Books
Cummins, Evelyn A. & McGuire, Harry & Farley, Ambrose & Boyd-Carpenter & Gillis, James M. & Chase, Mary Ellen & Kerwin, Jerome G. & O'Brien, John C.
BOOKS Strange Companions The Drift of Civilization, a Symposium: The Future of Science; The Future of Man; The Future of America. New York: Simon and Schuster. $3.00. WHEN Socrates sat with his...
...James M. Gillis...
...Can it be that Mr...
...No one knew on what the manufacturing cost was to be computed-whether, for instance, the right of the lessee (Mr...
...New York: Coward-McCann, Incorporated...
...Richard Byrd shows that he has a cultivated mind and a philosophy as well as skill in aviation...
...Ford offered to produce commercial fertilizer at a cost not to exceed 8 percent on the manufacturing cost...
...and as despair gradually seizes the mighty gallant, the devil's comments grow more trenchantly ironic...
...it contains not one dull page...
...This may be due to the impossibility of certain minds in Britain even now to realize that force is no ultimate remedy in politics...
...Howell formed one, in discussing the question of the relative positions of the diplomatic agents, makes excellent reading...
...On the Margins of Old Books, by Jules Lemaitre...
...5.00...
...We may take that as an antidote to H. G. Wells's opinion (dogmatically expressed as usual) that in the reconstruction period "America gravely and solemnly demonstrated that for all the practical ends of the situation, she did not know anything at all...
...The lord mayor of Chicago, Mr...
...The first part then opens ten years later, in Venice...
...The introducer of the Ford proposal in the House of Representatives said he did not know the basis of computing the manufacturing cost...
...The book is vivid as well as careful and thoughtful, bright and alive in its splendidly chosen diction as well as in the pictures it affords...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...It would incidentally be a novel sight to behold one of our younger Shelleys, staking his all on an intricate lyric conceit, veer out into the wider reaches of an epic having the dimensions of The Everlasting Nay (or even Hiawatha, for that matter...
...The reader is given too little of the actual in a situation which naturally piques interest...
...When Masefield writes, "The hunter blew his horn a note And laughed against the moon...
...Innocuous Civics The Other Side of Government, by David Lawrence...
...Though Dr...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, to celebrate its golden jubilee, are worth while...
...Arvin himself deplores...
...In democracies, however, we cannot guarantee by custom, and we would not guarantee by law immunity of public officials from condemnation-either just or unjust...
...he asks only to be led off to hell...
...His biographical facts at the very outset include two which strike the key-note of his book...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Rostand grants to the legendary gallant of Romance myth-the lover Don Juan-all the delicious fruits of his erotic conquests, and then subtly, slowly, lets him sink into the well of his delusions...
...swarms of airplanes, battle cruisers and submarines...
...1 HERE is here a pretentiousness which sometimes lessens the effect of otherwise skilful construction and graceful prose...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...The terrible thing about this book is its presentation of the absolute waste of promising young lives...
...Troubled Eygpt Egypt's Past, Present and Future, by J. Morton Howell...
...One feels constantly on the verge of getting full information when suddenly the supply is cut short...
...Those who wish the delight of reading the translation along with the original (which can be found in the 1921 bound volume of L'lllustration) will appreciate how effectively he has rendered the loose rhymed Alexandrines into English blank verse...
...Yet "there remains the fact of having pleased"-and they reveal the contemptuous, unmanly little things in which he pleased them...
...The book is really a charming substitute for a trip one would like to take but cannot...
...One finds a goodly amount of lucid thinking offset by incautious rhetoric and hazardous generalizations...
...There is bound up in this problem the method of treatment of our great power resources...
...Seven Women, by William N. John...
...The Lethens, mother and father, live in an amorphous world which is seen as darkly as the details of the quarrel which led them to hatred of each other and the determination that, although resident under the same roof, no word would ever pass between them...
...Jerome G. Kerwin...
...It may be true, let us admit, that Masefield has never been so ridiculous as Kipling...
...It might safely be used in the schools of Tennessee, Arkansas, Chicago or New York...
