Books
Maxwell, William M Agar, Paul Crowley, James J Walsh, Speer Strahan, Patrick J Healy, John Carter, G
BOOKS The Value of Science Science and the New Civilization, by Robert A. Millikan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.00. DR. MILLIKAN is known for his popular scientific lectures as well as...
...The expedition was a generous gesture that had little influence on the final outcome of the conflict in Italy...
...Had not the Secretary of State formally rejected this conclusion, as set forth in a recent British white paper, General Smuts's assertions might be regarded as a novel principle in international law...
...Introduction to Rabelais Francis Rabelais, by Albert J. Nock and C. R. Wilson...
...a charming creature grimly conscious of her starched, academic dignity, yet open to the inducements of young men in season...
...Brigades and battalions and regiments of Irishmen fought under many colors, and, always, it must be said, with credit to themselves and with honor to the flag they followed...
...Had man turned aside aghast and ceased his inquiries when this possibility was first suggested he would have missed the knowledge that has since been gained-halted by the shadow of his own fear which the truth has now dispelled...
...MILLIKAN is known for his popular scientific lectures as well as for his important contributions to physics...
...we may be sure of this for we have the words of the writers themselves that their whole aim is to generate an atmosphere of liberality and love...
...O'Flaherty as a Propagandist Return of the Brute, by Liam O'Flaherty...
...The Lure of the Jungle Jungle Portraits, by Delia Akeley...
...Celia Thome was the youngest instructor in a woman's college...
...Putnam did not arrive soon enough for their consideration...
...In comment Mr...
...Her purpose was not principally to add to our knowledge of the jungle animals, but to learn all that she could of the half-mythical pigmies...
...It is not an exhilarating book, being on the contrary tedious and lengthy at times, but it is the most powerful example of what has been cleverly termed the "imperfective" style in literature...
...Patrick J. Healy...
...William M. Agar...
...Dear, dead Victoria...
...Her path is thorny...
...and that it is highly improper for a young lady of correct deportment in the matter of prunes and prisms to mention such things as sins to a strange gentleman...
...THE reputation of the Irish as soldiers was gained very largely under foreign flags...
...Mr...
...This is one of the finest examples of small book-making we have seen in many a year, and confirms our belief that he is among the most effective of contemporary printers...
...His life was singularly uneventful except that once he inadvertently took a trip around the world in a frigate...
...We are told that the Societe des Etudes Rabelaisiennes "is one of the few that have ever grouped around a great man's name, and really accomplished anything...
...There are no events in Oblomov...
...Goncharov's Masterpiece Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov...
...So today those discoveries that seem most irrelevant are, and similar ones will continue to be, the bases of unimagined structures in the future...
...LIAM O'FLAHERTY is a writer of undoubted talent, but up to the present moment that is all that can be said...
...The energy is not available...
...Return of the Brute is an example of this...
...One regrets this effusiveness the more because Messrs...
...Undisciplined and without adequate equipment the Irish in the few engagements in which they took part conducted themselves with courage and credit...
...Even some of our own are inclined to say that we go around too much with a chip on our shoulder...
...Chesterton is at his happiest when answering Dean Inge...
...The suggestion recurs throughout this book that man can advance by science alone, that knowledge so gained is the only knowledge, and that science by means of evolutionistic philosophy points the way to a finer religion, to a better world...
...2.50...
...Dublin: The Talbot Press...
...Millikan is aware of the tendency to present fancy as fact and to promulgate inconsidered opinions, and he decries it...
...In the essay, Why I Am a Catholic, Chesterton has some very quotable sentences: "On practically every essential count on which the Reformation actually put Rome in the dock, Rome has since been acquitted by the jury of the whole world...
...He exposes also the absurdity of the fear that some scientist will one day release interatomic energy sufficient to destroy the world...
...Chesterton in Controversy The Thing, Why I Am a Catholic, by G. K. Chesterton...
...She must not whisper to an impersonal presence behind a grating the most abstract allusion to the things that she hears shouted and cat-called in all the theatrical art and social conversation of the day...
...James J. Walsh...
...He makes the gloomy Dean a witness to the truth...
...On page 234, Messrs...
...Olga is a splendid type of Russian woman, but somewhat unconvincing...
...GONCHAROV, a nobleman by education, spent many years in the government service in St...
...Morison is the editor...
...Two of the six contemporary accounts do indeed mention the Elevation, a third refers to the Agnus Dei, another claims the whole affair was concluded between the Elevation and the Communion...
