Among the Fall Books
Phelps, William Lyon & Oliver, John Rathbone & Kolars, Mary & O'Donnell, Hugh & Robinson, Henry Morton & Engels, Vincent & Agar, William M. & Crowley, Paul & Ross, J. Elliot & Repplier, Agnes & C., T. & Brunini, John Gilland
AMONG THE FALL BOOKS Superman, Poet, Novelist The Life of George Meredith, by Robert Esmonde Sencourt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50. GEORGE MEREDITH was a superman. He had enough...
...show a point of illumination that has never come otherwise to men, a rare but everlasting moment of Christlike comprehension and heroic peace...
...It is an interesting situation-the Middle-West professor, disciplined to acceptance of a cultural philosophy having noth ing in common with the democratic vitality of the plains, half sensing that he had little share in the life around and half sure that this life was indefensibly a compound of vulgarity and urban eroticism...
...To say that the intellectual life of the average citizen is "paralyzed by a regular reading of newspapers, popular magazines and church attendance," is to be cocksure of the doubtful...
...Carl Sandburg's lush note about the bluejays that called "another lovely morning" to the statue of Lincoln...
...The significance of Sherman lies in his spiritual venture-in his hunt for a distinction compounded of sincerity, his adjustment of an external ideal to a temperamental self, and his conception of a social absolute...
...a chance encounter with a singing tinsmith, and another with a tramp, who shared an onion with the writer...
...if Miss Adams is a reflective poet, he is one who exclaims...
...The church in which Fritz and his employer worshiped "had a stone altar as flat and as bare as a table...
...In physical exercise he was violent: he made love with volcanic ardor: in composition the sweat ran faster than the ink: his loud laugh shook the rafters...
...He may psychologize and refine for twenty pages, but he is a dead man before he begins to talk, and we can only await the fearfully dramatic climax when he decides to pull the iron out of his soul...
...New York: The Funk and Wagnalls Company...
...Indeed, his generalities regarding Germany are almost applicable to any other continental country or nation...
...In a hundred victims, ranging from Flammonde through Miniver Cheevy and Leonardo Nash to the gigantic figure of Tristram, the poet anatomizes the psychic flaw that dooms men to suffering and defeat...
...In the second place, newspaper editors, though Mr...
...Moult's indispensable series, and so long as it is read as a book of poetry, for the most part typical of what is considered distinguished in our time, no quarrel shall be picked with it...
...Well, sympathy and enthusiasm are the best paths to understanding...
...In fact the Roman Catholic knows as much about Luther, if not more, than the Lutherans and other Protestants...
...This merely transfers the problem, as the author shows, to the question: "Which set of reasons, inherent cause or external cause, carries the minimum of assumption...
...Sencourt, with disarming honesty and frankness, says, "Many now think that his reputation has been exaggerated...
...Newman for skipping over the Sistine Madonna with a mere reference and an illustration...
...If his book, dealing so convincingly and unbearably with pain, does not last, it will he because he has omitted that soul...
...Literature Hills and the Sea, by Hilaire Belloc...
...Philosophy for Laymen Series, edited by Roy Wood Sellars...
...But more did happen-a great deal more...
...He had a long career, but recognition was so slow in coming that he was compelled to devote many years to the reading of manuscripts for publishers...
...John Rathbone Oliver...
...2.50...
...IN E. M. NEWMAN'S books, as in his travelogues, his pictures are better than his text...
...He was an out-size personality...
...The passion and poignancy of a poem like Tristram depend almost wholly upon the skill (and dramatic truth) with which the poet locks his man up in an unbreakable vise of balanced forces...
...It does not yet appear whether or not Meredith was a great poet or a great novelist...
...Among many reasons why, there are three principal ones: first, because they themselves will wish to reread a very noble and beautiful piece of work...
...And she will dissect that moment with a most intent deliberation, trying to make it deliver up all past and future...
...Since 1923 this veteran of many decades has produced Roman Bartholow, Dionysus in Doubt, The Man Who Died Twice, Tristram, and Cavender's House-any three of which would form a trio of masculine studies without parallel in twentieth-century poetry...
...Issues are a little clearer now...
...The Person of Jesus, the miracle of His birth and the revelation of His Resurrection were less close to the hearts and creed of this congregation than God, His Father, the Creator, omnipotent, and omniscient in Whose hands were mercy and wrath...
...The beauty and distinction which religion has brought into the world are no more to his liking than are the creature comforts that have followed in the wake of the factory...
...There can be no doubt that these things have grown and developed, and since they appear to give signs of both integrations and differentiations, they are explainable along evolu-tionistic lines...
...MICHEL VAUCAIRE has written a swift-moving story of the life of Simon Bolivar, one of the most fascinating men that the western hemisphere has produced...
...Passages in the book lead one to believe that much of this essential trouble might have been obviated if Sherman's acquaintance with Europe had begun earlier...
...The book will leave some wondering about what, after all, we do know...
...That is not the way to further reunion...
...In the third place, the average clergyman is apt to be as sagacious and as well informed as his average parishioner, which is not claiming much...
...No one can read the evidently sincere statements in this book -and especially the concluding paper of W. E. Orchard- without a yearning sympathy for these strugglers...
...He had placed his conception of America on too narrow a basis because cultural America has always existed on too narrow a basis...
...His characters all have a touch of genius...
...High Falcon, by Leonie Adams...
...In the year 1928, the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Tolstoy, of Ibsen...
...Borsodi may not think so, are often men of intelligence...
...The lyrical element is not great, is in fact not present at all in Balzac, in Scott...
...But there was something right in the argument with which they appealed to the public-that the new America ought to demand a literature in which it lived...
...Scanlon's novel frankly does not pretend to do so...
...James Daugherty has, it must be conceded, not labored in the spirit of Abbey or the Pre-Raphaelities...
