Books
Connolly, Cornelius J. & Ryan, John A. & Purcell, Richard J. & Shuster, George N. & Zabel, Morton Dauwen
BOOKS Earlier New York New York in the American Revolution, by Wilbur C. Abbott; illustrations selected by Victor H. Paltsits. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50. A NOTABLE essayist and...
...The Impotence of Man, by Charles Richet...
...A heterogeneous population and material prosperity bred a toleration unknown elsewhere, save in Pennsylvania, but it was a toleration inspired by religious indifference and, from a Puritan standpoint, a lower moral code which winked at gaming and plaj'houses...
...It would be more in accord with the facts of science to say that the mental processes transcend every known activity of the brain though dependent upon it...
...THOUGH the literature regarding Thomas Jefferson is extensive in all truth, there existed a genuine opportunity for an acute French scholar to examine the ties which may or may not have bound the first democrat to the doctrine of old-world revolutionists...
...In other words, a religious group may actively and unitedly support and oppose candidates for political office without "going into politics...
...The person who betrays this amazing confusion of thought was for eight years assistant attorney' general of the United States of America...
...Next comes a section entitled An American View of Europe, remarkable for the glimpse it affords of French society on the verge of a revolutionary collapse and sometimes meriting the round scolding which the "puritan from Virginia" administered to it...
...Mrs...
...The speeches which constitute the appendix are an amazing revelation of her mental and moral limitations...
...Boston: The Stratford Company...
...Willebrandt published in a syndicate of newspapers a few months ago are here presented as a book together with an appendix...
...Willebrandt would have been well advised to put into this volume only the pieces that she had published in the newspapers...
...Families were divided...
...saw Howe leave for Philadelphia...
...for she was well aware that they had been in politics for decades in their endeavors to obtain and preserve prohibition...
...OF MANY books on Beethoven written around the centenary of 1927, four now available to English readers will prove to have more than ceremonial value...
...To those who read the articles when they first appeared, the appendix will seem to be the most interesting part of the volume...
...2.00...
...Richet is an Epicurean, pushing determinism farther than it ought to go, leaving no room in the world for God's grace or immortality...
...Political actions concerning a "moral" issue cease to be political...
...Schools were poor...
...John Jay, Isaac Low, James Duane, John Alsop and Philip Livingston were far from radicals...
...Few were concerned with theories of government as compared to the number whose interests or supposed interests made them rebels...
...Perhaps her denial is only a quibble...
...Chinard holds that the true state of Jefferson's mind at the time of the signing of the Declaration is revealed in a document recently unearthed-a draught of reflections upon the debate regarding the Articles of Confederation...
...His biographical interpretations strike one as valid, because he has discarded most of the mythical anecdotal devices which have misled commentators from Schindler's time onward, and relied on his own creative understanding in accounting for the ideas which Beethoven's music implies...
...It is based largely upon a scrupulous study of firsthand documents, some of them never previously utilized, and maintains throughout the scientific development and temper without flinching...
...Rolland has not written a biography...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...He has not only woven the scattered, fragmentary materials found in a multitude of memoirs, letters, documents and local histories into a flowing narrative, but from his own exact knowledge of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he has provided a background of digested information for the general reader, whom he does not overwhelm with citations and extended bibliographies...
...It had outgrown Wall Street, and the Bowery was no longer a sylvan lane, though the City Hall park as an open field was endeared to radicals as a rendezvous...
...Moderates were cast aside...
...Perhaps she means that she urged those Methodist ministers to stay in politics...
...That, as a summary, may fairly claim to merit our attention...
...The labored pedestrianism of his comments detracts from every part of his book, but it will probably remain the most useful life in English...
...He believed that old Saxon law stressed the natural rights for which American patriots were battling, and he seems to have been quite untouched by Rousseauism...
...Another striking example is found in the second speech to the Methodists of Ohio, at Lorraine, September 23, 1928: "Your church isn't going into politics...
