Books
Sheeran, Clara Douglas & Radziwill, Catherine & Sands, William Franklin & Shuster, George N. & Brunini, John Gilland & Kerwin, Jerome G. & Larsson, R. Ellsworth & Chase, Mary Ellen & McCormick, John F. & Kendall, Margaret
134 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 BOOKS Some Intimations of Immortality Darkened Rooms, by Philip Gibbs. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. The Last September, by Elizabeth...
...Dunne has more faith in adherence to a pattern than in sharpness and exactitude of expression...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...The Empress's Lady-in-Waiting The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, by Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden...
...contemporary education seems to close the mind, and while in the generation of the "spiritual fathers of the nineteenth century," emancipated thought quickly crystallized on one side or the other of an imaginary antithesis (God or science) today's temper rejects both, sadly: neither God nor science...
...God as cause and purpose having been "undermined by science," and cause and purpose being nevertheless the basic need of the human mind, one turned to science...
...It suggests a world of alluring forms and sensuous fancies, whereas the reality is simple, crude, laborious...
...He concludes it will be gradually replaced by some intellectually inferior race or group nearer animal than human life and therefore better adjusted to nature, with which human life is and must be in disaccord...
...We are often told that it avails us little to pile up large reserves of capital, for we cannot take one cent into the life hereafter...
...IN A foreword to The Pilgrim and Other Poems, the bishop of St...
...In them phrase and thought become subservient to rhyme and rhythm...
...Catherine Radziwill...
...Epstein, nevertheless, has done a good piece of work...
...MANY of us in America are playing with the gratifying illusion of an aristocracy of intellect...
...but we still have to make a living and to most of the disillusioned intellectuals there is just enough pleasure in it, real or meretricious, to obviate the desire to get out of it as quickly and painlessly as possible...
...Krutch's book is valuable and should be in the hands of every Catholic educator...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...He makes the point even at the expense of seeming at times to be the enthusiastic propagandist rather than the cool intellectual investigator of a pressing problem...
...WHILE M. Gide was traveling "officially" through French equatorial Africa, he kept an unusually observant diary...
...Or are they, rather, tragic figures, each a symbol of that pathetic desire, daily overwhelmed, to realize the possible fulness of the individual nature—that nature glimpsed only in rare and painful seconds of perception...
...But above all else one will remember the suffering mind and imagination of young Bayard Sartoris, whose story this is...
...What one is grateful for is the sincere devotional spirit of a few scattered verses...
...These are good points in a textbook and will be sure to recommend it to students...
...It is in regard to these small details of everyday life in the palace of Tzarskoie Selo, transformed into a prison, and later on in Tobolsk, that the book of the Baroness Buxhoeveden differs from all the other ones which have been written on the subject of the Romanov tragedy...
...Not only must our graduates meet it, but it is already present in our schools...
...And specifically in the matter of the history of philosophy, it may not be too optimistic to interpret the appearance of new texts as evidence that a new and more scholarly spirit is giving fresh life to our handling of philosophy as an academic discipline...
...The English parliamentarian destroys the legends of mutilated Belgian children, of the German corpse factory, of Germany's sole war guilt, of the atrocities...
...Her everlasting tittle-tattle set the Empress against the very people on whom she ought to have relied, and estranged her from them...
...John F. McCormick...
...The Small Missal is intended for "children of an older growth," for those who find the complete missal difficult or distracting, or for adults who have not yet come to the spiritual joy of following the words and the spirit of the Church in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass...
...It shows, in spite of the care it takes to represent the Empress as a victim of circumstances, what nefarious influence the too-famous Anna Wyroubova wielded over her mind, and the evil she wrought by repeating to the unfortunate Alexandra all the current gossip in St...
...Krutch shows us pitilessly and rather terrifyingly the result in this generation of our various efforts to produce such a thing en masse...
...They are written with a simplicity which enhances their heartrending details...
...Glenn has given us, in his The History of Philosophy, a clear and orderly presentation of the subject in brief space...
...The book contains such an amazing collection of political contradictions and such a startling expose of the business of making war that it should warrant extensive quotation in any history dealing with the years 1914-1918...
...To the whole book's implication I should still say: "not yet" rather than "no longer...
...Economic Insecurity The Challenge of the Aged, by Abraham Epstein...
...Poems, by Gerald W. E. Dunne...
...Few men maintain a better balance between the outer world of event and panorama, and the inner world of self...
...There is also one point which it clears up...
...There cannot be the slightest doubt that one of the greatest obstacles to widespread adoption of old-age pension legislation in this country is going to be the conflict with state and national constitutional provisions which expressly or by implication 140 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 prohibit the expenditure of public funds for private purposes...
