Books
Boursey, A. M. & Radziwill, Catherine & Crowley, Paul & Ross, J. Elliot & Maynard, Theodore & Chase, Mary Ellen & Brennecke, Ernest Jr. & Boyd-Carpenter
BOOKS All Sides of Ibsen Ibsen, the Master Builder, by A. E. Zucker. New York: Henry Holt and Company. $3.50. IN MY quiet moments," said Peer Gynt, "I sound and probe and dissect my own inward...
...But that does not alter my conviction that Professor Angus has failed...
...He is as human as Remarque, but he offers a consoling hope where Remarque despairs...
...Ibsen's story loses little of its dramatic appeal by reason of this simplicity and restraint...
...If it is a romance, may not one rightly expect something of the idealism which has marked romances from Tristan and Iseult to Lorna Doone...
...Theodore Maynard...
...and numerous letters written by Lee give other intimate pictures of a man whose history was one of greatness and tragedy...
...One reads on, not because of any irresistible interest in the rather sordid course of events, so many of them unconvincingly motivated by overdrawn coincidence, but because of a curiosity to see whether there is any actuating purpose beneath this motley succession of ephemeral love affairs...
...secondly, limitation of criticism to the purely aesthetic aspects of literature...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...But this alliance was detested, and it was attacked wherever possible by nearly all the intelligent elements in Russia...
...Father Bittle has written as a soldier and a priest in full realization of war-hardship and misery and in restrained appreciation of the spiritual within each soldier's heart...
...IN MY quiet moments," said Peer Gynt, "I sound and probe and dissect my own inward parts-and where it harts most, too...
...Such portraiture seems to indicate a natural gift in the authors...
...But he spoils the total effect by putting the sacraments on the same basis as the magic of Ali Baba...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...2.50...
...Duels are eclipsed by far more mediaeval accoutremerits...
...LUDWIG'S Diana was first published in Berlin as two separate novels in 1917 and 1918...
...Padraic Colum's anthology-although that is distinctly the best collection of Irish verse yet made, as Mr...
...But the actual result is disappointing to this reviewer...
...The second is an outline, bristling with names and tentative estimates which will help the reader unfamiliar with the topic...
...The American university has in a measure been compelled to permit the giving to people of what they wanted and could absorb by persons fitted for that task...
...He quite clearly knows little about Irish mythology and nothing of Gaelic...
...if this method had been maintained the book would, possibly, have been more interesting...
...In the whole range of our literature there are only a few outstanding examples of success...
...One feels, however, that these excesses are merely signs of where the exuberance of the time has really been manifest...
...IS it merely a coincidence, that eleven years after the war, and but weeks apart, two war books should come to me, one the antithesis of the other...
...His early life, punctuated by the usual sordid episodes through which every teacher like Ibsen must propel himself somehow...
...Zucker has produced a competent work, basing it not only on a long period of documentary study and discussion, but also on visits to the scenes of Ibsen's life and on a great deal of personal correspondence and conference with persons who had known Ibsen...
...The indictment is often telling, the criticism is fearlessly candid, and the remedy (a reform of the educational system designed to emancipate us from a German scholarship which the Germans themselves consider out of date) is advocated with enthusiasm...
...Despite his candid assertion that Christianity cannot be explained as the mere product of its antecedents and environment, he lays too much stress upon the supposed influence of other religions...
...The Pageant of America, Volume XV: Annals of American Sport, by John Allen Krout...
...Indeed, there is only one who is touched at all either by humor or by the least degree of fineness...
...Moreover his own gentle spirit has slight affinity with the traditional spirit of Irish verse, which Mr...
...Ludwig, one hopes, will not now desert his safer field of biography for more of this sort of fiction...
...It was bound to collapse principally because the nation had not been educated into the necessity of holding to it, until the day when it would become possible to throw it off without danger...
...It may be that there are too many philologists, and that they waste the time of countless students...
...The authors are at their best in the introduction, in which they delightfully picture the Prince under many aspects of public life...
...Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company...
...2.00...
...The fact was that the days of monarchies were waning, and that the principle of nationalism was coming more and more to the front...
...One may properly object that the "representative selection" would be too formal, and that literature is simply not purely aesthetic...
...Morton is a poet, and knows a good poem when he sees one...
...he has ceased to be news...
...The Bones of Paganism The Religious Quests of the Greco-Roman World: A Study of the Historical Background of Early Christianity, by S. Angus...
