Books
Radziwill, Catherine & Crowley, Paul & Kerwin, Jerome G. & jr., Ernest Brennecke & Engels, William L. & Carpenter, Boy
78 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 BOOKS A Minority Report The ImpuritartSj by Harvey Wickham. New York: The Dial Press. $3.50. WHEN The Misbehaviorists appeared a year ago, some of us naive...
...New York...
...It has the true ring...
...Indians that I have met," declares Mr...
...Abandoned is the attempt to have the slightest real knowledge or understanding of anything...
...The volume will correct many erroneous impressions of the baron's outlook...
...England in Shakespeare's Day, by G. B. Harrison...
...Consequently an atmosphere of unreality is cast over the entire book and the reader, from this standpoint alone, must dismiss the entire plot as preposterous...
...There is a surprising wealth of material, and a no less noticeable freshness of expression...
...The book is nevertheless useful and illuminating...
...It is evident that at first the fascinating figure of the Czar attracted her to the extent that she saw in him the personification of everything that was noble and good, and perhaps of her own youthful dreams, but later on came disillusionment, until finally she had to acknowledge that Napoleon had not perhaps been altogether wrong when he had called the Czar a "Greek of the lower empire...
...in 1928 Lundborg took off from practically the same spot in a perfectly equipped Fokker at a speed greater than a hundred miles an hour, to the rescue of a stranded dirigible crew...
...3-50...
...IT MAY be put down to the credit of the English that thej usually manage to render biography entertaining and relativelj brief...
...The planes engaged in the hunt for Nobile and his men, responding to this radio call, flew almost daily over the mountains of Northwest Land and the glacier that is Northeast Land—Conway and Nordenskiold spent several arduous years exploring only small parts of these regions...
...The temptation to go on quoting Mr...
...The Nobile Adventure The Arctic Rescue, by Einar Lundborg...
...Then again, Russian Grand Dukes are called "Archdukes," which was an Austrian title borne only by members of the Hapsburg family...
...In this volume, with its twenty-seven chapters, two appendices, many photographs, three maps and small but carefully selected bibliography, there is ample evidence of his powers of observation and inquiry into the habits, customs and beliefs of these still secluded people...
...The range of authors is not very wide, but the pertinence with which these discuss various aspects of life—town and home, church and travel—is quite satisfactory...
...William L. Engels...
...For good measure, Mr...
...but when Combes has married Elise, his remains a peasant family circumscribed by an almost pitiless thrift and tenacity of purpose...
...Finally to D. H. Lawrence, whose beloved Indians are so superior to us because the essence of their being is seated in the abdomen: "the gut is more noble than the brain...
...1.75...
...2.00...
...Average Citizen knows little of governmental affairs or policies, cares even less, and moves along on the assumption that the flag is still there, no matter what happens...
...To some extent, undoubtedly, he has been made a scapegoat, and one has the impression, perhaps unreliable, that Captain Lundborg would like to say a few hot words about certain eminent Italians who are much more necessary to the government than the designer and pilot of dirigibles...
...At that time the legend of Queen Louise was one of the few things which no one would have attempted to shake...
...A Prussian Queen Queen Louise of Prussia, by Gertrude Aretz...
...Bennett succeeds in inducing the Chaucerian age to hold up a mirror before its countenance is one question...
...It was from Danes Island, for instance, that the Swedish engineer-aeronaut, Andree, took off in 1897 in a magnificent balloon—the gas bag measured twenty meters in diameter— and sailed away toward the Pole at twenty miles an hour...
...May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 79 So we jump from facts to fancies—the more wildly confused, the better...
...2.50...
...Louise found hers in the person of the Czar Alexander I of Russia, and it cannot be denied that from the German, or rather from the Prussian, point of view, his influence over her brought about disastrous results...
...Yet it is only fair to say that it is not simply a large number of voters but a large number of intelligent voters that Professor Eldridge is looking for...