...In several interesting chapters we are then introduced to Jefferson's work in Virginia, which is valuable for the commentary it supplies on his private character and practicality of mind...
...Good Episcopalians, like the future Bishop Seabury, confused rebellion with Presbyterianism...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...Ernest Newman's The Unconscious Beethoven is a plausible, well-constructed account of the master's psychological growth and intellectual powers...
...Willebrandt ought to have known that no legal nor moral obligation rests upon any state to enact legislation for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...But there it stops...
...but no responsible person ever accused her of this...
...Problems of Behavior Master of My Fate, by Herschel T. Manuel...
...In discussing man as a unitary organism, he seems to have in mind an exaggerated dualism which he rightly opposes...
...In Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music, Robert Haven Schauffler has gathered most of the available biographical facts...
...That is enough to swing the election...
...Yet a skilful portrayal of the progress of an important community through the disrupting Revolutionary era is a decided contribution...
...Write to them...
...The rest of the volume is taken up with a splendidly lucid account of Jefferson's achievement at Washington and of the personal development he underwent...
...But he has traced the evolution of the Lenore idea with great lucidity, and laid before us in clear outline the development of a great theme...
...So they formed directed mobs, which broke down the administration of law, terrorized stamp collectors, destroyed tea, erected liberty poles, enforced non-importation agreements by dealings with merchants, bravely foreswore eating lamb, shouted "Wilkes and 45," threatened at a safe distance soldiers as "hirelings of despotism" who worked as scab laborers in the city, and hanged an occasional man in effigy...
...5.00...
...Written for popular consumption, there is little new material for the student of American history...
...The articles retain, of course, the same elements of strength and weakness which they possessed in their original form...
...To express this vision he invariably lends full measure of his own creative energy, with the result that his facts are submerged, and his verdicts, surfeited in a flood of enthusiasm, elude the wearied reader and drown in a sea of words and epithets...
...If she was not able to reason this out for herself she should have consulted the recognized legal authorities, such as Professor McBain of Columbia University...
...In the preface she makes specific reference to the first of these, the famous, or notorious, address which she delivered to the Methodist ministers at Springfield, Ohio...
...and then witnessed the evacuation...
...HERE we have the prefaces, introductions and epilogues of Mr...
...This romanticism bears its fruits in Jean Christophe...
...While she is no longer an important political personage, her book will be valuable as a symbol...
...King's College was of doubtful standard...
...The result is no worse, indeed it is somewhat better than most collections of the kind, and even at $2.50 is one of the more genteel swindles of the season...
...And all may some day, Mr...
...RICHARD J. PURCELL...
...The Inside of Prohibition will be very instructive to the historian who fifty years hence endeavors to describe the psychology of that extraordinary and antiquated national aberration...
...It presents the text of the five speeches which Mrs...
...They are strong in as much as they admit the failure of prohibition enforcement...
...A clever description of New York on the eve of the Revolution brings to light an ancient city which present dwellers on the subway will hardly recognize...
...Rolland on Beethoven Beethoven the Creator, by Romain Rolland...
...His structural outlines are close and logical...
...CORNELIUS J. CONNOLLY...
...Willebrandt's tortuousness and slovenly thinking...
...Her disclaimer under this head is a particularly crude example of the ancient trick of constructing and then demolishing a man of straw...
...JOHN A. RYAN...
...In 1783, New York was in a flurry: American prisoners were released from cruel hulks, British soldiers were embarking, refugee loyalists were boarding transports for Canada and the British Isles, middle-of-the-road loyalists were clinging hopefully to their possessions, and Washington's victorious army took possession...
...If the reader can supply these necessary realities, and keep them always in the background as he follows these chapters on the intellectual, physical, social and moral race limitations, the book will prove of delightful value...
...He accepted the "religion of progress" whole-heartedly, but he also revised his earlier deistic conception of Christianity and acknowledged with complete sincerity the incomparable value of the Gospel ethic...
