Books
Pineda, Gerald B Phelan, Morton Zabel, Max Jordan, Paul Crowley, Margaret Kendall, E R
BOOKS Threading the Maze Philosophy of Value, by Leo Richard Ward, C. S. C. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.25. THE subtitle of this work is An Essay in Constructive Criticism. Its author is...
...New York: Simon and Shuster...
...Paul Crowley...
...and it takes far more courage and fortitude to stand alone for principle than when sustained by numbers...
...His purpose is to present an impartial interpretation of modern thought on the subject of value and to confront his findings with the traditional thought of the scholastics...
...Fists Across the Sea America Conquers Britain, by Ludwell Denny...
...The struggle for oil between the United States and Great Britain is only one chapter of the wider issue of Anglo-American relations...
...The friends and patrons-Madame von Breuning, the Brunswicks, Prince Lobkowitz, Prince Lich-nowsky, etc...
...The boy who wanted to leave his small town, and never did, is still fingering the dirty cards of fortune in the end-still wishing...
...As such, it may be trusted...
...Thomas J. Meehan writes most inform-ingly on the "centenary" of American Catholic fiction (the Reverend Dr...
...Chotzinoff dismisses the scholar's responsibility...
...Denny's first book, We Fight for Oil, was reviewed in these columns a couple of years ago...
...At the very outset of his study the author encounters no end of difficulty in his efforts to disentangle a definite meaning of the term "value" from the galaxy of opinion which he quotes...
...I gave them all Cake and a Glass of Wine"-an entry of interest, no doubt, to contemporary clergymen...
...The tale is lively and will gloss a dull hour, especially if one cares for the con-quistadores, and their peculiar genius for colonization...
...On September 30, 1794, the Parson reports being "pretty busy this morning at home having had thirteen young People come to me to be examined against Confirmation...
...Chotzinoff, in the present narrative of Beethoven's career, steers a wary course...
...Eroica does not stand with these books: it possesses neither the penetration of the former nor the sweep and heroism of the latter...
...He examines their structure with a critical eye and finds beneath a mass of amorphous masonry, not a few solid stones, clear cut and shapely...
...The neo-scholastic movement is essentially a movement in constructive criticism and it has long been vigorous at Notre Dame...
...Yet when his book is read as a novel, scholarship still wins the first tribute...
...In the new country, one is solicited in love by a ruffian, the other by an Indian prince, but virtue proves impregnable in both cases...
...Yet substitution of the first force for the second is the idea he offers to the world...
...He sets down many a curious detail associated with events of historical importance, even if the interest of his journal lies primarily in its frugal regard for domestic incidents...
...BETWEEN the free-handed treatment of biographical material which gives us novels like The Moon and Sixpence (Gauguin in disguise) or the extravagant legends of Miss Barrington, and the expert discrimination which produces a rare vignette like Ariel, Mr...
...Most fittingly he heads his introductory chaper, Thinking of the Unthinkable...
...What was said there in characterization of Parson Woodforde applies here as well...
...He can well exclaim: "I am the sun leading my lieutenants, the light by which they shine...
...Presumably Mr...
...As to it, Mr...
...Chotzinoff addresses the same audience...
...Beresford deserves to be remembered in the prayers of book lovers...
...The secret of Gandhi was this: he was the first to organize corporate moral resistance, and to obtain a firmly united community, ready to go to any lengths of suffering as a body for the sake of conscience...
...There are many other good things...
...Not from an economic or constructive viewpoint, surely...
...Philosophy might still go on and one need not acknowledge that he was discussing metaphysics...
...But would it make for peace, so long as India seethes-as it does-with hate and pride and fear...
...2.50...
...It was not quite a struggle for freedom...
...The sympathies of all who have tried to unravel the same skein will be with Father Ward in his thankless, bootless struggle with the delightful but confused phraseology of present-day philosophy...
...Not through ideas, but through his personality is Gandhi great...
...There seems to be a sort of "defense reaction" in the contemporary enthusiasm for value...