...Possibly nothing elevates a book like this so near to poetry as the element of a contemplation akin to prayer which permeates the story told...
...It may or it may not be lamentable that people do not vote in greater numbers...
...This has been prepared with great care by a widely-read man...
...Since he controls his indignation, however, we prefer his narrative to his controversy...
...There is also considerable discussion of tests, psychological and otherwise, for the new citizen...
...Expeditions to the North failed before the Italia went to pieces, and resulted in tragedy, but the failure and the tragedy were on a heroic scale...
...There is no longer any talk of truth...
...The account of her first 82 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 years at the Berlin court give us an insight into her feelings, and the description of the subsequent events of her life, her acquaintance with Alexander I and with the great Napoleon, is also excellent...
...Real Indians, as a matter of fact, no more think with their guts than we do...
...Now this plan may make a special appeal to the sociologist, and perhaps to others, but it may safely be asserted that the number of political scientists who on reading it will sink back in their professorial chairs and sigh "Cui bono...
...Sophistication...
...The majority is slow to follow the man who deals cleverly in novelties...
...1.75...
...or Miss or Mrs...
...But what if they did...
...Watson, Freud, Wiggam, Will Durant and their tribe...
...May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 81 Each morning before sunrise the singsong commenced which showed that a reading lesson was in progress...
...He is fair enough even to give credit to the undeniable swiftness of the final section of reverie in Ulysses...
...vjOMBES and Audibert work together on the new road out of Saint-Andre...
...Chamson's art triumphs in the deftness with which details are inserted into this cadre...
...Merely dung-dust upon an Abie's Irish Rose...
...The impossibility of such a character, whose conversations drip erudite references to Cellini plaques, tensors, quadratic equations, chemical formulas, chess gambits, Ibsen neurotics and Beethoven's thematics, has become too glaring...
...The rhythm of existence itself substitutes for dramatic tension...
...One wishes that the author had given more instances of Tibetan place-names, such as Pu-Sum—the Head of Three Valleys: being a place where three valleys meet...
...The italics and the amusement are mine...
...The knowledge of the language, the capacity to inquire, has given us this absorbingly interesting narrative which deals with Tibet's peasants and nobility, woman and home customs, rites, amusements and commercial methods...
...2.00...
...It is these results to which the author of this new biography alludes when she says that the Queen "had to part from life, perhaps conscious that she was not entirely blameless for the miseries that had come upon her land and people...
...THE Indian civil service has been fortunate in that it has often produced good administrators who are also good linguists...
...The book is about all a scholar could wish for, and as interesting a short biography as you may find this year...
...There is far less apathy in the face of public wrong-doing and corruption today than there was in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century...
...3.00...
...And again his subjects are drawn from the popular idols of the unintelligentsia...
...Miss George offers a more varied assortment of authors and topics to illustrate the career of England in the great Johnson's day...
...It divides the community into mutually exclusive groups...
...they prefer the prophets who give more encouragement to their impulses and level fewer exactions upon their logical faculties...
...The chroniclers of society in those days, he tells us, were nominally writers of abominable English, so that illustrative material had to be sought in the playwrights and the poets...
...Wickham, after exposing Joyce's absurd sentimentality, "tries to appear nonchalant by piecing a few sentences, but we have him now...
...But even a large collection of brief bits from his book would probably fail to indicate his real formidability...
...Downs has not permitted his genuine wit to part company with decency...
...Here is a religion not of ecstasy but of acceptance...
...Catherine Radziwill...
...7.00...
...But he is at his best when writing of Sweden and things and deeds Swedish...
...Miss Aretz presents us quite a different picture of the unfortunate Queen, and a far more human one...
...Wickham's inspired irony might succeed in attaining what John Dryden long ago defined as the true end of satire: the amendment of vices by correction...
...The extracts which we are given out of the Queen's correspondence add very much to the impression of her charm, grace, refinement and undoubted intelligence...