...Nor is she helpfully supplemented by her associates who are as scheming, crass, egocentric and dull a lot of creatures as can be imagined...
...It is a difference consistent even in structure and style...
...The trappings of this strange chronicle are romantic in the extreme...
...He shows us the Ibsen who sadly lacked physical courage, who was vain enough to be proud of the decorations and orders which were pinned upon him so late and so grudgingly, who was jealous as well as taciturn, who rather foolishly cultivated romantic attachments to young females late in life...
...New York: Ives Washburn...
...There is a more excellent way of magnifying Christianity than by ignoring and decrying paganism, or disparaging the rival systems which Christianity overcame...
...The Brick Pile The American Scholar, by Norman Foerster...
...A human being, albeit an extraordinary one, emerges naturally from the historical account, from the anecdotes, letters, records of conversations, even from the photographs, drawings and caricatures with which the book is plentifully decorated...
...5.00...
...ENOUGH good material has been assembled for the writing of this biography of Robert E. Lee to make a thoroughly interesting and valuable book...
...Our author wishes to promote the application of "learning and the passion for truth to the study of the universal and unchanging in man, 'the underlying and permanent significance of humanity.'" It is a program having much in its favor...
...The Irish Poets The Renaissance of Irish Poetry, by David Morton...
...He who reads Remarque knows but half the war, and he who reads Father Bittle sees the other half...
...Those who defended the first point of view maintained that "writing" cannot be separated from "life," that the critic might therefore know this life, and that since omniscience is not to be expected of anyone the individual must content himself with a "representative selection" to be mastered before venturing into pastures new...
...Herein, in fact, lies the enigma of Mr...
...The mighty chan-celor appears as we always knew him, an ardent German patriot, sincere at times, and frank when he thought the situation required it, but not at all the "honest broker" he wanted others to believe he was...
...I specially commend his inclusion of Robin Flower's Saint Ita and James Stephens's Deirdre, neither of which, by the way, is to be found in Mr...
...And, like nearly all outsiders who have fallen under the Celtic enchantment, he takes the famous Irish fairies far more seriously, not to say solemnly, than any Irishman does...
...A Chaplain at the Front Soldiering for Cross and Flag, by Celestine N. Bittle, O. M. Cap...
...only one who is actuated by anything but selfish, not to say sensual motives, and he is mercifully spared further association with his colleagues by his death in a duel...
...THIS book will prove invaluable to every student of pre-war European politics...
...they are forever exhorting their spectators and readers to cultivate the highest form of courage: to subordinate minor comforts and blind ideals to major purposes, and to be everlastingly intelligent and un-deluded about it-"to sound and probe-where it hurts most, too...
...Ludwig's story...
...His plays do not merely exhibit real human beings in a variety of entertaining, grotesque, pathetic, grim situations...
...but many readers will be grateful that Dr...
...In all bitter truth, one hears no such clamor...
...But they remain as shadowy and unreal as the most naturalistic of Diana's amorous experiences...
...No nation can go forward on the road of greatness or progress under an autocratic government...
...Perhaps literary history, which includes the study of outside influences upon literature during history, has intoxicated a number of otherwise worthy souls...
...This Bismarck did not live to see, but the world has had to become reconciled to it, and from that point of view, it is well that books like M. Saburov's Memoirs see the light of day...
...Daniel Corkery, in his great book, The Hidden Ireland, has called one of devastating bleakness...
...But Mr...
...To modify systems will get us nowhere...
...Even if he had continued in power, he would not have been able in the long run to prevent the disaster which ultimately destroyed the German empire together with its two immediate neighbors...
...MORTON would be the first, I feel sure, to admit that as a critical summary of modern Irish poetry his book is exceedingly inadequate...
...1 HE concluding volume of The Pageant of America series is an outline of sport as indulged in by Americans from the days of the early settlers to the last years of the past decade...
...but I do not see how he can expect to divert the whole current into a single channel, even though he has commendably advertised the "one thing needful" in the field of literary study...
...Indeed the paragraph on the Prince saluting the untouchables, the scorned scavengers of India, is excellently presented...
...Professor Foerster thinks that philological research has, by this time, ploughed most of its field...
...He has written a sincere story of personal sacrifice, of wartime military life and achievement, that is noble from beginning to end and brings out more clearly than any criticism can the sadness of the waste of so much life, character and goodness...
