Books
Hawks, Edward & Lewalys, Garret & O'Sheel, Shaemas & Martens, Frederick H. & Shuster, George N. & Windle, Bertram C. A. & Deferrari, Roy J. & O'Shaughnessy, Edith & Coaldey, Thomas F.
22 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 BOOKS The Queen of Lisieux Sainte Therese of Lisieux, by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus; translated by Helen Younger Chase, with an introduction by Michael...
...Clusters of electric lights shine on this effigy which resembles a large new doll...
...Oxford: The Clarendon Press...
...This little book is admirably written in language calculated to draw the reader on, and is equally admirably illustrated...
...He comes from a family long prominent in English art, and he is a nephew of Sir William Orpen, one of the greatest living portrait painters...
...THE papers and discussions which make up this volume were presented at the tenth annual meeting of the Franciscan Educational Conference held at Saint Joseph's Seminary, Hinsdale, Illinois, in 1928...
...Material is provided for religious cant, and, in some people, for religious frenzy...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Michael Williams has written a most felicitous preface, perfectly balancing Madame Delarue-Mardrus's book...
...Gabriel's Brethren The Angels, by Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B...
...Never have I read a book in which the indispensable element of suspense is better sustained...
...but let us try to preserve it intelligently, first by a universality of outlook on all things Latin and Greek, and secondly, by a sane application of the modern pedagogy to the teaching of the classics in our class-rooms...
...What was to become of this fragile creature in the fiery furnace of Carmel...
...Ossendowski almost seems to be a Moslem himself, writing for the edification of other Moslems...
...The Romans, who had not much else, had that...
...Asisa, the Lioness, is the beautiful wife whom he is compelled to leave behind him...
...If, as seems probable, they were also an overseas importation, they brought with them a speech inherited from those who billowed out from the northern grasslands of nearer Asia...
...Enemies she has none...
...The dramatic climax comes with Ras's discovery of the woman whom he loves and has tracked down, and the subsequent death of both in a night attack during Abd-el-Krim's struggle against the Spaniards...
...No vestige of taste redeems the sorry bazaar heaped May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 23 over her bones...
...The spirits have not received a mission to interfere with man's free action...
...the meaning of their inscriptions we do not, nor ever shall, unless some Rosetta stone discovery gives us the key to the secret...
...Under the influence of the German historians then dominant, the story of Herodotus that they came to northern Italy from Lydia, where Croesus once was king, driven from their home by famine, was discredited...
...Now scholars have returned to the account of the father of history, and if it is not certain that the Etruscans came from Lydia itself, it is clear that they probably came from some part of Asia Minor or an adjacent island which was a centre of what the writer calls "nearAsiatic influence...
...We find in his book a clear determination of the differences in essential nature between good spirits and demons, and the declaration that unbaptized persons as well as the baptized share in the angelic guardianship with those "who behold the face of the Father Who is in heaven...
...Of course it was the Romans who really were made by the Etruscans...
...But she is very, very sensitive, even awestruck, no expression of praise is too exaggerated, when she speaks-of the saint herself...
...It will gratify many a believer to have had an unbeliever perform the all-too-delicate task of tearing away those weeds—only to find the Little Flower giving out a greater fragrance...
...The first darkly...
...By some mystic gift he saw into the heart of things...
...Madame Delarue-Mardrus's frank dealing with the material and materialized side of Lisieux seems like a cool, fresh wind suddenly blowing through an atmosphere heavy with the odors of commercialism...
...The unfortunate Asisa's tragic adventures in the Mohammedan underworld are not the least moving portion of the tale...
...A significant book when we remember that its author is the rector of Grace Church, New York, and that he was recently unanimously offered an Anglican bishopric...
...LEAVING the greatest of all things, faith, aside, the short sojourn on this earth of Saint Therese of Lisieux is the most curious phenomenon known to modern psychology...
...and the air you breathe keeps something of the "grande siecle...
...translated by Helen Younger Chase, with an introduction by Michael Williams...
...Their script we know...
...The second book discards the Christ of Christendom...
...Further she informs us that though we may not burn a candle at her shrine we may give a franc—or many francs—and have an electric bulb or bulbs turned on accordingly...
...Probably because, like so many other Asiatic monarchies, they had no staying power...
...but the thing always claimed for such a book and so seldom justly claimed, namely the totally unexpected ending, the solution so far outside one's expectations as to come with breath-taking force—that is here achieved...