...This phase is the most important element of the book's exposition, but closely following it in significance is the pitiless revelation of the extraordinary gullibility of the human race...
...His reflections stimulate our own...
...Well, Mr...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...It has a place alike on the desk of anyone interested in the promotion of peace and anyone interested in the prosecution of war...
...And yet he never fails to suggest the dimensions of the white man's opportunity, or to portray worthy officials, administrators and missionaries...
...Somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred pages of the present material could be profitably omitted...
...Most of us do not, of course, give our whole mind to science, but there was comfort in the thought that one could really know, if it were not for the hardest of cold facts that most of us have to make a living...
...The Congo offers comparatively little to the eye excepting forests broken up by fields and little villages, some of them curious agriculturally or architecturally...
...God or science" has been an accepted antithesis, filtering down through pseudo-scientists and pseudo-theologians to the semieducated mass, to the illiterate intellectual (that characteristic product of the mass college) and purpose has been lost in the process...
...The use of the missal by well-instructed Catholics has for so many years been an approved practice that it seems superfluous to comment on the subject...
...7-50...
...Favorite words become intrusive, "sibilant," "myriad...
...As this inferior civilization grows intellectually, it will in turn find itself out of tune with nature, and in its turn succumb...
...The English committment to France also has an important place...
...Unfortunately, a great many Catholics who ceased their Catholic training with the catechism and the reception of the sacraments have never been taught the use of the missal...
...Epstein takes from "a successful insurance underwriter": "The Presidents of the United States have certainly been successful men and well paid, yet about one-half of those who reached old age did not have large accumulations...
...Toledo: Privately printed...
...3.00...
...Why should it not be more rational to lead him to this practice from the beginning...
...Epstein might incorporate a consideration of the legal problem involved in instituting old-age pensions...
...his work in its entirety is well worth reading by every intelligent citizen...
...Nock's kind tolerance of the earth's self-engrossed activities...
...Kerby of the Catholic University of America points out that My Mass Book is to be commended because "it represents an effort to bring the mysteries of our Holy Faith to the sympathetic attention of little children in a manner suited to their capacity and to the deep direction of their lives toward God...
...IF ONE wants to be quite impressed with the economic insecurity of life, one should not fail to read Mr...
...The new science of our "spiritual fathers of the nineteenth century" seemed to them to throw religion into fundamentalism and obscurantism...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...2.00...
...Albans says, "Thank God there are still some things in the world which can defy the microscope, the test-tube, the mathematician and even the psychoanalyst...
...To semi-moderns of a sterner mold, God was too easy...
...It is widely decadent Christianity, from which we also are not and never have been exempt...
...It is a compound of Rousseauistic sympathy and modern scientific curiosity...
...New York: Scott, Foresman and Company...
...The author quotes numerous statesmen of the great war period who in moments of candor admitted that peoples must be lashed into a patriotic fervor by arousing their active hatred for the enemy and their intense approbation of their own national course...
...his summary of present legislation in this country and abroad should aid the legislator and the student alike...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Falsehood in War Time is mainly a book of quotations...
...Tropical Observations Travels in the Congo, by Andre Gide...
...To the temper of a generation ago it seemed that science at any rate could be understood by anyone of sufficient intelligence giving his whole mind to it...
...We all claim that our system of education tends in that direction and we admit (sometimes without undue pressure) that individually we form part of it...
...Dunne's verses...
...Gide is concerned with the petty abuses of colonial administration, the lack of sympathy with native aspiration, and the gross avarice of some commercial organizations...
...Sursum Corda My Mass Book, by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary...
...It is valuable, before the powerful traditions that once molded British character, and through that character our own, lose their ability to summon a "good form" in which no earthly profit is discernible, to contemplate the passing scene 138 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 with Mr...
...It is altogether an honest book, written by an honest woman...
...For them The Small Missal, convenient in size and simple in arrangement, is an introduction to a higher plane of Catholic thought and action...
...Thus they obtain their own immortality and ensure, sadly enough, the torturing mortality of succeeding generations of their name...
...his statistics are complete and serviceable...
...The intellect should never be satisfied...
...And what she tells us now are her personal impressions of a great time which there were no great people to meet...
...Who can tell...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...Dunne's lines too often remind one of manuscripts with blanks left in them before an end rhyme, blanks to be filled in when some thought is suggested by the rhyme...
...The last six chapters, however, are truly poignant, and contain the first authentic record of what went on in the palace of Tzarskoie Selo during the early hours of the revolution which culminated in the abdication of Nicholas II...
...I am afraid the dust cover gives a false impression of this book...
