Books
Larsson, R. Ellsworth & Chase, Mary Ellen & Morton, David & Hawks, Edward & O'Sheel, Shaemas & Purcell, Richard J.
BOOKS The Byron Tangle The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron, by Ethel Colburn Mayne. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $5-00. IT IS only rarely, if at all, that one comes upon...
...Schlump: The Story of a German Soldier, Told by Himself...
...But here are a man and woman who loved one another, and so married...
...2.50...
...and The Intimate Life of the Last Tzarina...
...In her later years Christ and the New Testament became almost her exclusive studies, and she was enamored of the Mass...
...New York: The Devin-Adair Company...
...One is willing even to accept that the romantic, the artificial nineteenth century was hardly the fit time for tragedy...
...crowbar brigades...
...In vain dost thou seek to restore her, oh queen, she was weary of war, Let us bear her away to the peace of the lonely and dream-trodden shore...
...It is minute and detailed to the last degree...
...Their roles are too great for them...
...The Miracle of Peille, by J. L. Campbell...
...In each instance, the life is one to which we can bring no experience that will authenticate it or help us to understand it-save that part of our experience, it may be, which we know to be exceptional and abnormal...
...Additional interest is evoked by the title of the book under review, since Robert Southwell, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is a poet of no mean order, as well as one of the glories of the Society of Jesus, who bore witness with his blood to the Mass and to the truths of the Catholic faith, pure and undefiled...
...translated by Eden and Cedar Paul...
...The first is a condensation of the Exercises of Saint Ignatius enabling the modern intellectual weakling to face what he might otherwise consider an appalling task...
...The key of Lady Byron's performance is set by an extraordinarily characteristic entry made in her diary after a waltzing party at which she first saw Lord Byron...
...It is for the descendants of these unhappy exiles that Father Cotter chattingly writes, with pleasant Celtic exaggeration, random thoughts as he muses over the legends, historical anecdotes and ruins of his native county, which he knows through hurried visits and fond reading...
...This is Mr...
...New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons...
...Why this is true, it is difficult to determine...
...or it can be read as a romance...
...Rev...
...For the book has merits...
...Spiritual Drill Manuals An Eight Day's Retreat, by Pere Longhaye, S.J...
...One of the Irish Choir Collected Poems of Eva Gore-Booth...
...A true poet she was...
...THE publishers are to be congratulated on these two translations from the French...
...Besides I cannot worship talents that are unconnected with the love of man, nor be captivated by that genius which is barren of blessings...
...They are idyllic, bucolic, idiotic on a farm in the East Country...
...He cannot even imagine that spiritual acceptance of personal sacrifice which consecrated the lives of Peguy and Reinhard Sorge...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...And Lady Byron-the sound of rage and abuse in her ears always, and worse, "the freezing sound of heartless professions-more intolerable than his uncontrolled abhorrence...
...They had nothing except one another- and even then, there was something one might envy, something like a light that was present...
...A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, by R. H. Charles...
...They lost the battle, in the end...
...Events are constantly impeded or protracted beyond endurance by correctness-tactful missions of friends, discussions, the never-ending continuity of written communications-and all this seems inalienably the characteristic of the period...
...Shaemas O'Sheel...
...Richard J. Purcell...
...the dialogue is more natural than most...
...it omits nothing either salient or accessory...
...She reports almost priggishly the impression he made on her, but one is more interested in her reason for remaining aloof from the company of Byron's admirers...
...There was something like light present where those two were together...
...Little more could be asked of a novelist than is offered in the first fourteen and last two chapters of this book...
...And there was darkness and utter defeat...
...Lady Byron's lonely death, and one of her letters: "It is not necessary to think ill of his heart in general-it is sufficient that to me it was hard and impenetrable, that my own must have broken before his could have been touched...
...translated by Bertram Wolferstan, S.J...
...The author was Eva Gore-Booth, who came from that same Sligo that cradled Yeats, and grew up in the sight of Knocknarea and amid the undying legends of Maeve...