...notably, W. H. Davis with For Sale, and, above and beyond all praise, A. E. with Germinal...
...It does not depend for its continued existence upon those theories, but upon an imposing array of data...
...An example is the opening verse of Winter Solstice: "December, mortal season, crusts The dark snows shuffled in the street, And rims the lamp with sleet...
...It is full of appallingly convincing reporting about the demoralization of the rear-line workers and the men on leave, and what it says cannot for a moment be disregarded...
...Two volumes, $10.00...
...His hatred of discipline, or rules and systems, while admirable in many respects, did not help him as an artist...
...He really and truly regrets that "the music of the spinning wheel, the rhythm of the loom" are no longer heard in the land...
...His friends had not only tremendous intellectual respect for him, they loved him as we love the sunshine...
...3.00...
...compiled by Caroline Miles Hill...
...And yet the fact remains that extraordinary people thought him marvelous, that many prominent Englishmen of sound culture still think him one of the supreme men of the nineteenth century . . . among not a few others, Stevenson and Sir James Barrie put him near Shakespeare...
...Although Meredith died only twenty years ago, and in his mental attitude was so emphatically a man of the twentieth century, it is interesting to remember that he published fiction before the earliest work of George Eliot appeared...
...All in all, the new volume is one of the best of Mr...
...Almost without exception, places have been made for the old guard, and some of them show to their best advantage...
...Miss Lee's book evidently derives its outline from its author's own experiences in clerical work at the rear, and in canteen work near the front and with the army of occupation in Germany...
...themselves, is affected and destroyed...
...These three narratives all have the advantage of first-hand material and strict seriousness of purpose...
...solid erudition, elegant manners and something royal in their walk, make Mr...
...Since the publication of her first book she has grown in power and in her range of interests, although she is still concerned frequently with the adapting of the soul to circumstances which it resents...
...all give us, in degrees, a stricken sense of its futility...
...This is important because the future conflicts between evolutionists and theologians will probably center about this matter...
...The best things in the book are the 300 illustrations from original photographs...
...Moult does not quote it, but we have space here for the final verses: "Long since, we pulled brown oak leaves to the ground...
...Frank Altschul of New York, who has in his possession a large number of letters of Meredith which had never been published, gave Mr...
...One objects to the idea that some slight disorientation of a few chromosomes at the time of conception could so fundamentally affect not only the life of the sadistic boy himself, but also the lives of everyone with whom he was brought in contact...
...If Mr...
...Another early childhood book is The Siamese Cat, by Elizabeth Morse (Dutton) which employs an oriental setting for a simple narration of a little boy's adventure with animals...
...Dark Summer, by Louise Bogan...
...The intellectual aspect of the Church makes no stronger appeal to him than does her austere comeliness...
...Quite otherwise is Mr...
...And a rapprochement has actually been accomplished between some churches...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...adventures, but of the soul even more than of the body, in Africa, in many parts of Europe, in his own fields at home...
...One feels more safe than usual, however, in recommending fairy stories, and Dorothy Emmrich's translation of Capuana's Italian Fairy Tales (Dutton) answers this description most charmingly...
...The Runaway Sardine, by Emma L. Brock (Knopf) is for the very young who like many pictures and large letters...
...Chicago lay only a short distance to the north of Urbana, and Chicago was then in the throes of one of its recurring periods of literary tumult...
...Her unexplained loss works like a poison in the life of the farmer's: family and under its influence the whole community disintegrates...
...Certainly there is a different spirit abroad from that of fifty years ago...
...And if we had, there is no reader living who is saint and sage enough to comprehend the quality of the whole, to bless and condemn finally...
...The attractions of Coblenz are outstanding to us nationally because that city is more familar to America now than before our soldiers were stationed there in the army of occupation...
...One may judge the book from the standpoint of the criminol-ogist, of the psychiatrist or of the scholar or critic...
...In prison he is a model of good behavior, and after his discharge the farmer whose child he murdered takes Fritz back into his house and Fritz lives there until he dies...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...No matter what the hero says, or how long he takes to say it, we behold the spear of his own character sticking fatally in his side...
...Although Joscelyn of the Forts, by Gertrude Crownfield (Dutton) is advertised as a story for girls, presumably in their early teens, boys of like age will also enjoy this New York frontier story dealing with the last French and Indian War...
...Paul Crowley...
...Never merely decorative, but always hung to the purposes of one or the other of these moods, are the pictures which she beautifully evokes...
...Indoors he loved copious meals, good wine and all kinds of lively conversation, from philosophical speculation to the most outrageous mirth...
...Newman does not sense the Catholic attitude when he says: "Large numbers of Americans come here each year, showing as much interest in what they see as does the Roman Catholic who visits Rome and views its monuments and relics"-as though some Americans were not Roman Catholics...
...But this question now engenders thought and earnest inquiry rather than despair, and the data and inference correlated here present as strong a case for evolutionism as can possibly be presented...
...Another book of like tenor is The Jumping Off Place, by Marian Hurd McNeely (Longmans) which describes Dakota pioneer life as children lived it...
...It is only after one of us discerns the whole human foundation that social life can be seen as something broad enough to be endured...
...Both should appeal to the middle group of children, a little bit superior to elves and gnomes and not old enough for Treasure Island...
...What Mr...
...New York: Charles Scrib-ner's Sons...
...I know of no more beautiful tribute from one man of genius to another than that of Barrie to Meredith...
...Hemingway's style, for instance, such a sophisticated and often such a wearing medium...
...It is right here that one confronts the basic weakness of Sherman's position...
...It is here that the question of origins first appears and is most fundamental...
...by Mary Lee...
...Bolivar the Liberator, by Michel Vaucaire...
...In Weimar Mr...
...There is no middle ground...