...1.75...
...One of them is really amazing...
...THERE can be no doubt that Professor Eldridge is correct in his assertion that Mr...
...edited by Gwendolen Greene...
...And, therefore, "the contemplated organization of citizens might indeed be conceived as a sort of modern secular analogue of the Church, and even as its possible successor...
...He adds "zero-worshipers" and "cold-worldliness" to our small vocabulary of acceptable puns...
...England in Johnson s Day, by M. Dorothy George...
...The method by which this material was assembled is disclosed in the preface: "Such as I have garnered during a residence of nearly twenty years, I have obtained by speaking to them [Tibetans] in their own language, not through interpreters...
...There can be no doubt that his is a part of the contemporary French fiction which is important...
...Lawrence seems to be acquainted...
...But the creative mystery has somehow fallen to the foot of the class, the dunce instructs the teacher...
...Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hiigel to a Niece...
...At any rate, Mr...
...Witness the great outpouring of voting citizens in the last national primary in New York City, in the famous "pineapple primary" of Chicago, and in the last national election...
...He is cogent because of his essential soundness rather than because of his wit...
...Municipal home rule, too, has been a decided aid to civic education and to the improvement in general citizenship...
...This cramps his philosophy and well-nigh reduces his canvas to the dimensions required for the nouvelle...
...a strain of national pride crops out in his story again and again until it becomes almost a chant—a chant of praise for his country's efforts during this rescue work...
...But his own book is sprightly and very well informed, critically keen and amiably human...
...No, says Mr...
...The most impressive part of the present book has to deal with the subtle erosion of Elizabeth Gormac's carefully barricaded personality under the influence of a youthful hero who is almost Eros incarnate...
...If it were presented in as pleasing a style as this volume on Tibet, it should enjoy wide popularity...
...Emotion is all that is asked for—emotion, no matter how awakened or what sort of an emotion it may be...
...the translation, remarkably limpid...
...Of course it is ridiculous to place the blame entirely on General Nobile...
...Mauriac's method here is far more objective than it was in his earlier novels, and one is conscious of a compression which, at times, seems nearly artificial...
...Downs has not denied either the solemnity or the tediousness of Richardson, who in several respects is the world's champion literary bore...
...We hope that he will long continue to chastise those modern unintellectual literary tramps and campfollowers whom Mr...
...Paul Crowley...
...In The Bishop Murder Case, unfortunately, he himself has killed his detective as a fiction figure...
...that Nero is described as another "fine poet" since he could get peace of mind from the satiating of no lust, howsoever delicate or brutal, but hungered only for Agrippina, his mother, whose belly he ripped open "so that he might see the womb in which he had once lain...
...Van Dine is extremely ingenious and the concluding incidents in which the murderer eliminates himself show him at his best...
...SELECTIONS with a different flavor are provided in a new & literary series, the general title of which—English Life in English Literature—is sufficiently ambitious...
...Such ¦excellence leads to the hope that he will acquire a new formula of plot construction, discard the omniscient Vance, and give us more from his pen...
...In fact it must be very definitely asserted that these various reforms are the outward evidence of an increased public spirit and enlightenment...
...ONE is grateful for the assurance that almost everything by Mauriac is to be published in translation...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...but it must be admitted that the new public order leaves us rather chilly...
...Destinies belongs to the same period as Therese...
...Wickham is a strong one...
...It need hardly be remarked that eighteenth-century novelists are not subjects for a squeamish pen or pair of eyes, but Mr...
...Having raised a splendid set of aboriginal whiskers, he entered upon his literary career moved by a passionate hatred of all laws and customs tending to put the slightest restraint upon impulse, the sex impulse more especially...
...translated from the German by Ruth Putnam...
...Here are reprinted Addison's impressions of the new Italian opera, Johnson on advertising, Fanny Burney on a royal holiday, and Hanway discussing tea...