...In general the chief value of the book to Catholic readers would be its effectiveness as an irritant...
...2.50...
...Politics make strange bedfellows, but these symposia, now so popular, make much stranger table companions...
...Only a Frenchman could have written in this discriminating way...
...the permanent officials had risen from 16,600 to 32,-800, while provisional officials increased from 2,500 to 11,300, and the daily paid employees from 38,000 to 102,000...
...But one makes almost the best possible definition of these two representative modern poets of English life by saying that Kipling can leap to heights beyond his reach in such marvelous lyrics as The Last Chantey, while Masefield, after a tremendous jump, invariably discovers that, after all, he has caught nothing more lofty than-shall we say?-his own hat...
...While the stories are uneven there are very few that seem beside the mark...
...Whereupon the list of his women is produced...
...Thus, in another letter we find "this war is simply a matter of hounding men to death, and that is a degrading business...
...By the elimination of the most culpable public servants we may increase the confidence of the public in their government and may thereby spare the more sensitive officials and would-be officials the mental anguish which accompanies ingratitude...
...from the detailed horrors of a bloody murder to the account of some beautiful act of self-sacrifice, manage somehow to pass from Dean Inge to Stephen Leacock, from Maxim Gorky to Guglielmo Ferrero, and not feel the sensation known to those who bump the bumps at Coney Island...
...Of course, the obvious truth is that something new and fresh and promising did come out of America...
...In connection with the same story we read further on, "The American Cyanamide Company has made an offer to lease the project (Muscle Shoals) which is described by its sponsors as better than the Ford offer...
...The writers were university men studying philosophy, theology, medicine, law, and for almost every variety of profession...
...Keyserling, though indeed not blind to the faults and dangers of America, says, "Democracy works better there than anywhere else...
...England, underneath a mask of professed friendliness, is jealous...
...But you need not, for a few pages further along you find Hans Driesch saying: "Modern metaphysics as well as modern psychology has reestablished the ancient problem of immortality as a legitimate one...
...if Henry Ford is more intelligible, Henry is at hand...
...2.50...
...long-range artillery, destructive explosives and deadly chemicals: all supported by intense industrial activity behind the lines...
...It is a compilation made from some twenty thousand missives from the front, written to relatives and friends, chiefly in the first two years of the war...
...Even now it is allowed to consider so-called spiritualism as a legitimate hypothesis, and the number of the scientific personalities who are inclined to accept hypothetically this doctrine is augmenting from year to year...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...and the colored races are resentful of our discrimination in the matter of immigration...
...But perhaps the most appropriate and most cheerful sentiment in a volume purporting to be a glimpse into the future is that of Rudolf Maria Holzapfel who, in his essay on The Possibilities for an American Culture, writes: "As Washington freed the Americans from the overlordship of England, as Lincoln freed the Negroes from the despotism of plantation-owners, so commanders of the spirit will one day arise to liberate the soul...
...Don Juan is brooding on his thousand and three victories in love when the devil, in the form of a puppet showman, appears and sets up his stage for Don Juan's amusement...
...Propaganda Fictionized The Red Napoleon, by Floyd Gibbons...
...We can indeed be thankful that we are not to blame for it, for even as it is, one often feels absolutely sickened by it...
...So in the present volume: what mental fellowship can there be between Count Keyserling, who believes in and writes on Spiritual Progress, and Albert Einstein, who hammers home a materialistic philosophy...
...Lawrence has set out to be nice to our federal government and to say nothing low, mean, or nasty about it...
...When the hate of Europe and the East is turned upon us, we shall be unready...
...Their book is another argument for peace that the world war produced...
...Ambrose Farley...
...But in the back of his mind he retains his twentieth-century habits, and his knowledge of the past which amusingly becomes prevision from the mystified point of view of the lords and ladies of Queen Anne's time...
...One must not attempt to sweeten or beautify such a thing as that...
...However, we who read the newspapers, skipping swiftly from a tale of bawdry to the story of the conquest of the Antarctic...
...For, as we noted at the start, his presentation of Hawthorne is perhaps not so much biographical as interpretative, perhaps no more interpretative than critical...