...One must discount the rich, exotic color of his tale to the extent of remembering that, no matter what glamour be read into the primitive's struggle for a "free" life based on a belief which furthers indulgence of his worst instincts, civilization, as the carrier of Christianity, still has a case...
...It may be expressed as follows: Let us not desert the noble heritage of the classics, which belongs to us in a special manner as Catholics, and which we must maintain if we would appreciate our Church to the fullest extent...
...The reader will be disappointed in finding under this head little else than a rehash of some of the sense and some of the nonsense set forth in our American classical periodicals...
...a symposium of essays edited by Felix M. Kirsh, O.M...
...The first by a French poet, charmingly translated, is the story of the great lawgiver transfigured by the rabbinical tradition...
...Possibly the chief value of the work is its success in disentangling the relations between the French and the British...
...The Etruscans seem to have got theirs from emigrants from the southern grasslands of the same area...
...LARS PORSENA of Clusium, like the pious Aeneas, the ' well-greaved Greeks, Catiline and others, seemed to schoolboys of my generation to have existed, if ever they did exist, chiefly to annoy budding youth...
...the raising of buried Carthaginian gold to aid Abd-el-Krim's holy war against Spain—that Mr...
...Maclver relates in his fascinating little book, Lars Porsena, at any rate, would have been an object of interest and not a nuisance who had to be learnt about...
...It astounded the Greeks, as well it might, 24 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 the ideas of that remarkable race as to their women being purely Mohammedan in anticipation...
...2.00...
...and I have named these subdivisions in the order of their value...
...The Romans spoke a form of Aryan or Indo-European tongue...
...The information here presented may be considered as philological, historical and pedagogical...
...Mystery and a Style Dtath in the Dusk, by Virgil Markham...
...The rest is on a uniformly high level, and carries a very timely message to all Catholic educators...
...But—and here is a significant fact—there is no connection between their languages...
...Cap...
...This power, coming from a close communion with God, released energies that could exert control over both the physical and spiritual nature of those who felt their need of salvation...
...Reduced to its essentials, the story of Ras ben Hoggar—barring strictly Islamic backgrounds— is that of any mountaineer living under primitive conditions who offends against the stricter property law of the lowlands (here that of the French in Morocco) and is obliged to flee his native habitat as a result...
...In the development of his theme the author examines with a rhetoric both brilliant and convincing the essential characteristics of the artists who led the rebellion against the new colossus industrialism, and the ancient octopus classicism, then casting their hateful shadows across England and the world...
...The Master: A Life of Jesus Christ, by Walter Russell Bowie...
...10.50...
...From the Etruscans, too, came their types of soldiery, their musical instruments, especially the "lituus," or great trumpet, and the insignia of their magistrates, the curule chair, the fasces and the purple toga...
...But one cannot well avoid doubting—if one is a Catholic—that numerous deft references to the failures and shortcomings of clerical groups spring entirely from motives of impartiality...
...and sketches in the explanatory details from European and American history with a succinct grace that manifests real scholarship and careful writing...
...One might admire and despair...
...This explains all the so-called miracles, which were never intended to be prodigies...
...After Jacques Carrier The Rise and Fall of New France, by George M. Wrong...
...Such is the on-the-spot character of the author's pictures: the tricks of the itinerant snake-charmer whose partner he becomes...
...26 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929...
...Catholics are defended from these dangers through loyalty to the guidance of the living Church, even if it remains to be proved that all external spiritism is dependent on the activity of the evil spirits...
...The presence of the Evil One on this earth in the days of man's innocence is an insoluble mystery...
...In western Europe, first by the universal Catholic Church, then by national monarchy, and finally by oligarchic aristocracy, were artists kept in constant employment...
...The stories of his incarnation, transfiguration, resurrection and mediatorial office are all misunderstandings of his disciples...
...Tomorrow the sentimental romance or the historical novel may be in fashion again...
...The author is at present in America where he holds the chair of Professor of the History of Art in the University of Pittsburgh...
...New York: CoviciFriede, Incorporated...
...It is not the kind of narrative you and I would linger over until past midnight, and Parkman did make us linger and wait for a guilty realization that morning was at hand...
...There is such a thing, therefore, as Catholic spiritism, a 28 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 thing full of health and life, as contrasted with the contagion, often affecting well-meaning men and women who are held in thraldom by the fascination of modern spiritism and become the playthings of the spirits who have been liars from the beginning...
...The Bible tale is enriched with magical imaginings which never distort the portrait...
...THIS tale of the mores of Mohammedan highlanders of the High Atlas again shows the well-known Polish traveler's gift for throwing a dramatically glowing spotlight on trails he has already exploited...