...The expert in the field of modern thought would no doubt pick some flaws in his reading of contemporary works-particularly those of Perry and Santayana-and the mediaeval scholar might differ with his interpretations of certain passages of Saint Thomas, but no modern writer would question the fairness of Father Ward's treatment of his subject and no scholastic would dispute the contention that the problem of value is one which metaphysics alone is competent to solve...
...Hence, The Passionate Warrior might have been with greater accuracy: Don Quixote Redivivus...
...Chotzinoff apparently recognizes his shortcomings in the task of interpretation...
...And had that happened, could there be imagined a more ironic ending to a life given to preaching, and to living, doctrines of love and peace...
...In despair he concludes: "The term value has quickly degenerated and become as vague as any in the language...
...The Spirit of Christ Crucified has led devoted followers to suffer rather than to sin for 1900 years, whether they suffered "isolated" or as members of a like-minded body...
...These he salvages and incorporates into his metaphysical edifice of value, a structure whose foundation rests upon the rock of common sense and whose spires point to God...
...Morton Zabkl...
...This singular weapon, by the sheer force of his own genius, he first forged and hammered till he had made it fit for his own use, and then afterward applied it to moral warfare with marvelous effect...
...The wealth of material and information he has accumulated for this book in long years of research work is not equaled by any similar publication in recent times...
...Hand spinning and Swadeshi will not appeal to Europe or America, nor will the strict ascetic practices by which is generated "soul-force" essential for displacing force of arms...
...This portion of the work serves as an introduction to the second part, the critical, constructive, synthetical section...
...These are his own words, at his trial for "organizing" a "non-violent non-cooperation" by the Indians, which straightway became violent-as anyone might have foreseen it surely would-in spite of his tremendous personal authority calling for a perfection of restraint...
...Max Jordan...
...Either the supremacy of America will be recognized by Britain in peace, or that supremacy will be asserted in battles of blood...
...He explodes what he calls the "dear cousin myth," and then goes on analyzing Anglo-American competition for foreign markets, financial investments, raw materials, aviation, cable and radio communications and fighting ships...
...But does Gandhi's propaganda promise that consummation...
...He is almost constantly doctoring for the gout (which, considering the quantities of food he dispatched, is hardly to be wondered at) the unusually severe winters cause no little discomfort, and life-long friends go to their rewards in disconcerting numbers...
...Two stories merit a special word...
...Gandhi, but those who had done so had been too isolated in their methods to reap fruitful results...
...the succession of personal sorrows ranging from illness and growing deafness to the vagaries of his favorite nephew Carl...
...Father Miltner's work in the ethical field is favorably known throughout the country as a splendid effort to restate the moral philosophy of the scholastics in the language of contemporary writers...
...A substitute had to be found...
...Practically every modern work on the subject is quoted with copious and accurate references...
...Denny's book will be an indispensable guide to all students of the foreign relations of the United States...
...It was more than that...
...They embody the distinct conviction that the good fortune traditionally represented by a certain portion of a turkey's anatomy may be only another element in a process of disintegration...
...Its author is a member of the faculty of philosophy in the University of Notre Dame...
...The thought appears confused, also the wording...
...At last, broken by war, by pleasure, by disillusionment at sight of the horrors of peace, which often led him to remark in reference to his work, "I have ploughed in the sea...
...Conditions have provided Mr...
...he died-easily one of the wealthiest and greatest men of his generation-in poverty, in obscurity and in exile...
...To him the Spanish colonial government was "a most merciless and unenlightened despotism...
...Andrews writes: "The one thing likely to cause the name of Mahatma Gandhi to stand out . . . is the weapon of passive resistance...
...There is nothing new or singular in passive resistance, used to gain one's end...
...It was also the laws of Indies, "a magnificent monument of legislation . . . converting into legal formulas the second commandment of the new dispensation: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as theyself!' " according to a non-Spanish, non-Catholic authority...
...Britain is declining in sea power, America is rising...