...Twenty-five pages of volume two are given, for instance, to letters which the professor addressed to students...
...We even find ourselves wishing it could be used in schools as a text-so much better are its pictures than a batch of notes...
...The first chapters clear the way by outlining the scope of the subject...
...Hugh A. O'Donnell...
...Vachel Lindsay's rhetorical announcement of the rise of a braver, hardier, more cavalier generation, and Mr...
...Newman welcomes a visit to Heidelberg...
...More obviously of the metaphysical poets because her language is classically in their tradition is Leonie Adams, and it is her language which accounts for the rather strange, old-worldly beauty of many poems in High Falcon...
...And yet do not the records of human anguish show a further term of anguish beyond mere despair...
...But Edwin Arlington Robinson decidedly has a way of avoiding poetical interment...
...The farmer and his wife drift apart...
...His most intimate friends were Robert Louis Stevenson, Leslie Stephen, John Morley, J. M. Barrie, Sir William Hardman, Admiral Maxse and the Dr...
...Ironical Sherman could be...
...William Lyon Phelps...
...THE poetic activity of a year memorable for it is rather accurately represented in Mr...
...3.00...
...Nevertheless it relates a smaller experience...
...He really and truly believes that small farms will solve the problem of living: "A poultry yard, a pig or two, and a herd of sheep and goats can furnish us with the great bulk of our foodstuffs...
...Vincent Engels...
...And Mr...
...He was shrewd enough to see how Babbitt's doctrine of rigorous intellectualism crowded the artist in man to the curb...
...Robinson's work, one feels that the man is beset by a single dramatic problem, the same problem that gripped Sophocles and obsessed Shakespeare...
...Robinson would have been ranked as the most considerable American poet of his era...
...Even the life of the animals on the farm, the life of the crops, of the trees...
...The farmer has a little girl four years old, his only daughter, bis favorite child...
...The deftness with which she works has not been granted to Merrill Moore...
...It seems to imply a civilization which produces ugliness where it should produce beauty, which builds museums that distress the eye, and which disfigures streets and parks with monuments that are the flowering of the commonplace...
...The result was a long inquiry into the nature of America and into the significance of its intellectual masters...
...and who at length, having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of putting out the flame...
...But those readers who have learned how to recognize and to enjoy genuine literature: readers to whom good prose is like good music-something to which one may and should return again and again-will welcome this reissue of one of the best of Belloc's good books...
...The cathedral, probably the most widely discussed religious edifice, aside from Saint Peter's in Rome, is enlarged upon in the text, though not particularly featured in pictures...
...still one cannot but notice the absence of the words "free will...
...THE reading of this book will inevitably lead to the conviction that love in the twentieth century is very much the same as love in the nineteenth...
...Moreover, it seems almost impossible that even the most inefficient police system could have failed to discover the body of the murdered child in one of her father's barns...
...The authorities pry about everywhere, hold long...
...And this-in spite of the fact that it is a collection of brief essays and sketches, miscellaneous in subject, contributed to newspapers, as they were written here and there, on this and on that...
...The author of the third book was a soldier in the German army at the age of eighteen-the age of his hero and the hero's comrades, of whom he says: "Now if we go back we will be weary, burnt out, rootless and without hope...
...In them she rejects all transitory aspects, attempting to determine the relationship, and the moment, in which their elements will come into the perfection of permanence...
...Agnes Repplier...
...This new contribution to the "seeing" series takes in everything...
...But this sergeant of marines, who began his.active life as a stockyard hand in Chicago, has more positive literary merits...
...It is probably true that Edwin Arlington Robinson could be cut to advantage, but there is no man living who is big enough or old enough to insert the knife...
...To the scholar or to the critic the whole book presents too black a picture with too few compensating elements of light and joy...
...All classes are extravagant, but every year sees more men and women living in closets and eating in drug stores...
...All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque...
...This story is set against a background of long and sometimes wearisome descriptions of country life that are, however, occasionally very charming and full of color...
...He writes of them (will he pardon this school-room word...
...Some will feel that the "inner experiences" of supernaturalism are treated too lightly, since they represent the experience of the race as opposed to "the suspicions fostered by recent psychology...
...The universe was created or it was not...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...During Fritz's adolescence his blood lust occasionally breaks out in cruelty to animals...
...New York: Harcourt Brace and Company...
...That want, however, is genuine...
...Mr...
...Evolution as a process is distinguished from Darwinism and the many other explanations...
...She is at ease in the most intricate rhythms...
...Toward Christian Union The Reunion of Christendom: A Survey of the Present Position, edited by Sir James Mar chant...
...THE title of Mr...
...they take you out of doors, as does the book...
...The acid has already evaporated from the numerous controversies, on behalf of standards or a better conception of the educative function of letters, which seemed so fundamentally important ten years ago...
...The Illinois Oracle Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman, by Jacob Zeitlin and Homer Woodbridge...
...Then comes the opposition of supernaturalism to evolution...
...For breadth and thinness few generalizations can surpass this...
...He wrote this work because he believes with all his might that Meredith is a great poet and a great novelist...
...As a portrait of the general, this book leaves something to be desired, but as the chronicle of his adventures, it is completely satisfactory...
...The language, though distinguished and highly wrought, is quite secondary to the dramatic situation...
...fencing...
...He gives pleasant pictures of city avenues, fountains, the River Neckar, romances such as Prince Karl's...
...Briefer Mention Three Comedies of Shakespeare...
...Some are drawn from chemistry and physics, the relativity of time and the problem of causation...
...He had enough intellectual and emotional vitality for ten ordinary persons...
...New York: Farrar and Rinehart...
...He is also strangely indefinite...
...If we have justice and humanity, they find their specific objects...