...Ford a philanthropist or not this statement is inadequate...
...Briefer Mention White Narcissus, by Raymond Knister...
...Even greater contrasts arise when deeper emotions are awakened...
...Morton Howell does not pursue the subject of Lord Lloyd's commissionership and its implications as evidence of a policy, which he might well have done, it is curious to note that ever since the Transvaal War of 1899-1900 whenever the Conservatives have been in power, they have sought either to impose their opinion by force, or to threaten force in order to gain their way...
...Masefield Collected Poems, by John Masefield...
...The President's powers are disposed of in large type on six diminutive pages...
...translated by T. Lawrason Riggs...
...The devil parries, "I know the devil can possess, of course, But-man...
...2.50...
...Lethen lavished all her love and care resolved the plot into the happy one of love's fulfilment and a reconciled mother and father...
...None," he writes, referring in his first paragraph to the thirty-eight youths who made up the class of 1825 at Bow-doin College, "was to be more inconspicuous than the son of a ship captain's widow from Salem, who had just distinguished himself in two dubious but characteristic fashions-by paying a fine rather than take a commencement part to which his reasonably high scholarship entitled him, and by refusing to have his silhouette made for the class gallery...
...New York: J. H. Sears and Company...
...Or again, what can we make of the cheek-by-jowl companionship of Benedetto Croce and Bertrand Russell...
...EDMOND ROSTAND, the most successful dramatic poet for over a century, who created Cyrano de Bergerac and gave Bernhardt two of her greatest vehicles, La Princesse Lointaine and L'Aiglon, died in 1918...
...Nevertheless White Narcissus is a decidedly good novel by a young Canadian who shows virility and promise...
...translated by Isabel Grazebrook...
...Forever essaying epigrams, he turns sententious where Housman is inspired...
...Then his pride at having dominated women is undermined as they tell of the sundry ways in which they have forced him to their own will for seduction...
...SEVEN women assembled for a charity meeting are interrupted by the scandal of a servant girl presuming to have a baby, and each of the worthy ladies picks up a stone to throw at her...
...But the devil mocks his vainglory even in this desire, and turns him into an eternal puppet in the show as Don Juan vainly pleads: "I long to suffer...
...Lacking a real war to cover, he has invented one, world-wide in scope, in which the proletariat of Russia and Europe and the submerged yellow races of the East unite to sweep the capitalist class from the seats of government...
...These are more or less obvious antitheses...
...BEING a review of the philosophic moralists from primitive anonymity to William James, Men and Morals covers a great deal of territory...
...The presence of Dr...
...Such seems to be Mr...
...Whether we believe Mr...
...Howell would serve as an antidote to such mentality...
...It has none of that "romantic individualism," which is characteristic of so much modern presentation and which Mr...
...The most irritating essay (perhaps some would say the most stimulating) is that of James Harvey Robinson...
...Should not a matter of this nature be treated clearly and fully if treated at all...
...But to make certain that more of this type do run he would spare them uncharitable criticism...
...but Don Juan is granted his freedom when he beseeches ten years more to play the cor-ruptor...
...It was presented at Versailles by Woodrow Wilson, but it was kicked under the table by the old-line diplomats, whom Philip Gibbs called so justly "the same old gang...
...but he reminds the devil that the victory is an empty one, for he goes as an immortal conqueror, unvanquished even by the devil himself: "I mock the paradise Reserved for innocence...
...Ford) was to be counted in, whether the value of the water power was to be the basis, or whether the bare cost of manufacturing fertilizers was to determine the price...
...More frequently than at the present he would have them run for public office...
...The most highly imaginative article, and to one reader at least the most stirring, is that of Paul de Kruif already referred to...
...translated from the French by Clarence Stratton...
...One day psychology in the form of psychical research may decide this question for the future...
...Fully as vivid also is Mr...
...If the reader cares to make one more effort at understanding Einstein, there he is...
...Arvin is no ringmaster with cracking whip who has a few tricks of his own to divulge before showing off those of his chief performer, but rather that he is quite content to stay behind the scenes...
