a program of agrarian reform...

...he has a deep culture, a wide sympathy, and an understanding of men and women...

...The popular reaction to the whole Lincoln saga can be much more simply explained by the principles which Carlyle laid down in his Heroes and Hero-Worship, and by a common-sense view of the behavior of mobs and individuals during a period of war...

...It leaps nimbly from topic to topic, and nowhere displays the fault of diffuseness...

...They were merely seized by the Spanish crown...

...Lewis's book, comes with something of the shock of a super-headline piece of news, even to one who sports a rather pallid grade of patriotism...

...Baring's Latest The Coat without Seam, by Maurice Baring...

...His limitations in these respects, if they exist, are bound to come rather blatantly to the fore...

...The new nation" (America) says Mr...

...The book is lively...

...It might have been possible, finally, without unduly lengthening the essays, to show more thoroughly how each reformer was influenced by previous currents of thought...

...Baring's novel...

...The whole argument rests upon the quicksands of facile pseudo-science...

...Here it reveals, in its generous quotations, the savagery of the evangelical American clergy of the time, ranting for vengeance—which would be incredible to us if we had not heard so much of this "foolishness of preaching" a dozen years ago...

...Terms like "virtual," "formal," and "pure act," are used in their technical senses without explanation, and such an abstruse doctrine as "individuation by materia signata" is casually alluded to...

...Curiosity on these points does not indicate a pseudo-religious, myth-making tendency on the part of the American public...

...New York: The Dial Press...

...That considerable numbers of the American reading public can be made to see such a necessity seems extremely doubtful...

...THE case of Maurice Baring is difficult to diagnose...

...Lewis erects his conclusions are not myths at all, but facts...

...Viewing the book as a whole one wishes that Maritain had not assumed any knowledge of scholastic terminology on the reader's part...

...The legend keeps recurring throughout the life of Christopher Trevenen, and at the end the relic is used to bind up the wounds of a spy who had used it to signal to the enemy, while at the same moment the dying Christopher recognizes it as the symbol of his own life, the coat which by his lack of faith he had torn in shreds and which now at the last moment has been restored as if by a miracle in his final confession...

...STUDENTS of recent Mexican history will be grateful to Mr...

...However, an account of what has happened in Mexico based on an analysis of Article 27 of the constitution and subsequent land legislation would be about as valuable as a history of prohibition in the United States, based on a detached study of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act...

...Part Two, The American Judas, reviews the history of John Wilkes Booth, the ham actor and comic-opera assassin, his accomplices, his act, flight, pursuit, death, and the strange mystification of his burial, the career of the crack-brained "Glory to God-man" who shot him...

...The novelist has apparently started with two things—the study of a man whose pride is hurt by the inferior positions he has had to accept, and the idea of faith lost and regained through mystical experience...

...That much injustice has been done and comparatively little headway made has been due in part to the incompetence and corruption of the administration...

...If the Mexican government will accept in a friendly spirit the proffered cooperation of the Catholic Church there is reason to believe that agrarian and labor reform in Mexico, with the passing of a government devoted to class warfare, may proceed in an orderly fashion...

...The importance of such figures is seen in its true perspective when they are considered as inheritors as well as innovators, when their relationship to previous thought appears as paving the way for their influence on later generations...

...we have devoured Mr...

...Its author, though not the founder of neo-Thomism, as one reviewer would have it, is certainly among the leading exponents of a philosophic movement which, in Europe at least, is flourishing with all the vigor of renewed youth...

...For readers, however, who are not afraid of exercising sustained concentration, the three essays should furnish an intellectual treat of a very high order...

...LINCOLN was assassinated on a Good Friday, a mere five days after Lee's surrender...

...Part Three, Altar Smoke, traces the legends that center around Lincoln's tomb at Springfield, the plots of the body-snatchers, the formation of the Lincoln Guard of Honor, the history of the G.A.R...

...2.50...

...Its introduction seems too often forced and incidental...

...These things are, of course, not irreconcilable...

...Tannenbaum for his dispassionate account of the agrarian revolution...

...Baring, might have been of surpassing power and beauty...

...Its first six chapters, especially, give the excellent effect of a superbly staged dramatic performance...

...The essays included in the present volume would be valuable only if they enabled one to arrive at some composite impression of current European letters...