...Robinson as a Tennysonian offshoot (the romantic Arthurians are to blame for that error) and think of him in terms of the Greeks, and possibly Browning, we would be taking the first step toward understanding this massively dramatic poet...
...If the author has tried to show that religion of this kind results inevitably in a hopeless inability to deal constructively with the evil of human nature, then he or she has succeeded in a very remarkable way...
...Doubtless Mr...
...Furthermore the author reiterates that evolutionism is not necessarily opposed to religion since it does not deal with first causes...
...How a boy of "Puritan" ancestry enjoyed such adventures as the slaughter of rattlesnakes in the far West...
...Unjustified he dared not remain...
...With the ground cleared of controversial matter it would appear that few could resist the claim of evolution to respect...
...Ruskin once referred to Kenelm Digby as one from whom he had learned to love nobleness...
...in the dramatis personae of his poems, no woman is accorded a principal part...
...The case for evolution becomes weaker as it progresses from the exact to the social sciences, such as economics and societal and religious developments...
...Nevertheless, it is also clear that something is stirring in the non-Roman churches...
...The word is.-used advisedly: for it is a wonderful thing to find a book of brief prose pieces so full of music: so full also of the expression of that rare kind of thinking which is the cause of thought in-others...
...There was no Christ upon the plain cross...
...investigations without being able to achieve anything...
...followed by Coblenz, Bonn, Cologne, Berlin, Potsdam and the ports of the north...
...Robinson seems to be rounding into a lusty second harvest, from which he will glean many a collection before the epitaph-chiselers get him...
...Few documents contribute more to a just discernment of the past, and it is also an admirably human testimonial...
...Scanlon's straightforward account of battle, murder and sudden death...
...One lays it down with a sigh of relief...
...We will not be able to find our way any more...
...how in due time he grew into college, and later on into the Harvard Graduate School...
...PROBABLY the truth about the war will never be told...
...Perhaps none of all the literary folk who have interpreted the last generation now seems either so amiable or so worth while...
...The all-to-be-encouraged revival of humorous verse is noticed with three selections, including an excellent one by E. Merrill Root called The Cow...
...And so, from the philosophic standpoint, it must be left...
...And in the meantime we can cultivate a spirit of charity that will keep us from adding to the misunderstandings already existing...
...The beggar, houseless, chill, and thin, Leans to the chestnut vendor's coals, The cart creaks off which trails the winter bush, And the thick night shuts in...
...The touching thing about the book is its idyllic picture of farm life, so care-free, so pleasant, so remarkably easy, so innocent of defeat...
...In the first place, the average citizen has no intellectual life...
...his two marriages, his devotion to his son Arthur, his likes and dislikes, his personal habits...
...It goes from the "City of Friendship" (Munich) with its art treasures, through Bavaria into the religious, artistic atmosphere of Oberammer-gau...
...Even grown-ups will enjoy many of these adventures into the fanciful, as well as the slightly sophisticated drawings which plentifully illustrate the text...
...The term evolutionism is applied to descriptions and explanations of a process of change called evolution...
...The elaboration of the word means less to her than strength of conception...
...Far back, we saw, in the stillest of the year The scrawled vine shudder, and the rose-branch show Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight can bear, The thin hound's body arched against the snow...
...Bonn, where Beethoven was born, is vividly portrayed...
...but comparatively few remembered that of Meredith...
...5.00...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Dramatically, and wholly in the psychic realm...
...Toward the close of his life, Meredith reached an apotheosis where his fellow-craftsmen, in regarding him, all looked up...
...The axiom that we may have too much even of a good thing generally is sound enough...
...Newman tells too much and not enough...
...He might be able to tell us also whether a complete forgetfulness or amnesia follows the commission of such sadistic assaults...
...He always had an undisciplined mind, and none of his productions has that air of serenity which is so often characteristic of permanence...
...Some soul in his little band of lost youth must have felt this final fruition of pain...
...After all, the painter has as much right to interpret a character as the actor himself...
...Henry Morton Robinson...
...The evidence is gathered from many places and, conflicting as some of it appears, just as bees in a swarm dart hither and yon, yet the evidence taken all together, like the swarm, points in one direction...
...There is, however, little connection between the pictures and the text...
...It is fifty-five years since Newman penned his reply to Gladstone, yet the words of his introduction are unfortunately still true: "There are those among us, as it must be confessed, who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and overbearing deeds: who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were close upon snapping...
...Another important feature of this preliminary part is that evolution is shown to be based more on inference than on evidence, albeit inference that is very strongly suggested by the data, which are themselves, in the last analysis, merely units that can be serially arranged...
...What Shakespearean would be without such a book...
...The last of those objections questions the adequacy of knowledge...
...but his solution was that of a traffic policeman, adroitly gesturing humanism to one side of the street and the new America to the other...
...THERE is possibly too much bulk in the frankly partizan, fulsomely reportorial, censer-swinging scrap-book which Messrs...
...From the standpoint of psychiatry it is hard for me to believe that, because Fritz was conceived in circumstances of fear by a raped farm servant, an entire family must be plunged into suffering, loss and despair...
...And no little men are permitted to strut his stage...
...A child of ability and of value to the world may easily be the offspring of a brutal rape, just as sadistic personalities may be the products of happy marital intercourse in well-adjusted homes...
...how conscientious teaching and tentative stabs at literary expression gradually led to a position of cultural authority expounded in books and by word of mouth-these matters the biographers have dwelt upon lovingly, but they have rightly seen that their story's substance is something else...
...He writes with complete integrity, and not as a publicist for his corps...
...Sencourt free access to the collection, and thus the reader has before him much original and highly important material...
...the "booky" atmosphere...
...There followed two clashes-one between Sherman and his own make-up, the other between Sherman and the new America clamoring for raw literary meat...
...But nothing but the wisdom of eternity will enable us to understand it all...