...This denouement, particularly in view of the many more interesting developments which might have resulted from Richard's power to thwart Hymerson's villainies, is rather disappointing...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...You may feel like sitting down and writing a snappy retort to that ignoble opinion...
...To them international Communism and the yellow peril are real, if not immediate, threats to our safety...
...He sees, too, with not a little delighted surprise, providing he is familiar with much of the new biography, that Mr...
...2.50...
...EGYPT seems to have taken the place of Ireland in British politics, in so far as it is a continuing source of trouble...
...But this is not all...
...Possess...
...Thompson, or the Daughters of the American Revolution, or Senator Heflin and all the guardians of law and order could not find the influence of perfidious Albion, the propaganda of Moscow or the secret machinations of the Vatican within this innocuous treatise on our government...
...MASEFIELD has been at least as prolific as Longfellow...
...Immersed in such an atmosphere, Ada Lethen's fear of love was innate nor was Richard Milne's character sufficiently dominant to force her, a slave to parental duty, into any acceptance of love...
...Again, both are realists...
...Another contrast is that offered between the degradation caused by war, and the spirit of brotherhood, as its diametrical opposite...
...One will not soon forget "those strenuous, alert, pragmatic, unimaginative Yankees, going about their prosy business as if Rochester or Hartford were the centre of the universe and 1830 the very summer of the golden age...
...He calls it The Death Fighters...
...FOR those who seek delightful tales, one stage in the quest may be halted at this point...
...And yet it is a grave mistake not to see that Longfellow was, for his day and age, a confirmed realist...
...For example, a constantly recurring note of hope frustrated is presented side by side with a growing belief in immortality...
...At last his pride is utterly demolished...
...2.00...
...It should also be stated that Mr...
...Arvin's revelation of the American character, a vividness heightened by the inevitably swift approval and corroboration of the mind of the reader...
...I've never suffered...
...The chapters are sometimes tantalizingly brief...
...Muscle Shoals, for instance, is still a very important public question...
...Still, unmindful of these smoldering animosities, our pacifists talk glibly of reducing armaments and international peace...
...In the fifth angle of this queer pentagon stood the grim and miserly figure of the farmer, Carson Hymerson, whose mad endeavor to seize the Lethen estate determined the plot's only action and avoided a stalemate...
...The play deserves fine production and many a reading...
...It stands out among a mass of novels and deserves to be remembered...
...I've a right to hell...
...When, as his ancestor, he falls in love with the lady he did not (as his ancestor) marry, and has to choose between remaining in the eighteenth century as a kind of present-future hybrid or returning to the twentieth century and losing his eighteenth-Century love, the entanglement grows rather bewildering even to the reader...
...The only modern poet who has tried anything of the kind without drowning is Yeats, and Yeats is incomparably the greatest poet in English since Browning...
...Letters from the Front German Students' War Letters, by A. F. Wedd...
...As one writer puts it, "This longing for productivity after having been for twenty years merely receptive, makes it hard for me to think that my life is no longer my own...
...To say that Mr...
...And quite similarly one is oppressed by so many pages in which the quest for something like an illuminating philosophy ends with the advertisement of a platitude...
...It is beautifully written...
...Too much praise cannot be given to Father Riggs for his exquisite translation from the French...
...WHEN Socrates sat with his fellows at a symposium there was a certain intellectual homogeneity in the group...
...Gibbons predicates the invasion of this country upon a state of unpreparedness that he insists is real...
...First, he cannot tell them apart, though he thought that he had "grasped their naked souls...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Underneath the charm of polished phrases that sometimes glow with epigram, sometimes with pure poetic beauty, there is the rich allegory...
...Dayton, Ohio: Service Publishing Company...
...For one shrewd remark about the influence of evolution upon Victorian "complacency," there is another flippant comment on something or somebody else...
...For this reason he admired the German Romantics, the Spaniards and Dante...
...Their letters offer a series of telling contrasts...
...Perhaps, too, there is not unwelcome exhilaration in reading, for example, Dean Inge's contemptuous refutation of democracy, especially American democracy, and being riled thereat, but continuing and having one's feelings soothed by the more understanding treatment the same subject receives at the hands of Keyserling and Siegfried...