...Gradually the impression emerged for me that just as Professor Angus has failed to make paganism live, so he has failed really to enter into living Christianity...
...His dramas, supplemented by the inspired interpretations to be found in Bernard Shaw's still excellent Quintessence of Ibsenism, and by this new biography, should be a part of the mental equipment of every honestly educated person...
...Any Catholic who has tried to describe Catholicism to one who is not a Catholic will realize how much more difficult it must be to give an intimate picture of a religion studied from the outside...
...that literary history has largely become a branch of historical science, which does not concern itself with "worth or value...
...I am content for the present to remain a reverent student of the many wonderful things which the book of India has to unfold...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...Corkery's study is the most illuminating criticism of the Gaelic spirit in literature...
...In a measure Professor Campbell's resume rounds out the Abbe Bardy's treatise...
...One finds both valuable, although necessarily limited in range, and hopes they may promote a deeper interest in the work and personalities of such men as Saint John Crysostom...
...It is quite certain that the destruction of Russia might have been delayed if not averted, had the alliance with Germany been adhered to...
...What he describes as Christianity is certainly not the religion of a Catholic...
...Embowered islands, shallops, love sonnets and prancing steeds, a lady named Olivia in a castle window combing her long golden hair, the hunt with sound of horn, princes with romantic names and palaces with romantic furnishings...
...2.50...
...When a man can truthfully make that statement about himself, and when he can also force or beguile others to do the same, in spite of their natural resistance to anything so uncomfortable, he has won for himself an honorable place among the world's teachers and artists...
...IN HIS preface Professor Angus says: "No genetic study of Christianity will ever explain Christianity...
...One reader at least cannot share this possible enthusiasm of the author...
...The inclusion of an extract from a speech at Delhi upon the detestable habit of the uninformed tourist putting his or her views in writing, is a delicious touch and bears repetition, the mordant sentence being, "There are, I believe, some persons who come from England and after spending even fewer weeks than I have in this country, give their valuable views and impressions about India to the public...
...If it is a realistic novel, has not one the right to demand a semblance of realism with the dignity always attendant upon that which rings true of whatever nature it may be...
...Paul Crowley...
...They reconcile us to the inevitable, and prove that mankind can never in the long run control events indefinitely...
...He has shown our serious contemporary dramatists how to compose dialogue that is at once beautiful and natural, how to construct plays that move with beautiful implacability toward a given point...
...his last years, with their pathetic picture of an old man's dying mind, endeavoring to relearn the alphabet like a child-all this makes a drama of absorbing interest in itself...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...Yet ignorance of its antecedents and of the contemporary spiritual forces and mentality renders a true appreciation impossible...
...Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...We shall still have to wait for a real biography giving details of the royal heir's court and domestic life...
...Ibsen controversies are no more...
...To me Professor Foerster's critique has much the same value...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Better than any other of the recent contributions to modern history, it shows us the why and wherefore of the different events which finally brought about the cataclysm of 1914...
...Such a man was Ibsen...
...One must recognize, too, the enormous range of reading back of this book...
...Of course, it is a difficult task to reconstruct long-dead systems of philosophy and religion...
...But it was an idea which haunted the minds of Russian foreign ministers with the exception of M. de Giers, and unfortunately it took hold of his successors, M. Izwolsky, and M. Sazonoff, and also of Nicholas II, with the result which we have seen...
...Zucker has not missed his several opportunities for irony...
...It is a sincere, distinct and splendid contribution to Catholic war literature, well worth the reading...
...The place of the external in religion is well done...
...Zucker has made no obvious attempt to reproduce the style of our wittier popular biographers, nor to reduce his hero to a collection of inhibitions, complexes, obsessions and sublimations...
...Right on the heels of Erich Maria Remarque comes Father Celestine Bittle with Soldiering for Cross and Flag, the impressions of a war chaplain...
...His negotiations with Austria appear at times to have been conducted more for the benefit of the gallery, than because he desired them to succeed...
...Catherine Radziwill...
...A glance at the chapter headings-The Romance of the Turf, Yachting and Aquatics, Anglers and Nimrods, The Rise of the National Game, Football and the Scholastic Influence-will assure the reader that The Annals of American Sport takes proper place in a very remarkable series...
...If the comment is not learned or profound the selections are well chosen...
...Diana, "a woman who never closed the door on nature's impulses," has little to offer save a kind of smart cleverness which serves her as well in her tumultuous amours as in her secret service work in the interests of European diplomacy...