...Not everybody will be ready to assign to this statement all the importance which Mr...
...The first (of which the right to think freely is an example) cannot be resigned without suffering, but the second needs the guarantee of civil society...
...And then there came the troubles from which the radical, disfranchised majority expected so much and in the end obtained so little, for an upper class- though revolutionized in personnel-continued to rule until the Revolutionary generation had passed away...
...Briefer Mention A Critical Introduction to Keats, by Robert Bridges...
...Milton is declared to have been the best and strongest influence...
...You have in your churches more than six hundred thousand members of the Methodist Church in Ohio alone...
...Willebrandt delivered in the two months immediately preceding the presidential election of 1928...
...It attacks puerile notions of human progress, asserting that even the most pompous individual is a veritable worm destined to wriggle about in some dusty patch of fragile mother earth...
...5.00...
...lawyers were numerous...
...It exhibits vividly the weaknesses and tyrannies of prohibition, and the incompetence and indirection of the prohibitionist mentality...
...THE twenty-three articles which Mrs...
...Yet New York had a cosmopolitan air...
...Jefferson is revealed as a plain man of legalistic mind, who derived some of his fundamental principles from Lord Kames and similar authors...
...GEORGE N. SHUSTER...
...A. A. Milne, salvaged from one place and another to make a book...
...2.50...
...Monticello's Sage Thomas Jefferson, by Gilbert Chinard...
...Worse than her loose thinking is her capacity for reckless and unfair statement...
...Too many of the old aristocrats became refugees or clung to the fence...
...In this a line is drawn between "rights of personal competency" and "rights of defective power...
...But science has not got far in this program...
...A NOTABLE essayist and more than a mere teacher of history, Professor Abbott of Harvard University has written a delightful sketch of the City of New York in the American Revolution...
...translated by Ernest Newman...
...IN MORE senses than one, Professor Richet's little book is a healthful purgative and a stimulating tonic...
...It would be more practical and more in harmony with facts frankly to accept "mind" and thus avoid the numerous inconsistencies and fallacies which are certain to follow immediately upon its denial...
...These notes, because of their range and accuracy, contain some of the most trenchant comments Rolland has thus far written...
...Disingenuously she attempts to exculpate herself from the offense of political impropriety which she there committed...
...Chinard is just such a scholar...
...Sometimes the author's gentle, disillusioned irony pumps humility into one's lungs with a pressure easily noticed...
...To uphold this thesis, Rolland not only outlines the thematic content of the music, with the philosophy it conveys, but also shows the personal ordeal of the musician, the causes of his deafness, his relations with the Brunswick sisters and with his patrons, and the reflection of these experiences in the renewal of creative energy which came after the Eroica...
...This is seen especially in his discussion of Mozart's contribution to the Eroica, and of Bach's and Haydn's to the Sonata Appassionata...
...ALTHOUGH Mr...
...His account of the Eroica and the Appassionata has elements of classical exegesis...
...In her Springfield speech she declared that the "underworld connections" of Tammany are "matched no place else in America...
...experienced the not unkindly rule of Clinton...
...Rolland here reveals a scholarly diligence not always apparent in his former works...
...J. W. N. Sullivan's Beethoven: His Spiritual Development is a brilliant exposition of the progress from experience to conceptual achievement in Beethoven's career, and of the ability of his concepts to "illuminate the universe" beyond the restrictions placed on music and the allied arts by the scientific absolutism of the last 300 years...
...Few of the Sons knew Barre or understood ingenious interpretations of the English constitution, but they did know that they were nothing and hoped to be something...
...The City of New York naturally played no part in the war: it heard American news that English censors held fit to print...
...Newman's translation does much to clarify the style of the original and to make it what in its present version it is: a volume to stand beside his own and Mr...
...Beethoven is depicted as a creator in "the first of those mighty crises of his being in which he seems to be perishing and then renews himself...
...3.00...
...With few or no exceptions, the agitators were never honored by their countrymen with high office, once independence was achieved...