...why then has he not yet produced a novel which can be said to count...
...Loth...
...What is the distilled essence of Christianity removed from all creeds or statements of belief...
...What a striking answer Chesterton has for our old friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has been objecting that the confessional is the most indelicate institution...
...Akeley herself takes occasion to remark from time to time as she tells her story...
...Oblomov is the story of a man led to inevitable doom by his drowsy indolence...
...O'Flaherty's talent makes these nine men credible, we yet feel that he has deliberately set out to present us horror, either for reasons of propaganda or simply for horror's sake...
...Pure science, abstract, removed from the life of the day, has laid the foundation upon which our civilization rests...
...2.50...
...Facts so discovered are cumulative and the time comes when they are fashioned into a theory that leads on to greater achievement and affects man's thoughts and deeds...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...This book will not increase one's knowledge of physics but it should clarify the fundamental relation of the scientific method to advances in human knowledge...
...It is strangely like science without facts or faith in natural law, it is like the natural philosophy of 300 years ago which science has outgrown precisely by collecting data and recognizing law...
...The author was fortunate in having taken up his study of the expedition while many of the veterans were still alive, and in being able to learn from them their recollections of what they had done and seen...
...THE fifty years of Harvard's existence as a university have been reviewed in this symposium, of which Dr...
...Celia, poor dear, after some three hundred rather well-written pages, resigns her career for a mess of marriage...
...It was honorable to the men who took part in it, and the author of this book is to be thanked for having rescued it from oblivion...
...Ash-win's translation is excellent in every respect...
...The book is Chesterton at his best...
...It is a high ideal to strive for the betterment of the human race, to plan the welfare of generations yet unborn, but religion points the way to this goal more clearly without forgetting the individual soul and its accountability to God...
...but General Smuts has gone right on in South African politics up to the election of General Herzog and the rise of South African nationalism...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...He contends that through the Kellogg pact we have virtually abandoned our rights of neutrality...
...It would be interesting to make a little anthology of the sentences in which Dean Inge is set right in this volume...
...Akeley not only found them and made friends with them, but she lived and hunted with them for weeks, studying their customs, family life, habits and language...
...FEW volumes published during the late seventeenth century have created the stir which followed the appearance of the Letters of a Portuguese Nun...
...One has the feeling after a time that it is providential that Chesterton and Dean Inge should have belonged to the same generation...
...Or does it tend to convey the impression that here is not so much an exposition of the being and achievement of Rabelais as an exhortation, a harangue, which reckons insufficiently with the virtue of restraint...
...Of balance, proportion, truth in its broader sense, his latest novel is without a trace...
...His latest book is a collection of lectures delivered at various times to different audiences...
...As it is, they are simply a historical curiosity, a ballon d'essai...
...Born to a family of Russian gentry, which lived isolated from the rest of the world, he received in earliest childhood a training designed to kill all initiative and which finally induced spiritual paralysis...
...But there is a much more insidious error which he does not avoid...
...Mr...
...As a matter of fact, however, the contemporary accounts present no such unanimity as Mr...
...The struggle is too much for Oblomov...
...It is an account of a trip which she made unaccompanied by any other white person, into the heart of Africa, following the death of her explorer-husband...
...dear, dead Victorians of New England...
...Whether it is an inability innate in his type of mind it is of course too early to say, but it is certainly possible to say that as long as he insists on writing novels which deal entirely with special cases, he will remain without serious import...
...The World Seen from Africa Africa and Some World Problems...
...A few examples must suffice...
...The book, planned as the final volume of a complete history of the institution, abounds in material which will fascinate the educator...
...Some chapters are therefore more technical than others and there is unavoidable repetition, but these links of different size and weight form a continuous chain with the following thought common to all...
...Loth's book will not be liable to replace Von Reumont's standard and readable study on Lorenzo, though it may rank as one of the dullest and most ignorant books written about any of the Medici...
...His dearest friend, Stolz, who always "applied the right method in every emergency," tried various and sundry ruses to rouse Oblomov from his apathy...
...Doris Cunningham...
...15 Shillings...
...The expedition in aid of the Pope in 1860 was conceived in the generous spirit of the mediaeval crusaders, executed against the opposition of the English and in face of all the opprobrium that the enemies of the Papacy on the continent could devise...
...Walterson's part in the work, one may say that it leads to the conviction that whosoever is moved to issue a literary production with distinction ought to turn to North Wales...