...And yet one is vaguely troubled not to be more moved...
...it has small appeal for any except those directly concerned with the project...
...David Morton...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...Then, lumberingly, the end: the birth of a daughter to Augusta, the birth of Isabella's child, the separation: events indefinitely protracted by letters, interviews, consultations, interference of friends-and letters, letters...
...And to some man on the dole as he leans against a pub in Tipperary town, the descendants of Purcell of Loughmore are still interlopers...
...But they had had a deal of life-together...
...The point is that they should not be taken as representative...
...And Father Cotter tells of the "psalter of Cashel" in the Bodleian Library, of martyrs like Archbishop O'Hurley and the Dominican Barry, of Munster's king, O'Brien, meeting Henry II on the Rock, of Kickham the Fenian, who complained of the failure of Catholic seminaries to teach national history as he wrote the sad tales of Sally Cavanagh or Knock-nagow, of famous sons like Father Mathew, Archbishop Croke, Richard Lalor Sheil and John Lanigan, who professed ecclesiastical history in Pavia, of Father Sheehy at Clogheen, of O'Mahony, the Fenian from Carrick, of the ruins of Roscrea and its Book of Dimma in Trinity Library, of Laurence Sterne of Clonmel, of the ancient Holy Cross foundation near Thurles, and of the glen at Aherlow...
...and it was glorious for the clan leaders, but even all Tipperary men were not sons of kings...
...R. Ellsworth Larsson...
...Edward Hawks is pastor of the church of Saint Joan of Arc, in Philadelphia...
...One remembers Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and resents so banal a murderer as Mr...
...The way they open is a delight...
...Great tyranny and menaces, furies, neglects and even real injuries": such was the comment of John Hobhouse, Byron's friend, later during the endless arrangements for the separation...
...HERR RUHLE has written a moderately enthusiastic life of the formidable genius who aroused the world's proletariat to an understanding of class warfare...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...and she would ride a whole morning and have no idea where she had been...
...Both books are concerned with the elemental struggle for existence, where that struggle is carried on in its plainest terms...
...the Fenians...
...Good as it is, it may not be unfair to ask whether Mr...
...the pangs of the famine...
...Any priest, or any layman for the matter of that, may profitably add them to his library...
...Far away near the haunted Rosses where the sea shrinks out of the bay, And the world is a purple shadow from the green lands to Knocknarea, Where the sky is above and about us and the sand crumbles under our tread, And a rain-soft wind from the hills shall soothe the tired eyelids of the dead...
...but the material and the point of view are sufficiently important to merit attention from earnest students of economic history...
...THIS novel by Peadar O'Donnell need yield nothing to Brinsley MacNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows, or Liam O'Flaherty's Black Soul, in point of realism...
...His motives were obscure, perverse, hopelessly tangled...
...Thomas E. Bcrke, C.S.C., is a professor at Columbia University, Portland, Oregon...
...hangings and deportations...
...And none of his countrymen will resent a comparison between the Galtees and the Alps or the Golden Vale and even the Elysian fields...
...It is as though one were given the task of surprising into a mutual agreement three mirrors possessed of entirely different reflections which, regarded separately, are precise and definite, but opposed, become inextricably tangled...
...1.50...
...and his marriage to Brigid, and the long struggle to support life on a farm that the bog was sapping...
...tithe wars and boycotts...
...But it will be well for the world if it realizes how rarely the spirit triumphs in arms...
...with a biographical introduction by Esther Roper...
...The events in the lives of these three have at least the outline of tragedy...
...5.00...
...Her literary work-and we are promised a couple of volumes of her collected prose writings-continued unabated, and she contributed not only to Irish periodicals but to the Yellow Book and the Savoy...
...Where there is blame, it belongs to myself, and if I cannot redeem, I must bear it...
...Jessie Lemoht is a contributor of poems and art essays to the magazines...
...Inoffensiveness," she writes, seemed "the most secure conduct...
...This latter feeling, I think, one misses, both in O'Flaherty's Black Soul and in MacNamara's book...