...Fritz cannot confess because he does not remember the murder...
...but (page 182) the date of Madame Bovary is given as 1859, instead of 1857...
...A good deal of the fuss was caused by mere intoxicated contemplation of poetic materials-the kind of excess which forever prevented Carl Sandburg from becoming a poet...
...Jessopp...
...Moult's new volume...
...In a winter of dry trees...
...He lists like a catalogue, with little explanation of things important...
...Outdoors he rejoiced in the southwest wind, in the steep hillsides, in the "rain on his storm-beaten face...
...The text evidences an extravagant use of the personal pronoun and there is a poverty of adjectives, almost as unpleasant as the author's frequent use of "pleasant...
...V. M. Hillyer has written A Child's Geography of the World (Century) which will capture the fancy of the most backward pupil and answer many questions which otherwise would be directed parentward...
...A Memorable Poetry Year The Best Poems of 1929...
...for even though a work of art may be an end in itself, still there should be some elements of contrast in the making of it...
...Who would not...
...He can describe the most stirring or grisly episodes swiftly, objectively, and yet quite without that affectation of indifference which makes Mr...
...AMONG THE FALL BOOKS Superman, Poet, Novelist The Life of George Meredith, by Robert Esmonde Sencourt...
...New York: Willett, Clark and Colby...
...A Study in Doom The Lost Child, by Rahel Sanzara...
...The parts dealing with the evolution of organisms will be the most familiar to the average reader...
...His story is straitly limited to his own career, but it is probably the most representative account of the fighting man that the war has brought forth...
...2.50...
...Robert Esmonde Sencourt, in the book before us, has written the first authoritative biography, and it seems definitive...
...It is not a question of whether we shall listen to Nietzsche rather than to Emerson, but of whether we can get away from the radio long enough to listen to anybody...
...2.50...
...Their efforts are not to be superciliously ridiculed...
...and while they must have been fascinating to their recipients, they leave the reader peering anxiously about for the man he wants to know...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...Like all writers who prefer the ancient tones, she does not describe a scene with which we may all be perfectly familiar without giving it a quality of remoteness...
...Juvenilia and Up ADULTS most frequently find themselves at sea when it comes to selecting books for a child, since it is difficult to remember just what did please and interest them at the ages of ten, twelve and fourteen...
...This process can occur in two ways: first, by integration, or the coming together of two units in space-as when several atoms unite to form a molecule...
...Robinson's protagonists approach the classic ideal of a kingly figure, the prerequisite of high tragedy...
...Potsdam is luring...
...It is vain to speculate on what might have happened...
...In his preface he pays his compliments to Lytton Strachey, and to his followers, who belong to the school of detraction...
...but reforming the civilized world is a task as demonstrable on paper as it is inoperative in action...
...when, apparently, the entire event is obliterated from his mind...
...Clearly, perhaps somewhat emphatically, Cardinal Bourne states the Catholic position: there can be no unity without the acceptance of the whole Catholic faith as taught by Rome...
...The unhappy family seek the missing child for years...
...Meredith's letters are to me even more inspiring than his poems and novels...
...5-00...
...Mary Kolars...
...His more than ninety drawings, which include three colored plates, evoke Elizabethan moods with an expressionistic use of the grotesque, a robustness of gesture and a gift for farce which seem genuinely significant...
...The pictures are all right and enjoyable, even if one would have liked to see, occasionally, more firmness of contour...
...poetry was his muse...
...If we have faith, it helps us to delimit that part of the picture which must be taken on faith...
...and we now may well believe that at least a few young Americans destined to become illustrious in some spiritual renaissance we cannot foresee will refer in similar language to the author of The Genius of America...
...William M. Agar...
...And so the citizen who cares about such things will, regardless of his especial literary convictions, salute in Stuart Sherman the man for whom personal development was not merely an ideal but an opportunity to achieve success...
...The problem of proof-really at the root of most of the disagreements-comes first, for without common first principles the most satisfying proof to one is no proof to another...
...Scanlon's, with which it shares the $25,000 Houghton Mifflin and American Legion prize...
...Zeitlin and Woodbridge have devoted to the remembrance of Stuart Sherman...
...Borsodi's cure-alls are simple and thorough...
...They were such microscopic Davids, after all...
...What she discovers there is put down in writing which would not be more sparse if she had to chisel every line of it in steel...
...But Miss Adams knows what she is about, and if her poetry is bookish, it is bravely so...
...nor in Thackeray, nor in Dickens-which is precisely why they are so essentially novelists, so almost exclusively lovers of the image of life...
...The picture he draws is a harsh one, true in part, but with its bright edges blackened into gloom...
...Ultimately, therefore, he was being polite to forms of expression-Dreiser's fiction, for instance-with which he had, innately, positively nothing in common...
...It cannot be said to be proved beyond question, but it is a difficult process to deny...
...how the capitol is the exponent of the national spirit, the soul of the German people, and of their character and culture...
...Leipsig is well done in regard to Luther and Handel, dramatically contrasted...
...There is no lyric trace, no physical action and very little narrative structure in any of his pieces...
...The preface is especially faulty in regard to this...
...a walking trip in the Pyrenees...
...then to the Black Forest, Nuremberg, Rothenburg, Augsburg, Eisenach, Regans-burg or Ratisbon, Bayreuth, Weimar and Dresden...
...But the author, unable as he is to conceive of a mystical experience, presents the case for.supernaturalism fairly...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Nevertheless, he is found guilty and imprisoned for fifteen years...
...He sees two great evils in modern life, the factory and the Church...
...The general arguments against evolution are considered next...
...Calvinistic ideas are mingled with a persistent humanitarianism...
...It tells the truth about the man and his career...
...His mind was richer than any of its products...