...BEYOND that freedom from the tyranny of hearsay which a scholarly training aims to confer, Lorenzo de' Medici demands in a biographer genuine intellectual achievement, balance and a sense of humor...
...Nock and Wilson digress to shower the universities with advice: "Let them first inculcate upon their fledgling doctors of philosophy some measure of literary tact, delicacy of perception, ardor and precision of spiritual sympathy...
...What we cannot find is one of these real wrongs that the Reformation reformed...
...This book hints at none of these qualities in its author...
...He regards Article X "as an exception to the real trend and purpose of the League" but clings steadfastly to the "economic sanctions" of Article XVI...
...The dean of Saint Paul's permits himself to call the Catholic Church a treacherous and bloody corporation...
...He shows that knowledge cannot be blamed if men misuse it and that "every scientific advance finds ten times as many new, peaceful, constructive uses as it finds destructive ones...
...Year by year the great figures of Versailles have been toppled from power or have been laid away in the grave- Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, Venizelos, Paderewski...
...TO AMERICAN readers the name of Rabelais is likely enough to seem an invitation to ask a few questions...
...If private war is illegal, and the party resorting to it virtually a war outlaw, he must not only be deprived of all rights against neutrals, but other states should also undertake to have no dealings with him, and should not render him indirect assistance through the ordinary trade or financial channels...
...Grenvillb Vernon...
...New York: Brentano's...
...Before they died away the Volterran Maffei was leaping forward, his dagger in his hand...
...Their knowledge of the translations is exemplary, though of course the much-debated modernistic rendition by Mr...
...For war will cease when and only when it is known to have no survival value...
...Oblomov makes a real effort to rise due to his friend's insistence and more particularly to his sudden love for Olga...
...Olga marries the energetic but uninteresting Stolz and Oblomov slips back more deeply than ever into Oblomovism-a life of complete inaction disturbed only by his beautiful and idealistic dreams...
...Nock and Wilson have written a book which can be termed, on the whole, the best available introduction to Rabelais in English...
...The author's sympathies with the undertaking and his admiration for the volunteers did not prevent him from exhausting all sources of information, hostile and friendly, in his effort to give a full and unbiased account of the expedition...
...Her repeated comparison of the happy, carefree life of the natives yet untouched by white customs-and clothes-are sad commentaries on our much-vaunted civilization and boasted progress, a matter that Mrs...
...Natalie Duddington has served the book "well by her complete and excellent version...
...The British thesis had not yet previously been so bluntly asserted...
...Including the Rhodes Memorial Lectures Delivered in Michaelmas Term, 1929, by J. C. Smuts...
...Religion wants the help of science in every possible way but not at the cost of relinquishing its highest ideal...
...As for Mr...
...The author, in the chapter devoted to the Alleged Sins of Science, denies its culpability for the war...
...True science does not and moreover cannot conflict with this...
...Surely the writer who has just proved the utility of much scientific work that seemed useless to those unacquainted with it should beware of applying that word to something beyond the sphere of his own knowledge...
...The author concludes that the relation between science and "the long-since vanished conceptions of the universe, or of God, frozen in ancient man-made creeds" is obviously one of "inescapable conflict...
...It is perfectly true that we can find real wrongs, provoking rebellion, in the Roman Church just before the Reformation...
...Lorenzo Mishandled Lorenzo the Magnificent, by David Loth...
...In it O'Flaherty gives us an episode in the war, a tale of nine men of a squad in the advanced trenches who in the space of a few days are brought by suffering and fear to the level, not of animals, but of unmitigated brutes...
...H. G. Wells is allowed to compare the Blessed Trinity to an undignified dance...
...Truth should need no defenders...
...DELIA AKELEY, famous as an African explorer and naturalist, has written one of the most interesting books on the dark continent yet brought out...
...MRS...
...This is, indeed, a book which is at the same time an act of veneration...
...Therefore, it is worth repeating that General Smuts's lectures on Africa constitute the most important part of this slender volume...
...That is his own affair...
...Browning, have been influenced by them...
...The description of the Renaissance seems to infer that Latin literature had not been studied previously...
...Inside they joined the fashionable promenade around the choir where the notables of Florence were accustomed to stroll, offering to each other bits of the latest gossip during the protracted services of their church...
...So after all Mr...
...In the introduction he answers those who suggest that there is too much controversial writing on the part of Catholics...