...and occasionally straightened up their aching backs to look at the stars, and to take the spring wind in their faces...
...One seldom, in fact, reads a book that has less appeal...
...Schlump is without either enthusiasm or philosophy...
...He has first of all understood his subject and been in sympathy with it...
...Of course many of the early poems have only the value of the usual run of juvenilia, and of course she wrote too much, as we all do...
...For Mr...
...The elaborate evasions of the extraordinarily voluminous correspondence this rejection precipitated are of the period...
...Such was the prelude...
...IT'S a long way to Tipperary" for the modern wild geese, of whom no Irish county has exported more to the United States and the dominions...
...At the end of that season, Byron proposed marriage, and was rejected...
...Campbell could not have written a better one about a Therese Ursule who completed her mission without leaving Peille, to whom the little village was a sufficient empire...
...This one is the work of a surer hand, and a more mature and profound feeling is in it...
...the material of the story has possibilities...
...Marriage for Byron seemed the only way out...
...Briefer Mention An Appreciation of Robert Southwell, by Sister Rose Anita Morton...
...David Morton is associate professor of English at Amherst College, and the author of Ships in Harbor...
...that it errs on the side of caution rather than exaggeration...
...and to those who expect an exhaustive treatise on the inspiration, the technique and the literary imitators of the poet, the second (and last) chapter will also prove a disappointment...
...Broadus Mitchell, associate professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Willia.m Gregg, Factory Master of the Old South...
...Always a rebel county, Tipperary knew spoliations by Normans, Palatinates and English...
...the drama one of too far-reaching an implication, the stage too shadowy and vast, their understanding impotent to penetrate to and comprehend the play and make it as luminous and vast as one can conceive it, in another time, with less ignoble players: a Byron less the maniacal narcissist, a Lady Byron less or more the patient sufferer, an Augusta Leigh more conscious of damnation-or less, far, than Byron, in his infrequent, facile moments of repentance...
...But the reality of their love is there, as present as the bog...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...FOR many years my mind has been haunted ever and again by certain lines, among the stateliest in all poetry: "She is rescued from days and hours, she is lost to the years that pass, And the broken pride of her beauty shall lie near the roots of the grass...
...And she adds: "I am not desirous of a place in his lays...
...But more than anything, one is impressed by the inappro-priateness of the players to perform this drama...
...and the heroism of the struggle is as real as its hopelessness...
...When tourists appear, and particularly when Therese is induced to leave her village temporarily, the story loses in beauty without, one feels, gaining in power...
...By diligence and a great patience it is not impossible to discover in each of them something resembling order, but even this is immediately dissipated when one attempts to bring swiftly into their proper relation to one another the three separate orders one has achieved...
...But her last years were saddened, almost as much as Dora Sigerson's, by the events following Easter Week, 1916...
...IT IS only rarely, if at all, that one comes upon any evidence of a clarified and direct impulse finding clear expression in the muddy opacity of Byron's life...
...To Englishmen, Tipperary is fraught with meaning...
...It is really a book of meditations, sixty-six in all, which are arresting and provocative...
...He has not been sentimental and he has not been too clever for words...
...that it is minutely documented, largely by letters heretofore unavailable...
...2.25...
...Princess Catherine Radziwill of Russia is the author of They Knew the Washingtons...
...One cannot but regret that Father Cotter is so obviously opposed to the Free State and so partial to the Irish radical faction which gave sad evidence of vandalism rather than constructive ability...
...Its story of the thoughts that rush through a man's mind as he mounts the stairs to murder the most intriguing and tenacious of his mistresses is mildly interesting, although the man himself is incorrigibly flat...
...J. Elliot Ross is the Catholic member of the faculty in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa...
...1 HIS year, as English Catholics not only are celebrating the centenary of Catholic Emancipation but also are urging more enthusiastically than ever the cause of the English martyrs, we naturally turn with great interest to any book that promises descriptions of life in penal times and biographies of those who suffered for their faith...
...War is always a human interest...