...Incidents are so well told that they seem detached, unable through their very individuality and power to take their place in the story...
...It is unfortunately not possible to say as much for Mr...
...M. Gide is, however, no fastidious European...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...Consider the men who were presidents of the local banks here twenty-five years ago...
...Jerome G. Kerwin...
...After reading Mr...
...while he watches, with an admirable temper, the lights that change and shift, abroad as in America, to glorify what once neither the English nor Americans thought the Right Thing for self-respecting men to do...
...William Faulkner's Sartoris brings to the mind of at least one reader the saying of Mrs...
...DIFFERENT as are the three books to be considered in the following paragraphs, they yet lend themselves to a comparative discussion because of one distinctive feature which each possesses and to which, in fact, each owes its unity of effect...
...It may not contain much that is new to the student of the history of the Russian Revolution, but it proves that there were after all a few faithful friends left to the last Romanovs crowned in Moscow, who loved them well enough to consent to share their dangers, and eventually the fate which all knew was bound to overtake them...
...It would be totally unfair to ascribe the modern temper solely to decadent Protestantism...
...This is a quite general situation, very ably analyzed, and there is a natural sequence in it...
...that inimitable Thanksgiving dinner...
...Indeed, the stark and ugly claptrap which he uses dims the effectiveness of the tragedy he would depict, renders tedious and unprovocative that which he would have pathetic...
...Though one turns page after page anxious to discern what the Negro opines, eats and suffers, the satisfaction that June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 139 comes with learning what our author thinks of the books he has carried with him into the wilderness is very great indeed...
...Clara Douglas Sheeran...
...Prayers for confession and Holy Communion, and other prayers every child should know follow...
...It is the name and story of a southern family whose troubled, overwhelming personality was so prodigal that even the dead Sartorises could not stay in heaven, must come back to linger on in their pipes, in the odor of the honeysuckle, in the rooms where they had once lived, and above all in the perturbed and desperate desires of their grandchildren...
...Such a consideration might well be built around the Pennsylvania case...
...This is concerned with thought anent the "curious practice" of English people, "apprehended by an American only with great difficulty and to which they give the rather conventional and indefinite name of 'doing the Right Thing.' Given a certain set of circumstances, that is, an Englishman may be trusted to take a certain course of conduct—for no reason in particular except to satisfy some inward sense of obligation...
...They did not realize, and their real "intellectual aristocracy" in this generation has only begun to realize, that science dealt with modes and methods, not with causes...
...Consequently any revelation of the methods of artificially manufacturing patriotism must be frowned upon by those who would have no hesitation in employing such methods again if it should prove necessary...
...nor does one feel that "even the psychoanalyst" could detract from the inherent dignity of expression and humility of thought in the volume of which he speaks...
...Are these English people in Ireland unbelievably ignorant of the terrific changes which are hurtling over their heads as the Irish revolutionaries pursue their awful ends...
...Heart Hermitage and Other Poems, by Patrick J. Carroll, C.S.C...
...Reflect on the following conditions which Mr...
...He has had the needs and difficulties of beginners well in mind and has been at pains to throw light on points which such beginners are likely to find dark...
...Even that illusion has vanished in the modern temper, for knowing everything, nothing explains our relation to the universe...
...For the general reader in subjects like the history of philosophy, foot-notes and references are perhaps only impediments which burden him in his progress through the book...
...William Franklin Sands...
...Had it been placed at the beginning, the reader would have earlier realized that he was given to see the present panorama of widespread social disintegration with the eyes of one bred to perplexing standards, not to be justified either from an "economic" or a "scientific" point of view, yet able to impose coercive obligation, even when following them may entail the loss of both one's money and one's life...
...Epstein, we may well conclude that there is a great possibility that we may not carry our savings even as far as the portals of eternity...
...The mingling of such emotions as are demanded by these hysterical pages requires a better hand and mind than Sir Philip Gibbs possesses here...
...There is such a wealth of figures, mostly good, that sentences too often seem mannered...
...He does not presuppose an understanding of the technical language of philosophy, but explains terms as they occur...
...Intellect is hard and daring...
...Petersburg...
...When you see it you know it, and are satisfied...
...Three Poets The Pilgrim and Other Poems, by the author of In the House of My Pilgrimage...
...Epstein makes his point that there is much economic instability in the course of life...
...Few books are poorer advertisements for European exploitation than his...
...Are they victims in a kind of Moliere corrective comedy...
...It must be offset, to have its full value, by a book presenting the other side—the real truth...
...Several of the greatest of the early Presidents were actually broke...
...Only genuine excellence is deserving of anonymity, but there is nothing to quarrel with in the anonymity of these poems, which have a rare quality of clarity and purity...