...After we run along with the author repeating more breathlessly as we go "Yes, yes, go on" and "Where do we go from here...
...Few modern writers require so much of you in the way of knowledge of their development or their work as a whole...
...He does not appeal to that good, sedate multitude which forms the backbone of literate society...
...May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 83 Briefer Mention Samuel Richardson, by Brian W. Downs...
...and education seems to have been largely a matter of cursing the pedagogue...
...His audience is a relatively minute group, after all: it consists of those few radicals (I use the word in its literal and complimentary sense) who are curious enough to be interested and amused by popular current speculations and who are yet sober enough to prefer wit to half-wit...
...The mind bows down before the creative mystery.' Here is what one might call a 'beautiful' confusion of thought...
...Wickham, "are not quite so intestinal as those with whom Mr...
...and looking forward to the solution which we think will never be propounded, we come at last to the grand plan...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...The book is exceedingly well translated, a fact which makes certain errors, evidently not those of the author, the more surprising...
...Here was a champion of common sense, attacking the most palpable stupidities, inconsistencies, blindnesses and blasphemies in those fashionable gospels of clever and ignorant materialism preached by Drs...
...New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company...
...It [the Church] would be adjudged, on an impartial appraisal, a civic liability . . . more than any other factor in American life, with the possible exception of race...
...But he has gained strength of outline and feeling from the discipline...
...it distrusts learning and sophistication...
...Tibetan Lore The People of Tibet, by Sir Charles Bell...
...2.50...
...This room had paper windows, no stove, no carpet, but the noise of reading, though loud, was not inharmonious...
...and what the characters do not afford of subtle analysis they retrieve in definiteness of outline...
...She was thought of as something beautiful, noble and wonderful, something almost more than human...
...the literary life hovered between flattery and amour propre...
...The Bishop Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine...
...2.00...
...A pleasing feature of this book is the use of sayings, quotations of poems, in English, giving often the transliterated pronunciation of the Tibetan words...
...The citizen of the future is to give two hours every day to a consideration of public questions...
...In reality, "Crown Prince" in monarchist Germany was a title borne only by the eldest son and heir-apparent of an emperor or a king...
...Fortunately for the world, the Indian government had the good sense to keep Sir Charles Bell in Asia for long years, nearly twenty of which were passed in Tibet...
...Occasionally he waxes needlessly elaborate, but on the whole his work is a splendid advertisement for Cambridge composition courses...
...Jerome G. Kerwin...
...She shows us a charming woman married to a man entirely inferior to herself, a woman capable of being led astray but conquering herself and her feelings before it is too late, a good as well as an attractive woman, but one whose sometimes foolish conduct brings to mind the famous French aphorism: "Behind every feminine opinion one finds a personality...
...the crew of the Italia, from their camp on the icy wastes, called the attention of the world to their plight by means of the radio...
...Wickham awakens full appreciation in one particular and well-defined minority...
...and it is not his fault if the material often seems stodgy and beside the point...
...Wickham notes that James Branch Cabell describes the infamy of Judas as "the reply of a very fine poet to heaven's proffered truce...
...Here Mr...
...If there are issues, however, there will always be votes...
...His title is again a happy one...
...Andree unfortunately crashed, and was never seen again...
...The author," says Mr...
...Religion turned into arid debating between Puritans and their adversaries...
...Incidentally, good Christian citizens may be interested in the following selections: "They [the Church and the neighborhood] divert attention from community problems, for in themselves they make but little contribution, directly or indirectly, to the treatment of those problems...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...An impression seems to be getting abroad that a long life necessarily means a long book, and that even debunking requires a host of descriptive adjectives...
...READ against a background which no devoted follower of the newspapers can fail to bring to it, there is no story so pathetic as this of Einar Lundborg's in the very considerable literature of Arctic exploration...
...The Road, by Andre Chamson...
...Says Mr...