...Certain American immigrants from the Mediterranean countries, he states, seized upon Lincoln as their God because they "had surrendered Apollo, Attis, Moses, Adonis or Osiris...

...Only a brief six lines is devoted to the agricultural cooperative credit institution contrived after a visit to Germany by General Calles, who was quite unaware that Raiffeisen banks had been organized in Mexico by the Catholic agrarians twenty years earlier...

...The book is mistaken in conception and execution...

...Attila: A Romance of Old Aquileia, by Paolo Ettore Santangelo...

...Whether or not one agrees with this verdict, there can be no doubt of Maritain's genius...

...Ernest Brennecke, jr...

...Tannenbaum shows that he is aware that no good came to the peons from the confiscation of Church property in 1857 as the estates of the Church simply passed to large private owners...

...Finally, it is apparent that many of the "myths" upon which Mr...

...he is tolerant with the tolerance of one who has lived in and enjoyed the great world, and yet he has the faith of a true and fervent Catholic...

...The trouble is that the author has not truly united the two themes...

...Maurice Baring has in birth and upbringing been of the fortunate of the earth...

...Its outline is overfamiliar to every schoolboy and shyster politician, but the keen power of its every subtle detail, as revealed in Mr...

...New York: The Macmillan Company...

...Its author, having painstakingly studied all available documents, old newspapers and other drifting ephemeral literature, as well as books and the conversation of informed octogenarians, has tracked down facts and rumors and assembled them in a volume that sets forth with economy and drama, the whole story and aftermath of Lincoln's death...

...He is just a bit too self-consciously smart, his ideas represent last year's fashions in psychology and anthropology a little too obviously...

...We have welcomed the debunking of various heroes...

...In general it may be said that, as long as Mr...

...Yet if the "general reader," to whom the English reviewer especially recommends the essay on Descartes, can thoroughly assimilate that fascinating study without the closest sort of attention and some acquaintance with mediaeval thought, one can only conclude that the general reader in England is a born metaphysician...

...In the present series of studies he applies these principles to certain essential mental attitudes of Luther, Descartes and Rousseau with a brilliance and acumen which are at once vitally personal and eminently characteristic of the French genius...

...The theme is the incompatibility of parties to an interracial marriage—in this instance an Englishwoman of the squirearchy to an American of boisterous Chicago...

...Nowhere is this sad truth more evident than in the Post Mortem which closes and attempts to summarize the content of Mr...

...Instead they are simply glib talks, with very obvious bibliographies attached...

...This canvas is composed of fragmentary unrelated episodes patched together so carelessly that the story holds no wind...

...But how many of us are interested in the serious study of great figures from a philosophic point of view...

...Maritain's reformers tend, perhaps, to seem as though they had sprung from the void...

...Professor Denis Saurat, who discusses French writing, is the best of all, but even his contribution is only a smooth address to the ladies...

...THE first translation into English of an important work by M. Jacques Maritain is a notable event...

...Tannenbaum catalogues without comment the various criticisms of the administration of the Mexican Land Law among which the charge of dishonesty bulks large...

...It is always dangerous to attempt to find the reasons which underlie the mere failure in technique of an artist's work...

...New York • Charles Scribner's Sons...

...The Coat without Seam tells the story of a journalist of good family but limited means who loses his faith in early vouth and finally regains it just before his death in a military hospital...

...But perhaps his writing, like his life, has come too easily to him...

...Apart from the obviously unjust provisions prohibiting the Church from the ownership of real property and the confiscatory provisions of Section VII, the other sections of Article 27 are capable of being put into effect to the advantage of the agricultural population of Mexico...

...The anonymous translator, whose work is on the whole admirable, might well have added notes in explanation of such terms, or even a short glossary...

...The novel takes its title from the legend of the holy coat of Our Saviour for which the soldiers drew lots after the Crucifixion...

...Within that blunt statement there is packed a story of almost incredible pathos, fantastic irony, grimness—in a word, tragedy...

...he has no less than thirty-nine volumes to his credit, and every one of them has shown the mark of a man of no ordinary powers...

...There is every reason why Baring should write a great Catholic novel...

...The result of eighteen years of agrarian revolution has been to give 2.64 percent of the total land of the republic to 4.31 percent of its total rural population...