...All these he has possessed, says the lover...
...Arvin has admirably managed a difficult job: the successful mingling and intermingling of three purposes...
...New York: Double-day, Doran and Company...
...One by one the disillusionments are piled upon him...
...Ten to One in Sweden, by Paddy Sylvanus...
...indeed the description of the action taken by a committee of three diplomats, of which Dr...
...THIS translation of letters written by German students is the most pathetic, perhaps the most affecting, of any of the war books...
...GIBBONS is the war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune...
...2.50...
...The fight of the great Nebraska Senator against this plan was one of the biggest of his public career...
...The critical reader, however, will not see in the book any more than it really is-a mildly interesting thriller, obviously written with an eye to the circulation of the weekly magazine in which it appeared serially...
...There still seems to be a chance for everybody, and therefore, the belief in the indefinite progress-a belief dead in post-war Europe-is still alive...
...The Boer War was force in operation to gain a certain position...
...How many a quite young married man have I seen lying dead...
...The major aspect of our history he conceives to be "a movement from the centre outward," "dispersion not convergence...
...Finally, both poets are alike in their addiction to the simile, in their fondness for onomatopoeia, and in their constant return from excursions in more recondite forms to the simple ballad stanza...
...nor the "Virgilian" tasks at Brook Farm, that inexhaustible manure pile which Hawthorne called his "gold mine...
...The farmer's breath caught in his throat, He fell into a swoon," we are properly reminded not of Coleridge, but of "The skipper he stood beside the helm His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now west, now south...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith...
...Harry McGuire...
...Of all recent studies of Hawthorne it is without doubt the most intelligent, the most thorough, the most illuminating...
...The conflict is conceived on a stupendous scale, involving vast bodies of infantry and cavalry...
...In rapid review, the Margins range from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Gospels and Golden Legend, through the middle-ages, to Madame de Sevigne and some proclamations of General Bonaparte...
...In this he places great faith in the product of the colleges and universities as a regenerative force in public life...
...Of course Masefield, with his countless proper names and his technical jargon, seems to us far more aware of actuality than the author of Evangeline...
...Though the volume indicates a certain diffusiveness in matter, it should serve as a pleasing introduction to Egyptian affairs and policies for those who desire to understand and know more thoroughly the recent history and developments of the Land of the Pharoahs...
...But in the modern symposium you have not only one mind contradicting another, but one mind incapable by nature or by training of understanding the other...
...and this aspect he illustrates by citing types, noble and ignoble, from the adventurous colonist and the philosophic anarchist to the tax dodger and the bootlegger-all dominated alike by a common distrust of centrality, all actuated by a kind of spiritual pride...
...In connection with such a statement there should be an explanation that this in no way meant to imply that Senator Norris favored the Ford plan...
...Serene in his self-sufficiency, Don Juan is ready to be taken...
...The idea that an essential purity and goodness can remain her principal attraction, that Mimi never changed emotionally during her very busy and sensational life, is presented as a fact rather than an illusion...
...FROM the first to the last paragraph of Mr...
...There is the legend of the man who enjoyed reading the dictionary even though the transitions were abrupt...
...It is a simple book, and this simplicity is what constitutes its attraction and its literary worth...
...but there is, he argues, more yet than this: "I too feel that I have a mission in life...
...And yet one vaguely senses the nuances of the time-relativity idea upon which the author's imaginings are based...
...It seems a case of Woodbridge Riley getting in the way of Woodbridge Riley...
...There are omissions in this volume which are surprising...
...Gibbons describes...
...When one is in the midst of it and fully conscious of its reality, one can speak of it only in the most deeply earnest spirit...
...And throughout his 300 pages it is this "estrangement" of Hawthorne's from all that makes for solidarity in personal or national life which forms at once Mr...
...The same young writer who denounces war as a degrading business declares that the sight of the dead has no effect on him at all, for the look of these pitiful remains proves to one how little this mortal body has to do with the immortal soul...