...The exceptional and abnormal are legitimate material for fiction...
...Childe Harold had just appeared...
...The books are light, well printed and strongly bound...
...She was then eighteen...
...translated by Maud Monahan...
...Mary Ellen Chase is professor of English literature in Smith College, and the author of The Golden Asse and Other Essays...
...Stout's hero...
...Prayer for All times, by Pierre Charles, S.J...
...Augusta, too, was uneasy...
...The second book has a rather misleading title...
...Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press...
...The poignant misunderstandings, the frustrations, abuses, apologies...
...and the flowers on the potato plants are not permitted to obscure the bog which is sucking the life out of the thin layer of good earths-and out of those who till it...
...war against oneself, with Saint Ignatius as strategist, can become the epic of Everyman...
...As long as I live, my chief difficulty will probably be not to remember him too kindly...
...But surely more of drawing power is demanded of a book than the too prolonged mystery as to which mistress is to be the fortunate victim of a revolver...
...The conclusion is relatively anti-traditional, it being contended that the Book was written in Aramaic, about 165, B. C. Whether or not this figure can be admitted, Dr...
...After the marriage, when it was obvious comedy was not to be the sum of the events, there were scenes-on the jangled honeymoon, and later, at Six Mile Bottom, to which Byron conducted his bride to stop with Mrs...
...its form is prescribed and arbitrary...
...One wishes he were ironic, like Mr...
...Richard J. Purcell is a member of the department of history in the Catholic University of America...
...But-"I shall not refuse acquaintance if it comes my way...
...this is a novel of defeat...
...Perhaps another is that he lives on such a dead level of monotonous sexuality...
...He ought, one feels, to be tragic, but he is not even pathetic...
...Each one of them is about as long as a short sermon, and could be used as such...
...To those who expect to read a scholarly life, based on primary sources, or who expect to see Southwell against the background of Elizabethan manners, customs and politico-religious intrigues, the first chapter will prove a disappointment...
...the incoherent explanations that explain nothing, the partings-these appear rather the scaffolding of a tragedy, not the haunted structure of tragedy itself (in which one comes face to face with ghosts and knows them for only one's own reflection in an unexpected glass...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...and the mixed savor of life, the sweet and the bitter, will give any reader the feeling that he is in touch with the authentic article as it comes to all of us...
...No, the outline these events present is closed, in the end, around unfortunate scandals...
...The book may be used for a private retreat, for meditations, for sermons...
...X HIS book should make a considerable impression...
...But this poet who was encouraged by Yeats and A. E., who with such contemporaries as Katherine Tynan, Nora Hopper and Dora Sigerson formed the chorus to the great voices of the Irish renascence, left at her death in 1926 many poems well worth gathering and remembering...
...It is the best hagiological novel to appear recently in English, and this is only partly the result of Mr...
...I never had, nor can have, any reproach to make her while with me...
...A letter from Byron to Tom Moore: "I do not believe-and I must say it, in the very dregs of all this bitter business-that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady Byron...
...And at last, everything went...
...Perhaps one reason lies in the fact that the helter-skelter events of his life are so artificially arranged under letters of the alphabet- A to Q-an arrangement which by its very arbitrariness destroys the impression of reality...
...All lovers of high poetry must possess this book by one whose requiem might be these lines of her own: "The dogwood's dead, and a mantle red Over the corpse is flung, Bow down, oh willow, your silver head, Summer's silver and winter's red, Glory and grey and green have fled, All winds are silent, all sorrows said, And all songs sung...
...Since its romanticism was a borrowed one, adhered to falsely, doubtless it is Miss Mayne's intention to indicate awareness of this possibility when she repeatedly refers to the fashions of the period, to La Belle Assemblee and the boundaries it established beyond which it was not seemly to trespass...
...And of course the meditative attitude of Remarque-which presupposes a sensitive character-has no place at all in this book...
...Shaemas O'Sheel, poet, reviewer a.nd essayist, is the author of Jealous of Dead Leaves...