...The present much-needed biography, the first one to appear in English for over twenty years, may serve the good purpose of keeping the living, efficient Ibsen before the public somewhat longer...
...LITERATURE, which in a measure has been the modern substitute for religion and philosophy, is now badly in need of definition and-to use a tentative word-a ritual...
...I do not think that they tell us anything new in regard to Prince Bismarck...
...Young is so concerned with his own emotional and sentimental reactions that his reader is almost immediately alienated...
...But it is perhaps too much to expect that his more significant ethical teachings have made corresponding headway...
...And so it is too bad that Ibsen is becoming a classic...
...Its materialistic people and its futile, empty events become after a few hours as shadowy and indistinct as its court of love accessories and its romantic settings...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...It deserves constant and fresh application...
...Ernest Brennecke, jr...
...This was persistently denied, and I do not think that either Alexander II or Alexander III ever desired it...
...1.35...
...The second count against Professor Angus is more serious...
...the plays, from Brand to When We Dead Awaken, are reverently studied in school and college courses and performed with no less reverence before polite matinee audiences...
...It is plain when one reads between the lines that all he had attempted to do was to try and persuade the Russian ambassador that he really wished to renew the alliance of the three emperors, while in reality he had become convinced of its futility as an instrument of peace, and knew very well that Germany could not go on indefinitely mediating between Austria and Russia...
...And one finds none whatever unless, indeed, Mr...
...Ludwig as Novelist Diana, by Emil Ludwig...
...And in some respects his mission has indeed been fulfilled...
...Many of the social problems to which Ibsen applied this ethical technique are no longer live issues with us, but that fact does not invalidate the technique itself...
...I suspect that there is as much difference between the reality and the description, as between a human being and a text-book of anatomy...
...his maturity, distinguished by a rather morose truculence and pride as well as by literary and social warfare and eventualsuccess and recognition...
...One can readily sympathize with the purpose which Professor Angus thus expresses, and it is certainly desirable that Catholics should know the historical setting in which Christianity arose...
...But neither Lee nor the figures surrounding him have been infused with any considerable life...
...But Professor Foerster's book is nevertheless a brave whisper...
...In themselves idyllic, one expects these to lend at least a blithesome atmosphere to episodes and incidents...
...In this respect as well as in others, the memoirs of M. Saburov are illuminating...
...the first is more interested in the general drift and its importance...
...The story is baffling alike in its intent and in its treatment...
...The "aptitude for entering intuitively into the inwardness of art" is often sacrificed to the belief that "adding to the store of human information" remains the highest university ideal...
...In Remarque we hate war, because it is provocative of all that is mean, animalistic and destructive...
...2.50...
...Ludwig believes Diana herself such an intriguing and entirely unusual character that she is worth 600 pages of meticulous vivisection...
...1.75...
...and that the tendency to study literature as history or sociology is leading the American scholar away from his job into such random domains as witchcraft, Welsh legal history and nineteenth-century manners...
...HERE are two meaty little books on a part of Christian literature regarding which more ought to be known...
...THE word "biography" is somewhat misleading here as there is really little in this volume which could not have been read within the columns of a society journal...
...And he has kept himself intact from the slop and slobber of the sentiment lists of the Molly Acushla school of Hibernians...
...A Russian Remembers The Saburov Memoirs, or Bismarck and Russia, by J. Y. Simpson...
...They are to be properly accepted as merely the light laughter of the heroic age...
...The second declared that a critic can never be a philosopher, scientist, historian and paleographer rolled into one, and so ought to content himself with the simple but interesting job of contemplating aesthetic...
...Ibsen has thus become almost a classic...
...Under a constitution public opinion in Russia would not have been so eager for war with Germany...
...It substantiates the accusation which Russian liberals in czarist times were constantly leveling at their government: the accusation that two political opinions and two different lines of action existed in Russia, the policy represented by the emperor, and that which, unknown to him, was carried on by his ministers and political advisers...
...I see no hope for a change until change is passionately desired or sacrificially earned...
...I have just read a German symposium on literary study in which these two points of view were proposed and advocated: first, the isolation of easily recognizable "moments" in the history of literature, regarding the books and cultural conditions of which the student or critic might be expected to possess an exhaustive knowledge...
...His work is no longer branded as bestial, disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent, loathsome, fetid, literary carrion-all of which epithets, and more, appeared in a critical article on Ghosts in the London Daily Telegraph in 1891...