...Despite all these shortcomings, the author has written a highly readable, sympathetic life of Bolivar, as he was, without glossing over his foibles or even his adulterous relations with Manuelita Saenz, whose presence of mind in saving the liberator's life on one occasion earned for her from Bolivar the title of "the liberator's liberatrix...
...But his "ideas" show weaknesses inseparable from attempt to force an issue, maintaining it is "passive" so to do...
...The Strength of Lovers, by Hugo Wast...
...Admirers of Mahatma Gandhi wish to bring him to the West, there to exert the spell of his transcendant personality...
...But it wll not miss its usefulness if it serves as a primer on Beethoven's life and work for the uninitiated reader...
...These episodes never lose the pallor of self-consciousness...
...The course of Beethoven's life is closely followed, with emphasis distributed among the various factors that directed his career...
...Constantine Pise's novel having been published in 1829): Grace H. Sherwood's monograph on early Maryland history is the best brief account we have seen...
...Denny carries his thesis too far, but it is obvious that his purpose is to challenge the advocates of peace the world over to face the realities of an alarming situation...
...If other Christians would be equally consistent, wars would have to cease...
...The brutality of the Spanish-American War is vividly recreated as a background for Bolivar's towering personality...
...refusal by unnumbered Quakers to bear arms has won them, as a body, a recognized position where they are allowed to follow conscience unmolested...
...It is a weapon people otherwise unarmed can never be deprived of, and it becomes effectively embarrassing to power in authority when numbers use it for obtaining something they all desire...
...what the psychoanalysts would call a repressed tendency...
...In An Imperfect Crime, it is a woman vaguely on the borders of the underworld who pays with imprisonment and death for not suspecting that her casual companions are planning a crime...
...4.00...
...The spirit in which he has followed it himself make him a figure of unique spiritual height in the modern world...
...At bottom, it was a race war and the slogan was rather: "Give me office or give me death," thus accounting for the attitude of the upper classes, egotistic, colonial-born Spaniards, who were excluded from the highest offices by Spain...
...3.00...
...These two facts are not unrelated...
...By his purpose Mr...
...But Father Ward does not dodge the issue...
...It would appear, however, to be more properly regarded as a manifestation of that persistent propensity of a clear thinker to set out what he intends to discuss before entering upon the discussion...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...Gerald B. Phelan...
...The years dealt with in this section of the diary-1793-1796-were those of the French Revolution, which Parson Woodforde regarded with all the horror of a confirmed Tory...
...Denny has now presented a complete record, and he is showing how the commercial rivalry between two Anglo-Saxon powers leads to growing tension...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...He does not consider war between Britain and America unavoidable, but he emphasizes the necessity of forestalling developments which might some day lead, against the will of the peoples and the desires of their governments, to a crisis which would be serious...
...Such wine needs no bush...
...HUGO WAST, the literary pride of the pampas, brandishes another title...
...The child employs it who will not do his work or eat his dinner till he is given what he wants...
...2.50...
...For he gives as cause for breaking with the British government, which he for years whole-heartedly supported, even recruiting soldiers for its wars, his belief "that the British connection had made India more helpless...
...A criticism of the artistic value of Eroica is implied at once, and further details support it in almost every particular...
...Psychology offered an escape and value-a concept basically psychological-a refuge from the ghostly peril...
...Either act or cease wishing, might be their common motto...
...Perhaps that explains the incoherence of its language...
...But Professor Ward's study is not simply an exposition of scholastic philosophy...
...the Spanish polity in America is solely the Conquistadores, the conqueror-settlers, admittedly high-handed and rapacious...
...THIS book most sympathetically introduces, to those desiring peacefully to solve "problems of violence which lead to internecine war," the great religious leader who sways India...
...But, though our clergyman does not possess the patience of saints, he shames us with unceasing, matter-of-fact charity and edifies us with his trust in Providence...
...He is, undoubtedly, a leader of transcendant spiritual power, and integrity...
...When rationalism came tumbling down before the onslaughts of the Bergsonian critique and empiricism tottered under the attack of Boutroux and the prophets of contingency, modern thought was forced to face the problem of building up a stable metaphysics...