...Two Biographies The Life of Moses, by Edmond Fleg...
...A little of "generous ardor," either of feeling or phrase, is missing in them...
...3.50...
...for Madame Delarue-Mardrus's impassioned and uplifting hymn to the cathedral of Chartres could not have been inspired by that of Lisieux...
...Of this individuality Parkman was acutely conscious, and his books are the homage of historical genius to a great achievement...
...Among the millions, nay billions of printed words concerning the saint of Lisieux—a large part unhappily devoted to demands for money, for which the Little Flower herself had no thought nor care—this sharply-cut, entirely objective book about a Norman saint by a Norman agnostic is but the more convincing...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Nevertheless the Wrong narrative is a supple, smooth, very firm literary unit...
...j.oo...
...From his own inner experience he found a new meaning for the Messiah and convinced himself that this awful role belonged to him...
...If this complex story does not quite come to life, it is made clear and understandable...
...He had no consciousness of any supernatural birth...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Son...
...Again Dom Anscar tells us that man's sins have strengthened Satan's position in this world but that they could not be said to have created it...
...The new rulers of the world regarded artists and craftsmen of every kind as irrelevant...
...At their hands, the relative importance of the object diminished, while that of the manner of its perception correspondingly increased...
...2.00...
...When they arrived in Italy they found their part of the country occupied by a people whom we call today the Villanovans, from the name of one of their settlements...
...It would be incorrect to say that Professor Wrong is unfair to Catholics, or willing to minimize the achievements of their representatives...
...2.50...
...THE author of A Pot of Paint has given us a most engaging volume...
...Frederick H. Martens...
...Her robe is of brown velvet and gold lace, her white mantle is studded with gems...
...The pedagogical portion is, in the main, poorly presented...
...NEW FRANCE is not entirely of the past...
...As a consequence art, instead of having a universal subject easily intelligible to all nations of Christendom and to all classes of society, lost most of its wide and universal range and sweep and tended to become narrow and exclusive...
...Consequently they were left to their own moods and theories and conceits...
...It was only when this power was weakened by luxury and the breakdown of the family—so characteristic a feature of real Rome—that they too collapsed...
...A race of scanty culture, they had in fact come down from the Alps, as the German writers supposed the Etruscans to have done...
...Absorbed by the British and the fellow-citizens of Jefferson, the lands over which the fleur de lis once fluttered have nevertheless retained a Gallic quality...
...The crasser actualities of existence in the Moroccan hills and the cities of the plain are strikingly opposed to the throbbing descriptions of Ras's despair over his separation from the woman he loves...
...Having set his stage, Professor Rothenstein proceeds in the second half of his volume to introduce his players, and he summons ten of the most important figures in the world of painting in the closing decade of the last century to pass in procession before us...
...Art in the Nineties A Pot of Paint, by John Rothenstein...
...Thomas F. Coakley...
...This flung the artist back upon himself, and he tended more and more to become his own master, the servant of his own whims and the recorder of his personal fancies...
...He points out the essential differences in art and theology in the interpretation of these winged messengers of God, showing that their immateriality and pure qualities of will and intellect place them quite beyond complete illustration, except as symbols in the paintings and sculptures of our world...
...If we had been told the main facts which Mr...
...The crisis came at his baptism, when he vicariously identified himself with the needs of Israel...
...Professor Rothenstein treats with consummate skill, fine discrimination and unaccustomed eloquence a period important to both artist and historian...
...This and much more Madame Delarue-Mardrus tells us, the knife vigorously in hand, of the externals of Lisieux...
...Both time and eternity have now answered her...
...And this little victim in her sombre dress, an offering to the Most High, who, while her family weep, presents herself to the Bridegroom of heaven—what can we say of her or rather of her soul...
...2.50...
...Go to New Orleans, to Duluth, to Montreal...
...Bertram C. A. Windle...
...Our French Saint Therese is in an ornamental glass case, lying life-size on a sort of pale blue divan...
...An Arab slave-dealer, who practises his illicit traffic for the benefit of the vicious in Constantinople, induces her to leave her mountain village by pretending to be a messenger from her husband...
...At Lisieux one feels that one is at the theatre quite as much as at church...
...Such a Christ could not be the object of worship, hardly of love...
...Though they start at the extremes of faith and incredulity, they meet in the end to hang an ex-voto at Saint Therese's shrine...
...There are, however, things in the book under review which entitle it to consideration on its literary merits...
...He left behind no formulation of his teachings...