...Such matters as the resolution of the two Houses of Parliament on the birth of the Prince, the Australian tour, the Indian, the South African, the South American and the interrupted East African tours, which, with the visits to the United States and Canada, fill up nearly one-third of the volume, add nothing to what has already been published in the daily press...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...But even through all of this, Ibsen remains an attractive, even a noble figure, and certainly a most important one...
...While in Remarque there is a bitter reality unmitigated by even a ray of hope, we have in Father Bittle's experiences of some eight months an idealistic but perhaps a truer picture of war...
...Major Giles B. Cooke, Lee's last aide, is quoted at length in a graphic account of the final months of the Virginia campaign...
...Having personally known M. Saburov, it is possible to me to draw the distinction between the point of view which he constantly defended, and that which he was supposed to represent...
...She becomes exhausting before the first volume is completed...
...And is not Professor Angus taking himself rather too seriously when he assumes the ecumenical authority gravely to propose scrapping the idea of Christly sanction and institution, special grace and necessary matter for the sacraments...
...He has now combined these in a revised version under a common title, and they have been rather well translated into English by Eden and Cedar Paul...
...in Father Bittle we hate war, because it is wasteful of so much that is good, manly and constructive...
...The lessons in literary technique that he provided have been rather thoroughly learned...
...Ludwig's tale is neither one thing nor the other nor yet an acceptable mixture of the two...
...Here is meant the worship of "facts as facts" which, in the name of science, has supplanted that "due respect for facts as the necessary basis for sound knowledge" which ought to characterize every scholar...
...The book is really a small anthology with running comment...
...4.00...
...A. M. Boursey...
...New York: The Yale University Press...
...New York: Rae D. Henkle Company, Incorporated...
...If it partakes of both romance and realism as cerain great books hitherto have done (one thinks thankfully of The Cloister and the Hearth and The Saga of Costa Berling) may one not confidently expect a merging of the two, the one complementing and enhancing the other into an effect of unity...
...And the marvelous thing to a Catholic is the nonchalance with which those who reject the authority of the Church expect others to accept their professorial authority...
...Certain scholars seem to assume for themselves and for those who share their opinions an apparent infallibility where no Pope would so presume...
...For first of all, Professor Angus fails to make these old religions live for me...
...This dual policy which, often unknown to the sovereign, was carried on in Russia, explains why, on the eve of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 Alexander II told the British ambassador, Lord Augustus Loftus, that he would not occupy Constantinople...
...Morse Robert, by James C. Young...
...Apart from his formal protests, the general impression is that Christianity is just as human as any of the other religions he is dealing with...
...But allowing for these defects The Renaissance of Irish Poetry should serve a useful purpose as an easy introduction of the average reader to this branch of literature...
...The volume is not brilliantly written...
...The material here presented is well selected...
...M. Saburov proves irrefutably that the Russian policy as represented not by the sovereign, but by those in possession of his confidence, had only one aim-the possession of Constantinople and the Straits...
...He was quite sincere when he said it, but what he did not know was that Prince Gortchakoff had this goal in view, that the Russian Foreign Office aspired to reach it, and then to confront the czar with an accomplished fact, things which would have been absolutely impossible under a constitutional government when one minister could not have pursued a policy of his own, unknown to his colleagues...
...1.00...
...But the mere statement of these divergent views suffices to explain the immense difficulties which criticism encounters in an age when the supply of knowledge has grown incredibly large...
...We must await the appearance of personalities who can make their own systems, and these will hardly appear until some audience demands their presence...
...Greek Literature in the Early Christian Church, by G. Bardy...
...Professor Foerster's little book is an outline of this need and, more specifically, an attack upon current academic "mystical faith in the brick...
...His memoirs indicate that perhaps the policy which was then popular in governmental circles, but which was violently opposed by the entire country, was sounder than could have been supposed...
...No attempt has been made to exhaust the history, but each division has been given interesting treatment textually and pic-torially...
...Briefer Mention The Greek Fathers, by James Marshall Campbell...
...It is a book which the American soldier can be proud of...
...Two volumes, $5.00...
...The national trek toward culture has been a pilgrimage toward information by crowds which conceived of literature impressionistically and of learning in terms of the Britannica...
...The Prince The Biography of the Prince of Wales, by W. and L. Townsend...
...Unfortunately Mr...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 16