...It invokes Frazer's Golden Bough for a complete explanation of the "Lincoln religion," and suggests, in a rather pussyfooting fashion, that the case of Lincoln and Booth presents an essential analogy to the case of Christ and Judas...

...So organically interrelated are these ideas, so closely knit is the construction of each essay, that the discussion of separate passages seems inadvisable in a review...

...Snatches of history, geography, archeology and philosophy are jumbled together to form a potpourri only less confusing than it is uninteresting...

...One is glad to close this review on the optimistic note struck, we think justly, by Mr...

...The failure of the introduction of the mystical coat quite to justify itself is evident in Mr...

...Baring writes with great ease...

...The translation was made from the Italian by Nathan H. Dole...

...Throughout The Coat without Seam Maurice Baring shows rare sympathy for his characters...

...LINCOLN MAC VEAGH has published many good books, and so may be pardoned one unmitigatedly mediocre offering...

...ATTILA: A Romance of Old Aquileia is a pseudohistorical romance of the days when the Huns descended on Italy, in the middle of the fifth century...

...The book has been described by the London Times as "easy to read...

...Can it be that he writes with too great ease, that the fact that he has thirty-nine volumes to his credit has been made possible by his refusal to submit his work to a long enough period of gestation...

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

...Edwin V. O'Hara...

...A profound student of the great mediaeval masters, he has made their principles his own with extraordinary thoroughness...

...2.50...

...So little, however, is M. Maritain known in America that most readers will be amazed by the quotation from T. S. Eliot on the book's jacket, which hails Maritain as "the most conspicuous figure and probably the most powerful force in contemporary philosophy...

...Lewis himself reveals the fact that Lincoln's body was for a long time not in its proper crypt, but hidden away under piles of rubbish, and that there was much deliberate mystification about the spot where Booth was buried...

...The further fact that less than 1 percent (.85) of the population "still owns two-thirds of the area and four-fifths of the value of rural lands of the republic," indicates that very many of the members of the Obregon-Calles military and political regime were more successful, if not more interested, in distributing big estates among themselves than in providing small holdings for the agricultural laborers...

...Within the field chosen for his investigation the author has presented the available facts with accuracy and in detail...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Lewis's book...

...Though one may not agree with Maritain's interpretation of his subjects, one cannot fail to be spiritually stimulated, and to find ideas in the book which will suggest their own application to other men and movements...

...He thinks that the rapid pacification of Mexico under Obregon, after Carranza's disturbed administration, could be accounted for by Obregon's program of land distribution...

...The first section of the book retells the story of Lee's surrender and attempts to show how Grant's magnanimity was probably inspired by Lincoln...

...4.00...

...Tannenbaum: "As a rule debt servitude has disappeared, payment in kind has been replaced by payment in money, the villages have been given a new stimulus, the number of small owners of rural property has increased and seems likely to increase...

...Such prodigies are rare in these parts...

...it is not woven into the texture of the story itself...

...OAD Joan Kennedy said, like Ruth, "thy people shall be my people...

...This rich content is handled with a good deal of compactness and skill...

...Channon's interesting novel...

...edited by William Rose and J. Isaacs...

...It would have been a gain, also, if the distinction between dogmas of revealed theology and the conclusions of philosophic Thomism had been more clearly emphasized...

...Its only service will be to increase further the chatterbox cataloguing of books and authors which so frequently passes for an acquaintance with literature...

...As a matter of fact there has been no general, honest attempt to put the agrarian laws into effect except in six states of the republic...

...322 Briefer Mention Contemporary Movements in European Literature...

...The author quite correctly states that Article 27 of the 321 Mexican constitution provides for a system of land holdings "which cannot be described as socialism, or nationalization, or communism," though undoubtedly many of the political leaders have been strongly influenced by all these isms...

...Here is a theme which, poignant though it is made by Mr...

...The author accepts too readily the estimate of 2,000,000 as the number of organized laborers affiliated with the C.R.O.M., an estimate probably 75 percent too high...

...thy country shall be my country," the troubles of her married life would never have been nor would Mr...

...and to quote the publishers, "carries an ambitious canvas...

...In his latest book there are the possibilities of a novel which might be epoch-making—and yet the novel does not exactly come off...

...It describes the assassination and reviews the sermons preached on the following "Black Easter...