...He feels himself competent in metaphysics...
...For he incarnates love, and draws it forth to meet him in return, so irresistibly that those of differing faiths find in him an abiding truth which can unite them all, and which is the world's gleaming hope for peace...
...A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor, if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him...
...THEtitle of these collected stories has a more optimistic suggestion than their actual plots and such philosophy as they carry...
...His adherence to authentic anecdote is a confession of creative timidity which, though it insures honesty for the book as a whole, denies to Eroica the larger freedom with which Werfel devised his story of Verdi or Miss Sedgwick her account of Nietzsche in The Encounter-a method which has been applied with becoming vision to the personality of Beethoven by Rolland in Jean-Christophe...
...Two Spanish ladies of family accompany Cabot when he sails westward in 1526 for El Dorado...
...The Passive Prophet Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas, by C. F. Andrews...
...It is irresponsible, not amenable to plain and strict logic...
...Andrews, "that a visit from the one man in the whole world who has proved himself a creative genius in this very subject, making it alone his special study, day and night, for nearly a whole lifetime, would help as nothing else could do...
...And so incident is added to incident...
...Says Mr...
...New York: Ives Washburn...
...In the large crop of books on Beethoven which have appeared since 1927, a novel in English was until now lacking...
...WITH due allowances, Bolivar is almost a symbol of Spanish culture...
...They are squarely framed in by paragraphs which have documentary authority behind them, and while these sections are heavily weighted with fact, they serve to promote the effect of trite and labored artifice which prevails elsewhere...
...Father Ward is no polemist, however decidedly he may differ from the views which he discusses...
...Possibly, Mr...
...It makes them excellently clear...
...And yet his egotism, as with most Spaniards, could be both centripetal and contrifugal: his wealth was everyone's and his gift of liberty was for all Spanish colonies if possible...
...Perhaps it would be true to say that since the days of the early Christian Church no such effective acts of passive resistance have been organized as those which Mahatma Gandhi inspired...
...Townsman sets forth the inroads of decay through weakness of the will with dispassionate realism...
...During October of the same year he happened to be in London when something like a communist riot was staged by a "Mob composed of the most violent and lowest Democrates...
...A typical menu, thus: "We had for Dinner some Skaite, Ham and Fowls, a whole Rump of Beef Boiled, etc., a fine Hen Turkey rosted, Nancy's Pudding and Currant Jelly, Lobsters, Bullace and Apple Tarts, Cheese with Radishes and Cresses...
...Ghandi has accomplished in the East, for needs of which his ideas were evolved, and where he has, himself, been present to direct their working out...
...Briefer Mention Wishbone, by Stirling Bowen...
...and Father Francis X. Talbot's paper on Isaac Jogues is both a good homily and a succinct account of a great soul...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...IF THIS book had not been published while the London conference was still afloat, it would have to be considered as a post mortem and, at the same time, as the most dramatic indictment of the failure of the big sea powers to come to an agreement over the limitation of their fleets...
...But the stylistic and creative freedom that invests a character with dramatic credibility is usually denied a chronicler of fact, and the wit that endows men and women with life in a way pure biography cannot claim is a faculty apart from scholarship...
...Cardinal Mercier spoke truly when he said that twentieth-century thought suffered from a phobia of metaphysics...
...Father Ward follows the best traditions of his colleagues at Notre Dame in his "sustained attempt to answer the general enquiry...
...Here is a sentence dated October 17,1793, which tells us not a little regarding the civic amenities of the eighteenth century: "The high street of Oxford greatly improved since I last saw it all paved like London, and I think is one of the finest streets in the Kingdom...
...Parson Woodforde's Gout The Diary of a Country Parson, by The Reverend James Woodforde...
...Britain is on the defensive, America is on the offensive...
...What does it mean to act...
...2.50...
...The violence was curbed only by his spectacular expiatory fast, extremely dangerous in his physical condition...