...In The Arctic Rescue Captain Lundborg writes simply and vividly of his "greatest adventure," of his trials on the ice after his Fokker had overturned on his second landing at the Italia camp, of the dissensions that arose among the remaining survivors, of the insulting attitude of the officers and crew of the Citta di Milano toward Nobile, and of the General's cold reception in Norway...
...England's Record England from Chaucer to Caxton, by H. S. Bennett...
...Is not emotion enough...
...And what ought we to do about it} See to it that the nonhuman, without words or vision, lays no strangling hold upon the creature who sees and speaks...
...Considering the scope of the work, this book seems nearly the best introduction to the period and its literature...
...It is to be found in a foot-note explaining that the German title "Erbprinz" is used "for a presumptive heir to a title...
...New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons...
...The new environment brings greater opportunity and ease...
...So many aspects of doctrine and history are touched upon, in a manner so salutary and modern, that one's own spiritual life is deepened by the mere reading...
...Mr...
...The Road is a fine exemplification of the sobriety of the newer French novel...
...When traveling in Kansu, the reviewer came upon a similar scene in a school near Tung Kang Caves, where all the boys were seated on a kang, two feet above the ground, in rows, each child chanting the Analects of Confucius...
...Wickham's minority now joyfully observes that he apparently finds it worth producing another and similar book, and that his delightful verbal gifts have not forsaken him...
...And he is fair—another thing that might make his opponents gnash their teeth...
...In his eagerness, however, to get to his own panacea for our public ills, the author does not give sufficient credit where credit is manifestly due...
...in some places the actual Tibetan characters, as, for example, where the correct form of the oft-quoted, "Om mani pad me hum," is set out as it should be: "Om-mani-peh-me-hum-hri," being literally, "Oh, the Jewel in the Lotus Flower," meaning Buddha, the benign and sympathetic...
...THIS book could never have been published before the war...
...Then certainly their way of consciousness would be fatal to ours...
...The Elizabethan age makes rather a poor showing in Mr...
...For Combes God unquestionably exists, but not as One Who must be "importuned" into the petty businesses of life...
...Strangely enough the correspondence, though dotted with mannerisms, does not reveal much of the writer's own personality...
...The Church . . . contributes comparatively little to the solution of moral problems raised by changing social conditions...
...The reader will find three neat compartments, into which Richardson's person, work and influence are respectively inserted...
...Aldous Huxley once had the sense to call Messrs...
...Harrison's book...
...Of this type is Sir Charles Bell, a man of unassuming character, but a student and precise observer, endowed with a nature as kindly as it is industrious...
...It now appears that Mr...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Wickham, "One begins to understand Cabell's idea of a poet...
...Lawrence in effect, white meat should give way to dark...
...Both are stories in which a soul uncontrolled by objective mandates rushes toward a doom which is at once a condemnation of its own self and an ironical commentary on the world at large...
...translated by Van Wyck Brooks...
...He is to be a member of a neighborhood group...
...Blight, Mildew and Smut...
...E. P. Dutton and Company...
...On to James Joyce, who writes "Miss gaze of Kennedy" for "the gaze of Miss Kennedy" and is hailed by the gullible as the Homer of our age...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Wickham attract the more active, curious and vocal little market-place groups...
...On my way to Lhasa, I halted for two nights at Nan-KarTse, [where] a small school adjoined . . . our bungalow...
...Perhaps we have expected too much...
...Out of this group, as from a cocoon, the new citizen will break forth on civic wings...
...Here is a readable source book and a fine garnering of representative prose passages...
...WHEN The Misbehaviorists appeared a year ago, some of us naive optimists hoped that Mr...
...Certainly it should bow down before the creative mystery...
...And no less interesting than the story of the actual rescue are the contrasts of past and present which, unconsciously perhaps, creep into the author's tale...
...The Citizens New Panacea The New Citizenship, by Seba Eldridge...