...They always escape unscathed because the practical wisdom of Saint Ignatius is for all time...
...John Chamberlain is on the staff of the New York Times Book Reviews...
...and twice as many lines more, the whole forming the Lament for Fionavar in a poetic play called The Triumph of Maeve...
...And Tipperary men have gone around the world in the armies of France, Spain and Austria, as members of the British garrison in India, in the Boer War, in Flanders and in the United States...
...Land was the big fact at the base of everything, in their lives-and Hughie's land was going...
...Be that as it may, it is none the less true that the influence of the period, the restrictions of the current code of behavior (if not of an integrated morality) is strongly to be felt in the affairs of the Byrons...
...2.So...
...Smith O'Brien and Michael Doheney at Ballingarry...
...Then they had, no longer, one another...
...Karl Marx, by Otto Ruhle...
...He marries Barbara Serenity (Bara) who, having been a little girl with heelless shoes and a flowing curtain of hair like Tenniel's Alice, even as late as 1919 was still wearing countless muslin flutings and always a geranium in her hair...
...It is the dark, despairing struggle of a peasant family against starvation...
...Leigh-scenes more in keeping with the skeleton of tragedy in "the Byron scandal": Byron raging at his wife, insisting on his relations with his half-sister...
...Schlump, a jolly good fellow with a streak of bravery, more than a dash of ability to shuffle along and a certain gross epicureanism, is as nearly the average soldier as anything we have seen in print...
...The parting comes through an inevitable Lucia, a plump and sprawling decadent married to a war casualty after the manner of Ernest Hemingway...
...The Way It Was with Them was his first...
...Stout's title, but he affects the reader with no irony...
...1.85...
...Their eternal freshness is brought out in this modernized revision, which is, however, loyal to the substance and spirit of the original...
...The narrative is straightforward...
...In his life and in the lives of those nearest to him, there is confusion only...
...It is more the result of his honesty...
...and a leader also in the women's fight for the franchise...
...and Frederick Law Olmstead, a Critic of the Old South...
...Father Cotter might have listed Tipperary men who made good in America, but like most Irishmen when pondering over the Green Isle, he looks backward rather than at the present and toward the future...
...Byron was uneasy about the direction his relations with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, were taking, and the gossip was becoming somewhat more unctuous...
...To the tourist of Irish blood, Tipperary has something to offer...
...Even seven centuries of possession have not cleared their titles in some Milesian eyes...
...and brought children into the world, and so struggled for them and for one another...
...the events they precipitated, grotesque, disproportioned...
...Of Miss Mayne's biography, one cannot say less than that it is careful, tactful, just...
...Thus far, except for asides, the play is to be a comedy-tedious and windy, but comedy nevertheless...
...and a remarkable woman...
...Edward Hawks...
...Charles's treatise is undoubtedly the most important that has appeared to date...
...The extremes of feeling are avoided...
...Campbell's skill as a writer...
...To all good Irishmen, even those born in the kingdom of Kerry, Tipperary signifies rich lands, robust men, virtuous women, brogueless speech, stout Catholicism, stirring nationalism and a romantic loyalty for lost causes...
...However, for those who make no such demands, this Appreciation, appearing at so auspicious a time as the present, will no doubt prove interesting and informative...
...Lanes Lead to Cities, by Georgina Garry...
...2.50...
...The asides give warning of what followed...
...The chief purposes of his rather large volume are to furnish a detailed life of Marx and to supply a panorama of nineteenth-century social conditions...
...To Father Cotter, all was rosy in the olden days of the O'Carrolls, O'Meaghers, O'Kennedys, O'Corcorcans and O'Briens...
...The story is of Hughie Dalach, and his growing up to manhood after the "hiring fair...
...2.50...
...So, too, are the arrangements for the marriage...
...3.40...
...The work is well done...
...That these statements have little to do with the tragic maze of three incredibly tangled lives may well be the fault of the period...
...Then money flies in at the door and George begins to breakfast in bed...
...Rev...
...But here is a stout volume of 642 pages (including some ninety-seven given to a biographical note and letters) to> prove that she was more than that...