...The author has connected them with the most concise descriptions of the points illustrated by his selections from the declarations of the chief figures in the world war, from newspapers and journals, from letters and documents, from treaties and records...
...We can see the anxieties of the inhabitants of the imperial palace, their dread of what was going to follow the first outburst of revolutionary fury, and at the same time their utter misconception of its gravity and of the causes that had brought it about...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...Cloth, $.80, French Morocco, $2.4.0...
...Hence Falsehood in War Time needs a companion volume...
...R. Ellsworth Larsson...
...those charming interludes of conversation among the Negro servants...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...But is it good practice to ask the student to accept opinions and judgments on the word of the text-book...
...the piping of young frogs "like endless, silver, small bubbles rising...
...In spite of the somewhat bearish expression employed by His Grace, one shares his gratitude...
...Nothing in science is absolute, for thought should push ever beyond ephemeral gain...
...The desert makes him feel much healthier, his sympathy with the primitive remains well-nigh unbounded, and his gracious moralizing is often really fine...
...The universe thus evoked is lush but not lawless, tropical but not languid, ugly with disease and ignorance but not hopeless...
...From the historical standpoint it is a merciless exposition of quasi-facts that hundreds of thousands, even today, believe are immutably based on truth...
...Of the three, Sir Philip Gibbs's handling of the subject in Darkened Rooms is at once the most realistic and the most unconvincing...
...In short, Mr...
...Margaret Kendall...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...George N. Shuster...
...THIS book of essays takes its title from the seventh of the ten papers it contains...
...Remembering better books from his pen, one closes Darkened Rooms with regret...
...One wishes for space to recount the things in Sartoris which will be long remembered: the moon-swept Mississippi fields and hills on spring nights...
...Yet these "victims" of intellect cannot achieve, either, "an exultant atheism...
...The three authors, by widely varying means and methods, have chosen to deal with the seeking of the human mind and heart after spiritual realities, with those unquiet, persistent, baffling forces which in the last analysis drive every soul back upon itself...
...It is a relief to turn to Miss Bowen's delicate workmanship in The Last September, to the perplexing remoteness of her characters and her theme...
...The prodigal creation of his forefathers, his is the body in which they survive, his the nature which they sustain and nourish and at last consume...
...Why is anything beautiful, good or true...
...1.25The Small Missal...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...2.go...
...God as a point of departure satisfied completely...
...Characters live so completely and fully in themselves that they mingle with difficulty...
...Among them were several cases of financial distress in later years, and even of suicide...
...Reading carefully her splendid dialogue, admiring her distinctness of detail, one is harassed by questions...
...1.60...
...The Baroness Buxhoeveden was lady-in-waiting to the last unfortunate Empress of Russia, she accompanied her to Siberia, and only escaped sharing her fate through a miracle...
...New York: Macy-Masius Company...
...This contemporary sad elite, however, is sadly conscious that it is not trained to think anything through...
...Sartoris, by William Faulkner...
...The two volumes of this were published in France with great success, partly because there exists a public interested in Africa but mostly because of the personal charm of M. Gide...
...Therefore, aside from the intrinsic merits of the book, which has been completely revised in conformity with the latest Editio Typico, The Small Missal fills a longfelt want and goes forth from the press as a missionary to secure intelligent as well as devotional participation in the never-ending Sacrifice of Calvary...
...THE English government will not be alone in its belief that Sir Arthur Ponsonby's stand that '"now it can be told" is not sufficient justification of the publication of Falsehood in War Time...
...The latter, apparently, is only to be found among the "intellectual inferiors...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...3.00...
...The intellectual aristocracy is tired and "enfeebled...
...Krutch is not speaking of modern thought but of the modern temper: "floating convictions, tendencies and moods, which taken together constitute a temperament," in which religion comes to be definitely discarded (though often with a sigh of regret) and science fails to satisfy...
...But because the family at Danielstown, "sealed up in lamplight, secure and bright like flowers in a paper-weight," because young Lois and Gerald and thwarted, middle-aged Hugo with his frail wife, and Laurence, the ultra-modern, and Lord and Lady Naylor stake out firm places in the mind each with an almost embodied desire for what he knows not, one feels sure that Danielstown is a house not made with hands and that its inmates, so trivial and meaningless at tea and tennis, are beating each his own wings against the cruel bars of time and place...
...The large, clear print and the exquisitely colored illustrations on every page are exactly what a child craves in books...
...Innumerable details enrich the pages like beads of manifold colors...