...New York: Har-court Brace and Company...
...Nor is there any mention of the speech of Zaghlul regretting that a "true Zaghlul ministry in name, in sense and in blood" had not been based on his own relations (November 3, 1924...
...Gibbons's thesis...
...And he conjures up the masked souls of all the women Don Juan boasts of having had...
...he realizes he has loved little, known less, created nothing...
...The rest of the play is between Don Juan and the ghostly women, as one by one they rip his debonair conceits to tatters...
...The two main parts of the play had been completed before the war, but it was necessary to reconstruct the prologue from fragments much erased, and to supply the stage business...
...The resultant play is a challenge to hedonism which should have particular significance in these hectic days of pleasurechasing...
...He would speed the day when college men and women will look forward to careers in government service as is the custom in Europe...
...and as the play has charm, wit and is skilfully constructed, it leaves a subtle, very pleasing impression...
...Arvin's book is in every respect one of the most noteworthy of the year just passed...
...On the whole Father Riggs has remained close to the original...
...Ambitious youth asks if it is never to have a chance to do anything, to create anything...
...Nothing new came out of America, nothing fresh, nothing looking forward to that great Pax Mundi...
...For as each orderly, accurate, thoughtful page gives place to the next, he becomes sure that here is a work which commands not only respect but admiration because of the sheer carefulness and thoroughness of its execution...
...KNISTER'S success with his background, slightly marred by too obvious symbolism, does not extend in equal measure to his characters...
...This is disputed by Senator Norris who thinks the Ford offer was better for the government than the latest plan of that type...
...It is obviously impossible to quote or even to call attention to all the good points made by its twenty-six heterogeneously minded contributors...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Yellow Springs, Ohio: Kahoe and Company...
...5.00...
...And is not immortality in the last resort the very problem of all philosophy and science...
...Possess...
...Rostand's Last Play The Last Night of Don Juan, by Edmond Rostand...
...But one reluctantly concedes that Masefield, who has fluidity and narrative verve, is certainly not stirred by so much as a breath of the grand passion...
...In the prologue the devil has hold of Don Juan, to take him to hell...
...Europe is hostile...
...or between William Howard Taft, the conservative, and Martin A. Nexo, an avowed Communist, who after a sojourn of three months in Russia returned to his native Copenhagen enthusiastically confident that the Soviet savages are benefactors of humanity...
...while the ghastly Irish outrages approached within measurable distance of civil war...
...Perhaps, as one young philosopher says, it is easier for the young men to face death than for the older ones, who are the fathers of families...
...Ford guaranteed a price is inaccurate...
...Ford wanted a lease for ioo years and at the conclusion of that period he stipulated that his assigns were to have first option of releasing...
...2.50...
...The writers of these letters were all killed...
...As one letter says, "One never takes a real battle lightly...
...Yet this telescoping of the problems and the activities of government may lead to misunderstanding...
...Cromer, Allenby, Lloyd were apparently members of this school of political thought...
...translated and arranged from the original edition of Philipp Witkop...
...So, somehow, we moderns find that we can skip smoothly from Croce's apologia for Christianity (as understood by himself) to H. G. Wells's inevitable fault finding with America, and from James Harvey Robinson's ill-natured critique of all past ages, to Paul de Kruif's continuation of his fascinating story of The Microbe Hunters...
...Arvin's thesis, his explanation of the man and his work and the unifying effect of his study...
...They can tell a story in metre remarkably well, avoiding both the tedium which an artist bent on expressing pure inspiration can hardly sidestep after 300 lines, and the empty verbal whirr of the rhymed novelette...
...I've earned my hell...
...It seems to me, after reading the nigh unto one thousand pages of the present collection, that the two have much else in common...
...Indeed, the play as Father Riggs has given it to us, is a work both of intense beauty and moral force, a worthy companion to Brian Hooker's translation of Cyrano and Basil Davenport's translation of L'Aiglon...
...Masefield's phrasing is never infallibly right, is indeed almost infallibly faulty...
...The old spirit of militarism was one of heroics, but in this work there is nothing of that false point of view...