...He is quite comfortably sure that "churches, preachers and religions have merely an ethnological interest for intelligent people," and that "if the masses of mankind were to follow their more intelligent fellows in so regarding them, the gain to social health would be invaluable...
...His quality is exuberance...
...we heard the cock Shout its unplaceable cry, the ax's sound Delay a moment after the ax's stroke...
...How does he handle this regal material...
...We feel we know Meredith...
...The latter are perhaps the most wonderful...
...London: Jonathan Cape, Limited...
...He was enormously alive...
...secondly, by differentiation, or the rearrangement of already integrated units-as if the same molecule were formed by the coming together of atoms taken from other molecules...
...THE author of this book, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, emphasizes the general application of evolutionism to the data of all the sciences and thereby enlarges upon the oft-repeated biological aspect of the subject...
...The evolution of matter is first presented in a chapter that gives a brief account of the newer physics of protons and electrons, of quanta and the space-time of relativity...
...To anyone who is interested in religious reactions, there are one or two sentences in the book that cast an illuminating light back upon the whole story...
...Herr Remarque has written well enough to deserve this question...
...There are pages in this book which will become permanent in English literature, The Good Woman, for example,, and The Harbor in the North...
...If one takes it as an academy of the elect, however, it is immediately open to the criticisms which await other "best" books...
...A plague upon your whimpering idealizations of the Bard...
...The fundamentalist and the freethinker share it evenly, and give it the same animated expression...
...and all fail to convince us that they have told the whole truth...
...the rest emanated from quasi-bohemian litterateurs, imported to swell the alcoholic content of journalistic criticism, and setting to work with the same canny understanding of "what the people want" which later made a Gotham replica of the Chicago Tribune so valuable an advertising medium...
...Much is said of Frederick the Great and his Sans Souci and their associations...
...even if nothing more had happened, Mr...
...Rather we find a statement of the cases for both theistic and naturalistic evolution, for conflicting theories, and a fair appraisal of the evidence for all...
...the famous university...
...TO A Catholic reviewer, the only contributor to this symposium who knows where he stands is Cardinal Bourne...
...The second collection of Miss Bogan's hard-bitten verses is not always the easiest sort of reading...
...The answer to the first three is that whatever may be the ultimate structure of the universe, the particular part of the space or space-time which we inhabit acts in this particular way...
...but the wages it pays buy less and less as they grow bigger and bigger...
...The zest with which Windy City columnists heaped curses upon Sherman and his book now seems more than relatively comic...
...To those of us whose feet are planted fairly firmly on the ground of normal life, a book like this touches matters that are too strange and mysterious for us...
...Some may consider this his fault on page and platform, though he is better on the latter because his speech is confined to the pictures, generally so excellent that they express themselves fully to the student traveler...
...selected by Thomas Moult...
...He shows that the most obvious weakness is the unilinear arrangement of stages of religious and cultural development when it is well known that the stages are never simply distinguishable...
...The boy lives in the house of a farmer in whose mind stern...
...Mass production has built up giant fortunes...
...He is apparently interested in men only...
...What matters is no longer if one shall respect the American moral or intellectual tradition, but if one shall harbor any cultural or spiritual ambition at all...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Newman rehearses the exquisite traditions of them both, a symphony...
...Unfortunately, he will probably never see the book, but his opinion of it is the only opinion that I should be inclined to accept as authoritative...
...It appears to mean here the opposition of special creationism rather than of the supernaturalism implied in theistic evolutionism, but the opposition is based at any rate upon the principle of economy of explanation, "Occam's razor...
...It's a Great War...
...For it is a fact that his centenary passed almost unnoticed...
...Then one day when alone with the little girl in the barn he kills her and buries the body...
...All her words are naked...
...He could tell us whether the character of Fritz in this book is also really true to human experience...
...From the standpoint of criminology it seems to me very unlikely that a sadistic type like Fritz could always develop a complete amnesia for every one of his sadistic outbreaks...
...all add, unquestionably, to our knowledge of the war...
...But evolution begins with matter or energy already in existence and leads on from there...
...A FIRST volume of verse is a promise...
...If it fails to be widely read, at least the explanation will not be that it is unexciting...
...Very few errors appear...
...that The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is comparable only to Shakespeare...
...A sail at sea in an open boat...
...from Lake Constance to Stuttgart...
...he was rather a great man who wrote poems and novels...
...Borsodi's book is misleading...
...So finely has the work been done, so haunting and intolerable are the pictures of these boys clinging together in half-childish comradeship, with their gutted lives, their docility to disaster, their humble despair, that one feels temerarious indeed in speaking any word of dissent...
...He is sometimes dull, as Milton and the ocean are dull...
...The same wager is as confidently offered on Louise Bogan's Old Countryside, which appeared in Scribner's during the spring, and is included in her new book, Dark Summer...
...assigning it to an age other than our own...
...and it sometimes happens that a good magazine is popular...
...Naturalism or mechanism are of course so opposed and, while these views are upheld by many evolutionists, they are not the logical outcome of evolutionism...
...2.50...
...He has been a prisoner since his adolescence, during which he committed two or three hideously brutal, sadistic murders of little girls...
...Frankfort, the city of the Rothschilds, of "stock exchanges and world-wide financial influence," where Schopenhauer, the philosopher, lived and died, where the Grimm brothers wrote their fairy tales and from which came Goethe, "the greatest European soul," has its elaborations...
...For one thing, he retains his grip on the fact that war is, whatever else it may be, a matter of soldiering...
...Then, after several years the body is discovered...
...We have no lamp to guide us," as Daniel Webster said, "except the lamp of experience," and ordinary experience fails us in our endeavors to estimate the value or the truth of such an account...
...It deals with a sadistic boy who, front the moment of his conception, was apparently doomed to the commission of evil without his own knowledge and almost against his own will...