...THE latest volume of this well-known series opens with the paper by Father Cuevas on the Saville Codex, reference to which has been made in The Commonweal...
...Denny: "There is not room in the contracting modern world for two conflicting empires as large and predatory as Britain and America...
...edited by John Beresford...
...Britain is losing world markets, America is gaining them...
...Both in scenes and in dialogue, Mr...
...New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society...
...But such a subtitle would presuppose greater breadth and depth than this book contains...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...It is to be regretted, of course, that the poor man is frequently in troubled health...
...E. R. Pineda...
...PREVIOUS volumes of this admirable diary, in which the quieter English folk of the eighteenth century come to life again, have been reviewed in The Commonweal...
...Had the fast caused his death, would not the grief and wrath of his huge following have meant a bloody rising throughout India, perhaps a holy war, involving many lands...
...If similar "effective acts" characterized the early Christians, Gandhi is clearly not "the first" inspiring men to "go to any lengths of suffering as a body" rather than do what principle forbids...
...He shows the part played by the Washington government in the foreign victories of Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil, General Electric, Radio Corporation, Firestone, Morgan and scores of American companies over British trusts, and he comes to the conclusion that war is brewing between Great Britain and America, despite the London naval conference, the greatest economic war that history has ever seen, a struggle to the death for control of the strategic trade of the world...
...Margaret Kendall...
...If the publication of this book, giving his thoughts and aspirations in his own words, can do anything to further such an object and make known more clearly beforehand the principles for which he stands, it will not have been compiled in vain...
...The authors gives no new information, except perhaps to English readers, but on the contrary, some old misinformation...
...The gamut from the death of a horse to the birth of a calf is scrupulously annotated...
...Too dilatory in method to encompass in its limited space all the available facts, and too intent on narrative interests to do more than hint occasionally at a fresh inquiry into Beethoven's music, Eroica will probably win the reader who has no time to spend on the elaborate biographies of Thayer, Prud'homme, and Schauffler, or the studies of Newman, Sullivan, W. J. Turner and Rolland upon which I commented here a few weeks ago...
...With the Summa of Saint Thomas held high like a torch to light his path, he threads the maze of value philosophies...
...The British may be ousted: and that would not be unjust...
...Quixote Redivivus Bolivar: The Passionate Warrior, by T. R. Ybarra...
...For "It might happen, in God's providence," writes Mr...
...Popular taste abroad has been satisfied by several stories of the "Life-and-Love" variety...
...One of these ladies, Lucia Miranda, is vaguely historical, but Sefior Wast's attempt to glorify a prude is least admirable in an otherwise worthwhile novel...
...Beethoven as Hero Eroica: A Novel Based on the Life of Ludwig von Beethoven, by Samuel Chotzinoff...
...his novel is at least trustworthy in outline and motive...
...A few excerpts from the book may show, better than anything else could, why Mr...
...But metaphysics was a bogy...
...Gandhi, striking for Swaraj, with an object native Indians so fervently desire that they will sink all minor differences while following the leader who proposes to unite them in a "non-violent non-cooperation" so vast that it will paralyze British rule...
...He does so with advantages of knowing his subject and the scholarship concerning him...
...Again, in dealing with the Spanish-American War, the author has seized at the shadow of truth...
...The first section of his essay-approximately half the volume-comprises an expository and analytical study of contemporary theories of value...
...Historical Records and Studies...
...Chotzinoff has taken the liberty of invention...
...4.25...
...The dichotomous division (expository-critical) practised in this and similar studies of modern problems has sometimes been misinterpreted as a polemical device, a piece of controversial strategy...
...In time the isolated stand produces fruit...
...Can they suffice to pacify the western war mind...
...Volume XIX...
...Many had engaged in passive resistance before Mr...
...and the succession of ladies in whom the Immortal Beloved finds brief and unconvincing embodiment act as a frame through which the central personality weaves like a shuttle its imperishable fabric of music...
...4.00...
...We may judge from a most fair-minded narrative what Mr...
...We dined in the Study and drank Coffee and Tea in the Parlor...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 25