...Erbprinz" was that of the son and heir-apparent of a German duchy or principality...
...Nor does Mr...
...All this, however, is insignificant in the presence of the fact that the volume called Queen Louise of Prussia is a production of which its author has every reason to be proud...
...A crown prince is direct heir...
...Certainly the mind is an instrument...
...The geographical descriptions of this land of secluded peace, with its elevated plateaus about ten thousand feet and its vast mountain ranges, though compactly given, are si jularly suggestive of the causes of its isolation, and we shall hope for another volume from this author on the effect of Tibetan altitudes on Asiatic climate and habits, especially among the Mongols and in northern China...
...The group will convene at a neighborhood centre and revel in the discussion of public affairs under a competent leader...
...Wickham casts his summing-up in the form of an excellent parody of the style of Ulysses...
...Here he is primarily the diviner of other souls and the exponent of religious truth realized as objective and holy...
...will be ever so many...
...Professor Eldridge is right, too, in believing that the schools and colleges can do more than they are at present doing in stirring up an intelligent interest in current political, social and economic problems...
...Ernest Brennecke, jr...
...attacking them, too, with fiercer, sharper, gayer weapons than their own, with a more agile and intelligent wit, and occasionally with extremely amiable clowning...
...84 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 Destinies, by Frangois Mauriac...
...At the same time, Miss Aretz tries not so much to excuse Louise for errors which almost any other woman in the same difficult position would have been led into, but to give us a picture of her heroine which is drawn without prejudice, and as such, cannot fail to enlist interest and sympathy...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Only into the history of the dirigible have come details of such a petty character as to make it a subject for indignation rather than respect or gratitude...
...Although we have not reached the millennium in government and politics, we have improved...
...Van Dine would continue with his novels based on the remarkable cerebrations of Mr...
...3.00...
...New York: Covici, Friede, Incorporated...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...translated by Eric Sutton...
...It was winter, with a temperature of 40 to 50 degrees of frost...
...As a writer Mr...
...He takes up all the modern devices for reform in governmental machinery, such as the city manager, the direct primary, the short ballot, the initiative and referendum, home rule and so on, considers them and decides that although they give some help, it is not much...
...When he points out the fallacy of inferring that the Greeks were great because they were pagan from the fact that they happened to be both great and pagan, he is at his best...
...The late and tedious Otto Weininger, who was the unsung prophet of the new school of sex, is carefully dissected, exposed, dried up and puffed away by a rigid and restrained scientific analysis...
...Vance...
...Granting that there is no salvation in the institution of a new piece of governmental machinery as such, we must nevertheless admit that certain types of machinery are simpler of operation than others and are more understandable to the public mind...
...J. HE Baron von Hiigel certainly never dreamed of writing a "popular spiritual classic," and yet the present collection of letters to a favorite niece is just that...
...that he has pieced out a most interesting and serviceable book is another, which can be answered with an immediate affirmative...
...This clears the way for the more lively disposal of Edward Carpenter, and of Havelock Ellis, "that gentle, soft-hearted, and not very hard-headed old patriarch," whose desire was always "rather to see others eat than to do trencher work at the banquet himself...
...Such, in fact, is the manager form of government which, while passing through many vicissitudes in some cities, has awakened a remarkable public interest in municipal affairs and has invariably resulted in an improvement in munici80 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 pal administration...
...Both are from the meagre uplands, where people ask little of life and are given no bounty...
...Then to Marcel Proust, in whose interminable novels we hear everywhere of inversion, perversion and subversion, of atmosphere, of art...
...But a soul which actually followed out the suggestions prodigally offered by the little book would grow into the very finest realm of spiritual traditions...
...The mind is merely a servant...
...IT was a foregone conclusion after the success of The Benson Murder Case and The Canary Murder Case that Mr...
...Whether Mr...
...Wickham demonstrates that he also can be terribly grave and exact, at the expense of being slightly boring, like his subject...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 3