...2.50...
...Who was this French monk of the sixteenth century, in what English version has the flavor of his work been most successfully conserved, and how are we to judge of his morals and his purpose ? The present writers have endeavored to answer all three of these queries...
...He has gone in for blood and beastliness, just these and nothing more...
...In all matters of biography and background they wisely availed themselves of the researches of Professor Plattard and the French Rabelais Society, wherefore the reader will find their book a digest of all that is known about this very elusive storyteller...
...After a few pages have been read it will be sufficiently evident that they are enthusiastic advocates of Rabelais's point of view, morals and literary method...
...This, of course, is not a scientific conclusion but rests upon Dr...
...Pazzi had only a moment to see that Maffei and Bagnone were close behind Lorenzo when the sacrament was raised and the words 'missa est' were echoing under the great dome...
...It is to the credit of science that it has emerged from the latter...
...But scientists themselves are not always as guiltless as science...
...Has the Franciscan record at Oxford, Paris and elsewhere been forgotten so completely...
...Speer Strahan...
...THIS volume is made up of a series of essays which have, most of them, been printed before, but which are well worth reading again though doubtless only confirmed Chesterton fans will have seen more than a few of them...
...From the purely historical point of view, his lectures on African problems are the most valuable portion of this book...
...Granted that Mr...
...Again, he speaks of mediaeval theology together with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialism as "assertive-ness without knowledge...
...Paul Crowley...
...The question is simply one of fact, but there is the psychological importance of disagreements...
...The novel is strictly subjective, stressing the importance of standards of conscience...
...Livingstone and Stanley, Cecil Rhodes and Jamison, come to life again and are linked with the organic developments growing out of the war and reconstruction period in Africa...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...15 Shillings...
...Was Machia-velli really the "founder of modern political science...
...6.00...
...The view of the Church as an institution interested primarily in turning people over to the secular arm for decapitation is a bit restricted, to say the least...
...Briefer Mention Letters of a Portuguese Nun...
...She loves Oblomov for his guilelessness, his generosity and his idealism and she does everything in her power to make of him a man she can respect...
...His literary output, aside from Oblomov, is not very significant...
...The advice is very good, but does it belong in a volume of this sort...
...and of course they are responsible for the abiding greenness of the Marquis de Chamilly's memory...
...Talybont, Dyffryn, North Wales: Francis Walter son...
...Only Filippo Strozzi the younger, writing the life of his illustrious grandfather, uses the words, "in sul dire missa est," but there is no implication whatever that they were used even as a password...
...New York: The Mac-millan Company...
...5.00...
...And she was accepted on almost equal terms with them because of her prowess on the trail...
...Loth could have easily discovered had he taken the trouble to consult such a work as Erich Franz's Sixtus IV und die Republik Florenz, where they are all conveniently listed...
...translated from the Russian by Natalie A. Duddington...
...the Bishop of Birmingham to compare the Blessed Sacrament to a barbarous blood feast...
...The very abuses that made the last war horrible may themselves bring about its abolition...
...John Carter...
...A state involved in a public war will lawfully exercise as against neutrals the ordinary rights of search and capture in accordance with international law, while one provoking a private war will not be entitled to these rights...
...Chesterton points out, however, that such a controversial attitude is necessitated by the attitude of a number of those who, as they think, write not in controversial spirit but yet use the most intolerant language...
...Literary folk, from Rousseau to Mrs...
...From the war in Italy many of them passed to the war in America where, in the southern as well as in the northern armies, they gained fame and distinction...
...The peace pact is only a grand beginning, and its general declarations should be followed up to their logical details...
...Well, there are at least several dozen such societies with good records...
...3.50...
...The essential problem of Anglo-American naval relations will be met by practical cooperation rather than by dialectical ingenuity...
...And such, no matter what the talent, is not the stuff of which literature is made...
...If the right of supply to a war outlaw is explicitly renounced, as it is implicitly renounced in the peace pact, the United States could no longer claim the right of a neutral to freedom of trade with such a party, and the question of freedom of the seas falls to the ground...
...Now the coauthor of the League of Nations is free to lecture on world politics...
...At first thought one might imagine it to have been written by some gossipy old woman from a pension near the Porta Prato in the City of the Flower, or say by some retired English colonel drowsy with cherry brandy among the waving palms of Bordighera...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...It is now generally conceded that the author was what she purported to be, so that the tale of amorousness here unfolded is at once a historical commentary and a stage in a moving spiritual history...