...Her extremely condensed style sometimes results in obscurities which are not cleared up without a number of readings, but the results are worth the effort, particularly in the case of The Mark...
...Newman's Berlin is worth while in as much as it is an intimate story-a heart one-telling of yesterday and today, the "before" and "after...
...Briefly stated, the thesis seems to be: "Can any man escape the fate that is dealt out to him in his own character...
...third, because it is a strong proof of the vitality and perdurability of Belloc...
...There are surprises almost in every line, although to provide them he has to dynamite into a hilarious wreckage the venerable architecture of the sonnet...
...That terrible old saying, "Nature hates a farmer," has evidently not come the author's way...
...He has been for the last ten years not much read either by the many, or by the few who live in the literary fashion...
...Tim Towser, by Robert Joseph Diven (Century) and The Chief of the Herd, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, are books about a dog and an elephant respectively...
...Here Rosalind wears her mannish clothes with a swagger, Shylock is a glorious fiend, and Portia speaks her "mercy" speech without a lisp...
...After reading the full thousand pages of Mr...
...However, Mr...
...His is the most distinguished name in musical history, and doubly distinguished when combined with the illustrious Franz Liszt, fellow-citizen and father-in-law, whom Wagner worshiped as "the greatest musician of them all...
...This latter class will find that Vaino, by Julia Davis Adams (Dutton) the story of a Finnish boy during the world war, and Two Boys in South American Jungles, by Grace B. Jekyll (Dutton) cut to its taste...
...Intolerance is the most indestructible of human qualities...
...Moult's labor has been enormous, and doubtless it would be hard to find a better anthologist, yet it calls for no great power of memory, or of diligence in reading magazine poetry, to be able to name recent poems better than many which are given a place in the book...
...THERE can never be too many good illustrations for Shakespeare...
...If we would stop regarding Mr...
...At any rate these questions lead into the background that need not be explored, for evolutionism is presented as a unifying concept that may be based upon a mental, spiritual or material cosmos, or all together...
...And he has an occasional power of concentrated suggestion which marks him as a genuine artist, though perhaps an unconscious one...
...New York: Simon and Schuster...
...Again it is even more difficult to determine if the tastes of a child are normal for his or her age...
...2.50...
...It is chock-full of the enticing...
...The naturalist and the supernaturalist are at odds...
...One can hear the echo of Pontius Pilate's "What is truth...
...This stage of his development is clearly reflected in On Contemporary Literature, which is the best of his books when regarded objectively but the poorest when one relates it with the author's idea of life...
...mischievously, out of an abundance of high spirits...
...Borsodi's antagonism to religion is every whit as pronounced as his antagonism to factories...
...Because it illuminates from so many points of view this problem of the compatibility of life in America with the highest purposes of the expressive spirit, Sherman's biography is eminently worth reading...
...He sees in the Bible only "a compilation of some of the sacred books of a barbaric Semitic people, and the writings of the followers of a possibly mythical Jewish messiah...
...At least we can pray that the Light which enlighteneth every man who cometh into this world will some day enable them to see the true basis for Christian unity...
...This chapter ends, as do the others, with a section that criticizes the data and offers possible non-evolutionary explanations...
...But if we may borrow a suggestion from Summer Wish, there are two voices within her: one implacable, the other proclaiming the detachment which comes from looking upon the largeness and the oneness of nature...
...and such books as The Genius of America are admirable manifestations of a spirit which hungered after a truth that would endure preaching...
...and this is an admirable biography...
...but to speak with coarse contempt of things which your neighbor holds sacred and dear is certainly not beautiful...
...That tale with its references to recent history, the haunts of the former kaiser, the cataclysm, and the final fall of the curtain under the calcium of the world, accompanied by a universal sympathy, is sublime drama...
...The very weaknesses and indecisions of Sherman may incite a sluggish generation to bear in mind that wrestling with truth is its most imperative, and possibly even its most beautiful, vital function...
...He was evidently a very good soldier, and his recital has the competence and simplicity which come from being centered about the workmanlike doing of a job...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...The appearance of Emily Dickinson's unpublished poems gave him an opportunity which he could not afford to miss, and he has found a Portrait by Elinor Wylie which may well serve as the epitaph for that rare talent...
...But Miss Lee is out to stop war, and while no more noble purpose can be imagined today, a thesis is not the stuff of which an enduring novel is made...
...It is considerable in that bright particular genius of our own day, George Meredith, who so strikes us as hitching winged horses to the chariot of his prose-steeds who prance and dance and caracole, who strain the traces, attempt to quit the ground and yearn for the upper air...
...First published more than twenty years ago, it has gone through almost as many editions as years...
...and, without reference to persons and places, is indicative of what the prospective purchaser of the book may expect...
...The War God Have Mercy on Us!, by William T. Scanlon...
...Among the new men is Stanley J. Kunitz, who has come ahead so rapidly during the year, and whose Men Do Not Ask for Much is the best sonnet in the book...
...According to my own experience with types like Fritz, the book does not ring true...
...He is interested in everything under the sun, and gets his ideas everywhere: the city streets, the laboratory, the graveyard, and from such things as billboards and telephone wires...
...second, because they will recognize their duty to bring such a book to the attention and knowledge of others, urged by the precept of charity to the neighbor...
...The Noise That Time Makes, by Merrill Moore...
...Passages in these volumes are singularly vital even now, and yet Paul Elmer More was certainly correct in saying of them as a whole that they preached idealism rather than humanism-a theory and not a sequence of facts...
...We are told about the Rhenish wines...
...she has both the knowledge and the craftsmanship to bring off what she has attempted...
...The theistic evolutionist can be as good an evolutionist as any other...
...3.00...
...Once before, some half-dozen years ago, his publishers had him under a nice white stone with a collected edition of respectable weight and reputation...