...BRIDGE'S essay on Keats was published twenty-five years ago, in a limited edition for which a special form of typography was employed...
...Manuel rejects as unwarranted any materialistic interpretation of his views, and is "not concerned with the nature of the elements of which a living man is composed," there are many expressions to be found in Part I, dealing with the organic basis of personality and behavior, which do not seem capable of any other interpretation...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...2.00...
...But the ministry failed in the crisis, and neither Lieutenant-Governor Colden nor Governor Tryon were able to prevent the disintegration of the old government and the organization of the patriot machine with its various committees and delegations to the Continental Congresses...
...New York: The Century Company...
...He describes the present volume as the first of a series of studies of "the great creative periods," and calls it From the Eroica to the Appassionata...
...From the moment we hear the Rhine sending up its continual murmur behind the hero's boyhood home (the Bonn of Beethoven) we catch the overtones of grandeur and heroism which this novel describes in terms of a musician's trials and triumph...
...This is a typical instance of Mrs...
...Or it might be susceptible of an explanation which comes within ethical category...
...The six hundred thousand have friends in other states...
...But in the endeavor to maintain a scientific attitude he makes use of a terminology which is quite mechanistic...
...It deserves a wider circle of readers because it is really one of the most lucid and discriminating of commentaries on an abiding poet...
...There is erudition without display...
...His previous studies have earned for him the respect and gratitude of American historians, and the present book will add to his reputation...
...1.00...
...physicians were quacks...
...Practically nothing is known of the neural processes which accompany the learning of simple habits even in the lower animals, not to speak of the mental activities in man...
...For lavishness of phrase they rival the work of many mediocre critics...
...Mrs...
...Indeed their evolution was painfully gradual...
...Every day and every ounce of your energy are needed to rouse the friends of prohibition to register and vote...
...Manuel makes no distinction between the higher cognitive functions and the organic-the same "machinery" does both, and apparently in the same way...
...As an experienced lawyer, Mrs...
...and Broadway was a street of confusion with mansions, taverns, shops and poor men's hovels- all indiscriminately located...
...The Sons of Liberty were led by "gentlemen," often merchants who did not believe that British trade laws, even those concerning spirits, should be obeyed as long as they were on the statute books, but the ranks were filled with young men, propertyless individuals who paid no sumptuary taxes, mechanics and carters who found domestic rum less expensive than tea...
...There is no distinction between different levels of activity...
...Fortunately many solid men remained and many new men became conservative in later years: "Without the agitators, the Sons of Liberty and the element which they represented, there would doubtless have been no Declaration of Independence, no Revolution, and no democracy...
...She says that she did not attack anyone's religion...
...MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL...
...He is," we are told, "above all poets an example of what is meant by inspiration: the mood which all artists require, covet and find most rare was the common mood with him...
...Chinard's book deserves to be ranked with the very best volumes of American political biography...
...New men came to the front...
...Her attempt, in a speech at Los Angeles, November 3, 1928, to convey the impression that most of the great Catholic advocates of temperance and total abstinence, including Pope Pius X, were believers in prohibition, might charitably be put down to her incapacity to think straight, which is frequently demonstrated...
...He did that a quarter-century ago...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...Without their opponents there would have been no federal government, no constitution, and no such government as we possess...
...is one of the more genteel swindles of the season...
...Professor Abbott's reader follows the army in Washington's masterful retreat of 1776, sees the occupation by the British, whose success is not deprecated, and enjoys New York's society as a British garrison town quite as much as the ladies who were intrigued by the officers and shrewd merchants who counted profits in golden sovereigns in an era of continental currency...
...And Rolland is not one...
...There are several varieties of behaviorism and it is difficult to detect in most of them a system free from inconsistencies...
...A score of quotations might be given which, even apart from their context, would reveal the completeness of Rolland's surrender to the power and magnetism of Beethoven...