...When I use in connection with her the word genius, which applies equally to the sacred and to the profane, I may seem to be lowering the sacred glory of Therese of Lisieux and placing her on the level of the great minds of the world, forgetting her holy mission...
...To them they owed their official religion, their Capitoline temple, their methods of augury by flight of birds and by the examination of the liver...
...When I say that this book keeps entire faith with its readers, I mean that the things one looks for in a mystery tale are here in abundance—thrills, horrors, fascinating and exasperating mysteries, incredibilities made credible, the eerie atmosphere, the impingement of the supernatural—and that they are all worked out with the care that leaves one at the end feeling, if not quite convinced, certainly not let down...
...2.00...
...The point of view throughout these essays is that of teachers in theological seminaries, but the teacher of Greek and Latin in general will find in them much of interest and assistance...
...Whistler and Beardsley, Greaves and Beerbohm, Steer and Conder, Sickert and Rothenstein, Ricketts and Shannon, are called each in turn, and their work is measured in the light of the principles he sets forth with such force and conviction in the first half of his remarkable essay...
...A frenzy of false elegance seems to have seized those who gave themselves the task of glorifying the humble little Martin girl...
...THESE books present a notable contrast...
...almost everything that he did or said has been misapprehended until modern ingenuity reconstructed his true story...
...for, as the author points out, the historical Moseslives on in the creative memory of Israel...
...Moslem Hills The Lioness, by Ferdinand A. Ossendowski...
...Of course a certain amount of space must be given to a consideration of those theories of teaching the classics which are more or less in the public eye, but a really helpful contribution to our pedagogical knowledge might have been made by presenting for us the main features of the method employed by the outsiding teachers of the Franciscan Conference...
...For this reason (though not for it only) Professor Wrong's work may be termed good historical writing, but not yet the perfect narrative, so very desirable, of an imperial enterprise...
...But the new philosophers of the industrial age laid emphasis upon man's instincts and passions as the best possible means of attaining the general welfare of society, and they elevated the two greatest positive passions of the age, personal liberty and material progress, to the status of a religion...
...places the noble adventures of New France definitely in the current of new-world discovery and exploration...
...Madame Delarue-Mardrus might as well have cried out, "Thou hast conquered, Therese...
...A N INCREASINGLY eye-conscious people, to whom reading has become a habit without very deep cultural roots, must have its literary pabulum...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...Shaemas O'Sheel...
...But at that remote period little was known of the Etruscans, and what was surmised was highly speculative...
...Indeed the commercialism that has grown up, strong-smelling and weedy, around the Little Flower without suffocating her is part of the miracle of her earthly appearance...
...her pose is theatrical, her right hand extended holding a rose...
...the curious oriental day-by-day existence in a city like Marrajesh, crowded with all the races of North Africa...
...Garret Lewalys...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...He had become the Son of God because the love of God was burning within him...
...On the other hand, I very much doubt that it incorporates adequate sympathetic understanding of the French...
...The Parkman books are picture galleries, not something like a triptich...
...The latter were very considerably ahead of them in the scale of civilization...
...But he was still too close to the source materials to see the picture either precisely as it was or as a magnificent ensemble...
...What is offered as our great example is a supreme and pathetic egoist...
...Every reader of such a tale is of course, consciously or involuntarily, acting the detective all the while he reads...
...Their treatment of women alone shows this...
...Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company...
...No longer was there any control over the artist to keep him as a healthy social factor, and he swiftly became excluded from the main currents of modern civilization...
...translated from the French by Stephen H. Guest...
...Older than Rome The Etruscans, by David Randal-Madver...
...His major thesis is to set forth the currents in the art world of England in the 1890's...
...Why did they collapse...
...Edith O'Shaughnessy...
...2.50...
...Rather it is a De Profundis that she intones...
...Redemption could only come through a spiritual kingdom: there he was to be the centre around which were to be grouped those who shared with him the new experience of power...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...There is no book having anything like the same proportions which utilizes so many documents and coordinates such a host of facts...
...A list of the titles of the articles will give the best idea of the range of this work: The History of Classical Education in the Church, The Value of the Classics, College Entrance and Graduation Requirements in the Classical Languages, Methods and Text-books in the ClasMay 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 27 sical Course, The Training of the Teacher of the Classics, The Greek Problem, The Tradition of the Classics in England, and Bibliography for the Study of the Classics...
...One hesitates to declare that Professor Wrong's two generous volumes are all that might be wished...