...SO MANY books by Hilaire Belloc have recently appeared that those all too numerous souls who manifest their interest in literature principally by reading and gossiping about reviews and publishers' announcements may consider a reissue of one of his old books to be rather unnecessary...
...Mr...
...Newman continues the movement of the harmony by presenting much the same thrill in the charming relations of the contrasting Goethe and Schiller who were perfect friends, writing to each other daily when not together...
...how the powerful influence of Irving Babbitt persisted with a young professor who set up at the University of Illinois with some misgivings...
...Briefly reviewing some of the season's crop of books for youngsters is, therefore, an undertaking which can merely aim to be helpful with no guarantee that the purpose will be achieved...
...and the promise of an immediate glorious future under an entirely new but well-settled political regime...
...Mr...
...2.50...
...and when the subject-matter is so poetic as The Tempest, he is likely to succeed better...
...But even this elevation by those most qualified to judge, did not bring the public to him...
...T. C. No Epitaph Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson...
...We know that conditions could and should be bettered...
...It will also bolster the notion that wherever poetry is collected and classified according to subject or mood, it becomes very tedious...
...Moult himself will not agree that Archibald MacLeish's Reproach to Dead Poets, which appeared in the Yale Review some time last winter, is one of the best poems of the year, or of five years, the reviewer will cheerfully memorize every line of The Best Poems of 1929, including Mr...
...There is, however, only one person I know who could adequately understand and appreciate this book...
...New York: Henry Holt...
...Borsodi has in mind is rather an unlovely civilization, hard, grasping, and mechanical, which lacks leisure for enjoyment and intelligence to enjoy...
...The more swashbuckling The Red Prior's Legacy, by Alfred H. Bill (Longmans) appeals to more mature readers than the foregoing, but both boys and girls in their middle teens will find it a nice parallel to such tales as The Days of Bruce, and The Lion of Flanders...
...The Man against the Sky, The Town down the River, The Three Taverns-these were already a part of our literature...
...The book upholds no dogma, nor has it any point to prove...
...Evolution to Date New Views of Evolution, by C. P. Conger...
...There is much more of the immortal preservative in Mr...
...all excite us with a renewed perception of the deathless courage of our race...
...No man ever had better friends, better in every sense-in their intellectual endowment, in their affectionate and playful company, in their capacity to understand, in their sheer nobleness of mind...
...New York: The John Day Company...
...At first the ''humanistic" ideal was enough, though Sherman could never bring himself to enlarge "aristocracy" beyond the circumference of the individual...
...The illustrations by Donald Maxwell in their own medium share many of the qualities of' Belloc's prose: they are simple, strong, suggestive and charming...
...He had always more fame than popularity, and more popularity than notoriety...
...And in the same poem are lines which almost parody the later Elizabethan manner: "Those pheasants whose proud tread Made royal summer fields Hang speckled crop to crop, And strung before the gamester's shop The hare stares out with frozen eye...
...The author recognizes that fact...
...It is the least depressing, and in some ways the most remarkable...
...We have not instruments to grasp a phenomenon so vast, to render to scale its brutalities, its blunders and its exaltations, or to measure the momentum with which it rolled across the life of the world, seeming to efface the normal pattern of the human will like the pressure of doom...
...5.00...
...To threaten your fellow creatures with a hell of your prescribing is an ugly thing to do...
...Destroy both, and mankind will become healthy, wealthy and wise...
...Important leaders-possibly whole bodies-are wistfully seeking after some sort of union...
...The lyrical element, the natural foundation of his self-expression in poetry, interfered with his art as a novelist...
...The evolution of nervous systems and minds is next treated and the same impartial scheme is followed...
...The mass and carry of his poetic energy seems to be still unimpaired, and, aided by a lengthening garrulity (almost pardonable in a man who sees so many and ' such diverse aspects of any given situation) Mr...
...with decorations by James Dougherty...
...Consequently, the reunion of the whole of Christendom seems to be postponed to an indefinite future...
...Through Germany with Newman Seeing Germany, by E. M. Newman...
...There are illuminating views of Leipzig, Heidelberg, Frankfort, the Rhine, of course...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...If this is perfectly clear and definite, it is equally clear that no corporate body outside of the Roman Catholic Church is willing to give that acceptance...
...It conveys with a faithfulness that is startling the double mind of the soldier...
...Probably the most absorbing chapter is the one about Bayreuth...
...He always said that prose fiction was his kitchen wench...
...As a whole, the volume has not the directness nor the accuracy of a Baedeker, nor the generous erudition of an enthusiastic traveler who knows and appreciates the magnets in great places that haunt and lure with the thrill of "seeing" things, realizing all that he has brought with him...
...Wagner and music are almost synonymous...
...6 shillings...
...No one saw that more clearly than Henry James...
...2.50...
...And we go to Cologne...
...Geographically, it thus covers more ground than Mr...
...translated from the German by Winifred Katzin...
...Twentieth-Century Love Poems...
...but never a loud-voiced contemner of the forces which have led man on his way, and built up the imperfect civilizations of the world...
...But in Dresden, who can forgive Mr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...A fine adjustment of life and mind to experience may produce a sceptic, a philosopher or a man of faith...
...Arcadian Panacea This Ugly Civilization, By Ralph Borsodi...
...Various evolutionistic philosophies are then discussed and the book ends with an estimate of evolutionism...
...a collected edition is usually an epitaph...
...TO read this book carefully requires a great deal of courage-Even to read it in a cursory manner demands a certain amount of patience...
...The strength of the evolutionary explanation arises, he believes, from the necessity for an ordering concept to arrange the data...
...but it is possible that if Meredith had been free from the necessity of earning his living, and able to confine himself to writing poetry, almost anything could have happened...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 2