...Unlike their grandfathers, those who are its victims do not and never expect to believe in God: but unlike their spiritual fathers, the philosophers and scientists of the nineteenth century, they have begun to doubt that rationality and knowledge have any promised land into which they may be led...
...Epstein's work on pensions for the aged...
...War is, unfortunately, not definitely a thing of the past and the methods of propaganda may again have to be utilized...
...5-00...
...In place of them, Mr...
...Faulkner's ingredients are so dear to him that he hates the stirring of them into a smooth whole...
...And we can watch together with the author the conflicting emotions which, through those dark days, shook the soul of the unfortunate Empress, and the disillusionments which one after the other drove her almost to despair...
...1.00...
...In the meantime our moderns have something to say for life as an art, the criterion of art being self-expression and the perfection with which each individual expresses himself in the particular role he chooses, whether as a Francis of Assisi, a Napoleon, a Lenin, a Leopold or Loeb...
...And as such it can be warmly recommended, even though it needs editing for the young...
...Amiable Essays On Doing the Right Thing, by Albert Jay Nock...
...Nock, one may guess, is of those rare Americans who would themselves, obeying instincts formed by an inherited tradition, emulate in such practice the peculiar Englishmen of whom he writes: and for that reason possibly, this essay, not in other ways the most significant, may have been chosen to give title to the collection...
...Mr...
...One closes the book, unconvinced even after a second reading...
...A fatal mistake if there ever was one...
...Consider the house I now live in...
...Nevertheless, perhaps even because of these things, Sartoris is a memorable book...
...For all that certain of these pieces have a very moral air, their expression is not impressive...
...Furthermore, his repetitions on causes for old-age dependency are more annoying than impressive...
...Belligerent Gossip Falsehood in War Time, by Arthur Ponsonby...
...Sartoris has faults, but they are the June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 135 faults of a style and a method crammed with virtues...
...The first owner was a high railroad official, but he lost so much money in his later years that his wife is now a telegraph operator...
...Eventually in the interest of scholarship he must accustom himself to go to the sources...
...THOUGH the writing of text-books may not be a very high form of productive scholarship, it is still an encouraging sign of progress in our teaching of philosophy when such books begin to multiply...
...He has perhaps inherited, together with an "inward sense of obligation" deriving from his ancestor, John Jay, sufficiency of worldly goods to let him quietly sustain such obligation, where it affects him personally...
...June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 137 Thought in Review The History of Philosophy, by Paul J. Glenn...
...How can a professor of psychology, an eminent lawyer, a clever Oxford graduate and a brilliant actress be fooled by an illiterate wouldbe medium who conceals music-boxes under floors, wears masks of wax and deals in a very obvious ventriloquism...
...with an introduction by Jane Addams...
...The first pages of the book are essentially banal and conventional, and in more than one detail incorrect, but they are sincere, and true in so far as they describe her own feelings...
...Does the author mean to depict their empty tennis games, their imagined love affairs, as merely ludicrous and inane and futile when contrasted with the destruction at their doors...
...That which gives the effect of poetry is the more reprehensible for giving only the effect, and technical adroitness hardly compensates for obstruction to the thought...
...This modern temper seems to be a school product, a forlorn, unwilling and disillusioned scepticism, rather than a dilemma 136 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 of an open, inquiring, vigorous mind...
...This angle of the problem justly deserves more than passing attention...
...Besides, who wants to...
...Illusions of Aristocracy The Modern Temper, by Joseph Wood Krutch...
...Allowed to see the cheap tricks of the medium's trade from the very outset, few readers can take stock in characters so gullible as his...
...THIS is neither a very clever nor even a well-written book, but it is an exceedingly pleasant one to read, because it shows us that loyalty, affection and devotion to the memory of a dead friend still exist in this age of general ingratitude...
...The striking difference in manner of some of Father Carroll's work gives one, having read a poem that has about it at once the artificial air of a public tableau and the simplicity of an unaffected prayer, a feeling of uneasiness, even of embarrassment—the embarrassment of an intruder...
...Robert Louis Stevenson about R. L. S.: "His faults are so much more lovable than other people's virtues...
...THE preface by Dr...
...The illustrations of the Mass are for the most part on the left-hand page, while on the right a full-page reproduction of some great painting of the Redeemer's life shows the child the divine inspiration and development of the Holy Sacrifice...
...Krutch says this generation "can no longer think in terms appropriate to either...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...In the right of his intellectual independence, which presumably we are striving to foster in our teaching of philosophy, is not the student entitled to know what the basis is of the opinions and judgments he is asked to accept...
...He also claims for the modern temper this intellectual aristocracy, admits its enfeeblement, but sees no remedy...
...The Last September, by Elizabeth Bowen...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 5