...It substitutes a synthetic Christ, a reflection of modern religious, sentimentality, who suggests the socialist, the pacifist, the faith healer, the psychiatrist and the superman...
...When May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 25 the author is in controversial territory—for instance, the matter of the Acadian dispersion—he proceeds with a factual definiteness eminently pleasing...
...They would stick it out, as they did against Carthage for example...
...The mythical element only serves to cut the true image deeper and to identify it with the aspirations of a great race...
...Making allowance for the fact that revenge— in a savagely primitive and Mohammedan sense—is the motivation of the hero's conduct, and that the Christians encountered in the tale are veritable angels of darkness, we can enjoy the authentic quality of the descriptions of scenery and customs in a world so far and fantastically removed from our own...
...This guardianship is not merely the result of prayer but the final unalterable dispensation of God's providence, "something natural, something normal as the great powers of the physical cosmos...
...but while it has its brief life, it is well to call attention to a work which displays meticulous craftsmanship, which keeps entire faith with its readers, and which possesses qualities of style that would do credit to any work...
...Until the industrial revolution the mass of mankind had almost uniformly regarded man's instincts and passions as something to be disciplined and kept within reasonable restraints...
...I call the Unknown to witness that such is not my intention...
...Teaching the Classics The Classics: Their History and Present Status in Education...
...and that great desideratum of all concocters of mysteries, the unexpected denouement—well, here it is in all its power...
...Delivered of her friends the Little Flower is fully competent to handle her enemies—or, to be more exact, those of little faith...
...But with the advent of the Reformation entirely secular subjects were substituted for the religious themes that had been the occupation of artists of every kind during previous centuries...
...It traces the connection between one major fact and another with evident veracity...
...As in every composite work, a certain unevenness of quality is bound to exist...
...But I should not dwell at length on this phase which forms, after all, only a small portion of the book...
...It too will be forgotten...
...a colossal genius, unique, like Shakespeare...
...The thousands of missionaries, explorers, governors and traders whom the kings after Henri IV dispatched to the wilderness were too masculine to leave an imprint which two or three centuries could efface...
...today it just happens to be crime stories, and they pour off the presses, to give their little hour of harmless thrill and pass into oblivion...
...When the industrial revolution first burst upon the world, the most competent artists soon found themselves without employment, for they had no patrons...
...Before the Reformation the artist was a necessity, both religious and political...
...Roy J. Deferrari...
...It demonstrates the substantial reliability of tradition...
...The artists of the 1890's endeavored to shatter the classic belief that art should depict only what is in itself obviously beautiful...
...While Lucie DelarueMardrus says quite frankly "non credo," in our Catholic sense, she writes with a high solemnity, with a contagious enthusiasm, with a sense of awe, even, of her compatriot, her neighbor, Saint Therese...
...George N. Shuster...
...He had an immense maturity and surpassed all others in the voyage of spiritual discovery...
...It is a profound philosophic inquiry and a penetrating and illuminating analysis into the nature of the artistic product of that brief but interesting period, showing the background and the tendency of the aesthetic revolt at the close of the last century...
...Early forsaking Anglicanism for the Catholic faith, Rothenstein had for his father in God no less a personage than the celebrated Eric Gill, who has immeasurably enriched the treasures of ecclesiastical art...
...As an inevitable part of that phenomenon her life has been written, and in vigorous, authoritative yet flowing prose, by one who calls herself an unbeliever...
...Edward Hawks...
...There can be miracles of angelic intervention, as there can be miracles of divine intervention...
...Kings, princes, and the aristocracy with their more national, local and class horizons succeeded the Church as the patrons of art and artists...
...These sparkling and informing biographical sketches give us much that is new, and all of them have a fresh point of view that grips our sustained interest...
...The Catholic religion was almost the exclusive subject for all art, and because the subject was understood by everyone, even the work of the most ordinary artist had a definite meaning for the people...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...A S "IT is a favorite theme with Saint Thomas Aquinas •**• to represent the whole physical world as being entrusted by God to the keeping of the angels," it has appeared well to Dom Anscar Vonier to elucidate somewhat our inherited beliefs in the existence and the character of these potent spirits...
...He was the supreme poet of life...
...Who is this bride of fifteen...
...Though there was nothing new concerning her earthly life to be related of the Little Flower, there was a new attitude to be taken...
...Madame Delarue-Mardrus asks, "robed in white velvet, swan's-down and point d'Alengon, this young girl lily-crowned, with her long, fair hair rippling over her shoulders...
...but they are exceptions: God and His Angels work unceasingly for man's welfare...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 1