...Creating an atmosphere nicely balanced between reality and fantasy, the author poses the notion of a twentieth-century young man who, brooding in an old house in Berkeley Square in London, projects himself back into the eighteenth century, where he becomes his ancestor in all exterior characteristics...
...The comparison is remarkable for in 1914 the cost of the personnel was 5,900,000 pounds, but in 1924 it had risen to 12,600,000 pounds...
...THE printed version of this Broadway hit stands up well...
...You will look in vain through this fat book for a single unforgettably masterly line, which men like Milton could turn out by the hundreds...
...The "English Miss" supplies vivid pastels of Swedish life and customs...
...A greater percentage of people is happy or contented...
...the fight in Parliament over the Finance Act, the Parliament Act, were again the threats to use the overwhelming force of a Conservative House of Peers...
...If he never got far above the realm of his blacksmiths and Priscillas, it was not primarily because of the immaturity of his idealism but because there was so very little in the American scene of his time except idealism...
...Men and Morals, by Woodbridge Riley...
...Nobody need offer apologies for virility, epic sweep and sustained ability to characterize men and landscapes...
...Mind Bluette, by Guido de Verona...
...but he has in some places wisely taken the translator's liberty of changing into appropriate English idiom subtle phrases that would lose the full spirit of their meaning if translated literally...
...M. LEMAITRE writes himself down as a "prophet of the past" in his address to the French Academy, designed to serve as preface to this book which is, on almost every count, full of charm and thought and wisdom...
...With such optimism, David Lawrence introduces his work on The Other Side of Government, a work intended "to express the spirit of governmental activity rather than its functions or technical aspects...
...and makes the most of an unusual sojourn in the north country...
...for one I've lost I have regained a thousand...
...I believe that I have a message to deliver and I long to give back to mankind some of that rich treasure which God has put into my heart...
...All in all these essays, which, by the way, were written for a newspaper, the St...
...The devil suffers many witty sallies from Don Juan, first in the form of Punch, then undisguised, and seems to come off second best to the proud apostle of carnality...
...nor those long, still days at the Manse, spent after his marriage to Sophia Peabody in "the solitude of a united two...
...His final journey to an insane asylum and Frank Lethen's sudden enraged smashing of the narcissi on which Mrs...
...Of Henry Ford's offer to purchase Muscle Shoals the author says: "Henry Ford made a bid to lease the plants for ioo years, offering to manufacture fertilizers at a profit to be fixed by the government and to lease the power...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The Recluse of Salem Hawthorne, by Newton Arvin...
...Evelyn A. Cummins...
...It is this pride which accounts for, which, indeed, is the tragic end of Hawthorne's characters as well as of the man himself...
...He left behind a literary last will and testament, a poetic drama entitled La Derniere Nuit de Don Juan...
...chronicles without monotony or strain the amusing but central activities of a large family...
...There are people who believe the United States to be in peril of an invasion such as Mr...
...Lawrence hopes by this method to whet our curiosity and to send us on private expeditions to government sources for further information ? It is indeed a noble mission...
...Arvin's extraordinarily able study of Hawthorne, a study which is at once a biography, an interpretation and a criticism, the reader consistently experiences an odd but pleasing conviction...
...She completely bewitched her biographer...
...Berkeley Square, by John J. Balderston...
...As a picture of provincial existence, the book is remarkable, and the more so in that it is singularly free of intrigue, unless the servant girl's wanderings from the path of virtue can be called by that name...
...Lawrence concludes his book with a chapter entitled, The Call to Public Service...
...Its keynote is the sentence "We never get over being an animal and some of the worst mistakes of the past have been due to the failure to recognize ourselves as animals...
...MY OBSERVATION leads me to believe that govern-ment officials conscientiously try to do their duty and that irregularity and scandal are the exceptions which prove the rule...
...John C. O'Brien...
...for instance the American minister makes but little comment on the cost of government in Egypt prior to the war and since the declaration of sovereignty and independence...
...I am far from being contemptuous of such poetry...
...If some are mediocre, it is the fault of the people who vote to send them to Washington...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 13