...This book-with its succeeding parts-will probably rank as a classic of its kind...
...that, in helping to bring about the repeal of the New York State Enforcement Act, Governor Smith had violated his "oath to support the constitution of the United States...
...The author faces facts, even recognizing that the Great Britain of our day owes much of its progress to defeat-not unlike the idea stressed by Sir Esme Howard in a Yorktown address (1925) and that possibly, America lost something in victory...
...He places Beethoven, with sound historical perspective, among the musicians who aided him in perfecting the structural canons of music...
...Willebrandt's Findings The Inside of Prohibition, by Mabel Walker Willebrandt...
...they are weak in as much as they betray the limitations of the normal prohibitionist, particularly his inability to see facts in their actual proportions, his reliance upon emotions as a substitute for intellectual processes, his mental fogginess, his tortuous reasoning and his utter disregard of individual rights...
...after Yorktown, it faced Carleton...
...Men of property were loyal to their own interests, and hence were usually loyalists...
...New York made ready to follow the lead of Boston...
...His definition of motives is usually convincing...
...The method is to supply introductions to the poems in their order, and to draw sparingly upon material provided by the life of Keats...
...Manuel hopes, be described in the familiar terminology of "nerve currents and physiological processes...
...and I should say that, being amply supplied with this, what as an artist he most lacked was self-restraint and self-castigation-which was indeed foreign to his luxurious temperament, unselfish and devoted to his art as he was-the presence of which was most needful to watch, choose and reject the images which crowded on him as he thought or wrote...
...But in criticism this extravagance deadens the writer's perceptions and likewise diverts the attention of the reader, who is given no change for reciprocation or discovery...
...In Rolland's failure to discern the causes which resulted in the failure of Fidelio as opera, we see again the excess of his excited sympathy...
...Chinard attributes to it, but it does help us to understand Jefferson's distinction between state and national rights and it does prove that he was miles removed from underwriting the theory of Rousseau...
...She denies that she exhorted the churches to "go into politics," although her speech contained these sentences: "There are 2,000 pastors here...
...The conclusions arrived at are much the same as those upheld in Nock's Jefferson...
...Yet it is in the very nature of his gifts that they prevent him from making the clear, detached judgments which may not re-create the grandeur of music but nevertheless remain most useful and stimulating in the end...
...His understanding of music is instinctive and profound...
...Sullivan's cooler, more scientific books...
...By Way of Introduction, by A. A. Milne...
...In his vigor of sympathy and in his fundamental grasp of ideas, Rolland undoubtedly surpasses his rivals...
...It maintains, as it has during all the years of struggle, that prohibition does not belong in politics, that it is a moral issue...
...In his view of great writing and music, he depicts them as repositories of the supreme flower of genius, as summaries of human idealism and endeavor...
...Heretofore, his critical works have suffered from an excess of fervent enthusiasm...
...The constantly recurring questions regarding the origins of Jeffersonian democracy seem to have been answered as satisfactorily as is possible, and the myth of American Rousseauism has been dispelled...
...It covers the years 1800 (when Beethoven was thirty) to 1806, dealing in a broad interpretative manner with the third symphony, the opera Fidelio, and the Sonata Appassionata...
...To the 264 pages of his study, he has added another 200 of notes and appendices-some of them composed of hitherto inaccessible documents such as Therese von Brunswick's diary-which show how widely he has gathered his evidence, collated his annotations and canvassed far-scattered libraries in his search for intimate biographical details...
...It grinds no ax, keeps to the facts with resolute fidelity, and tells its story with a good-mannered simplicity rare and commendable enough...
...The old element was complaining of a German-Irish vote, as its political grasp weakened...
...The City of New York became American territory...
...Finally, we now have Ernest Newman's translation of Romain Rol-land's new study of Beethoven as creator, and thus hear an enthusiast speak again on behalf of the genius who has influenced his own career from the time he conceived his great novel, Jean Christophe...
...His vision of art is cosmic...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 15