...When the war ended the Irish returned home in a vessel chartered for the purpose by some friends in Ireland...
...It is not necessary to prove that it can do no wrong...
...The war in defense of the Pope was neither long nor bloody, nor was it conducted, apparently with any evidence of military skill or preparedness...
...Of less actual importance, though of greater popular interest, are General Smuts's observations regarding neutrality and the Kellogg pact and the League of Nations...
...New York: The Century Company...
...He does not have enough energy to arrange his affairs so as to make their marriage possible and the engagement is broken off...
...Upon this single novel, which is certainly a work of genius, his literary reputation rests...
...Chesterton's answer is, "If a girl must not mention sin-to a man in a corner of a church, it is apparently the only place nowadays in which she may not do so...
...He has power, he has command over words, and he has imagination...
...Unfortunately enthusiasm is difficult to control...
...Chesterton says: "It is felt that phrases like these cannot ruffle that peace and harmony which all such humanitarians desire...
...In addition to her notes on the pigmies, the book includes many episodes of animal life, observations of insects, and some fascinating stories about crocodiles...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...The radio, the airplane, modern motors and countless other material achievements depend upon the "useless" thought and "idle" experiments of men dead many hundred years...
...Surely no one should dispute the value of science...
...Millikan pictures man as sleeping until three hundred odd years ago, then, with the dawn of the age of science, awakening to a realization of the universe about him and turning from the "useless" monastic life to "useful" work...
...MISS WEYANT harks back to the nineties for her theme, a time, we are told, when the higher education for females was still a warmly debated topic...
...As the enforcement of "economic sanctions" will be impossible without the cooperation of the British fleet, this thesis simply resolves itself into an assertion that in future wars the United States will have no legal rights as against the operations of the British blockade...
...3.00...
...The Tethered Bubble, by Fanny Lee Weyant...
...Take a few sentences on the Pazzi conspiracy: "Exchanging compliments and jests, the three hurried back to the cathedral...
...At any rate, one does notice the absence of restraint...
...Petersburg...
...He seems simply to have rehashed some third- or fourth-rate biography of Lorenzo, with such a general blurring of detail as to make his book a triumph of feeble and pointless writing...
...Check and double check...
...Let this liturgical naivete pass, even though it argue a lack of elementary knowledge concerning an institution one ought to know rather well, if he have any real desire to understand the civilization of western Europe...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...Cliff Maxwell...
...A leader in one branch of thought should pause and consider that many intellects at least the equal of his own have recognized certain creeds or beliefs-the data of religion if you will-under which Christianity has flourished and produced great men for well-nigh two thousand years...
...there is nothing in these expressions that could possibly interfere with brotherhood and the sympathy that is the bond of society...
...translated by E. Allen Ash-win...
...The march south of Mahommedanism, the eradication of slavery, the native problem, economic development-all these find their place in this valuable treatment...
...her heart is wrung and her head befuddled by the necessity of choice...
...And so on...
...But many, if not all old ladies in Florence, as well as practically all retired colonels on the Riviera, are specialists in Italian history, and speak of it with an enthusiasm and a preciseness which would do credit to Mr...
...Science has truly helped to sweep away some misconceptions bound up with religion but not a part of it, and its light has sometimes pierced the dark shadows of superstition and banished them-for all truth must ultimately work toward the same end...
...It is to the discredit of the scientist that he speaks so of the former-a topic evidently beyond his ken...
...SINCE 1920 we have been so preoccupied with eradicating the wild Wilsonian gleam from our diplomatic eye that we have not noticed General Smuts in the British international outlook...
...But, since he makes such statements it is pertinent to ask what the "essential religion" of which he speaks may be...
...The Development of Harvard University: 1869-1929, by Samuel Eliot Morison...
...Fighting Irish The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army of 1860, by G. F. H. Berkeley...
...It is commented upon at length elsewhere in this issue...
...Chesterton has taken Mencken and Dreiser to task in the first essay in the volume, The Sceptic as a Critic, in a way that will delight the hearts of American readers who have looked in vain for a satisfying retort to these worthies from American sources...
...5.00...
...Millikan's conception of religion...
...Return of the Brute is able writing, but if it is not propaganda it is naturalism gone mad...
...The entry of Rabelais into a Franciscan monastery is termed a "strange choice" in view of the fact that the mendicant order "did not keep schools or do anything with teaching...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 23