...Mankind bows before me," she wrote...
...agrarian disorders...
...Byron was decidedly a success...
...He has written with sincerity, dignity and charm...
...And that mystery, we do not need the publishers' advertisement to tell us, is the chief, if not the only motivating power of this weary and unprofitable tale of a weary and less profitable soul...
...The casualty finally does Lucia in, by a long-drawn-out system of murder, which releases the erring husband to his wife, so all's well that ends well...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...At the end, what does one retain...
...It is for a different sort of poem, but equally Irish, that she is generally known-a masterpiece in miniature that has almost condemned her to be known as a one-poem poet...
...Day by day life was growing harder and more starved for Hughie and Brigid -and yet, it never grew quite dark...
...Anne Isabella made no attempt to have him brought to her...
...It circumvents the problems of biography adroitly and with skill, and leaves the novel's problems to the novelist...
...Such a nature turns naturally to the saintly exercise of devoted work for the unfortunate and oppressed, and Eva Gore-Booth, Irish landlord's daughter, was for years an indefatigable laborer among the textile workers of Lancashire-not as a philanthropist, but as organizer, teacher, counselor, editor...
...Father Cotter as a loyal son seems to resent the possessions of the Butlers as he speaks of the rightful heirs of the land...
...Round about Cashel Tipperary, by James H. Cotter...
...Divided into three parts-introduction, commentary, translation -it holds to a consistently clear perspective for which the scholar will be most grateful...
...Toward Darkness Adrigoole, by Peadar O'Donnell...
...Naturally enough, the second cannot be supplied without some concessions to a "tendency...
...ALTHOUGH the author of this story of the unknown soldier has manifestly followed the Simplicissimus pattern, with its fondness for caricature in low relief, he has written one of the most real of all books about soldiering in the recent war...
...The Exercises provoke from time to time the fire of criticism from those who hate to believe that a man must work out his salvation with fear and trembling...
...R. Ellsworth Larsson, poet and critic, is the author of O City, Cities...
...O'Donnell's second book...
...3.00...
...and Harvest...
...REX STOUT'S novel, How Like a God, has much in common with a painstaking report of a careful and exhaustive laboratory experiment...
...and in so great a body of work, the very merit of unvarying idealism becomes a bit overwhelming...
...bold Dan Breen's assault on the constables at Knocklong...
...CONTRIBUTORS Rev...
...CHARLES has written an exhaustive textual commentary on the various Greek texts of the Book of Daniel, utilizing vast research into the development of Aramaic speech during the centuries immediately preceding Christ...
...Her mysticism was no affectation, but the mark of a high soul: it is told that as a child she sometimes walked for days with sharp stones in her shoes, entirely unaware of them...
...Aside from all such considerations, it is welcome as a moving narrative of heroic struggle and enduring love-and the little sweet that nourishes the soul in its longest and bitterest travail...
...GEORGE MALLORY has red hair, an enormous frame, no mind and less character...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Augusta, to whom "concealment appeared a duty," making circuitous claims on Lady Byron's "inoffensiveness...
...Campbell is at his best when describing the various life of the hill town, and the attitudes which its people take toward their miracle-worker, Therese Ursule...
...Longmans, Green and Company...
...2.50...
...It is not a prayer-book...
...What clarification is to be achieved is to be achieved falsely, by examining singly the lives of Byron, of Lady Byron, of Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh...
...O'Donnell's book is especially welcome, at the moment, as offering a more representative and more largely human picture...
...Than the Rock of Cashel with Cormac's chapel, the ancient cathedral, the round tower, Saint Patrick's altar and its views of the Devil's Bit in the Galtees and the golden rolling plains, there is no finer relic of the past in all the British Isles...
...It was her second London season: she was a success...
...New York: The Vanguard Press...
...And that, readers will do...
...In addition, one retains a feeling that the "Byron scandal" was more relevant of a society than of human destiny...
...Detailed and Banal How Like a God, by Rex Stout...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 3
