Books
Hawks, Edward & Bayard, Martha & Vernon, Grenville & Nickerson, Hoffman & Zabel, Morton Dauwen & Hollard, Mireille
BOOKS Cecil Rhodes and Others Dreamers of Empire, by Achmed Abdullah and T. Compton Pakenham. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. $3.50. THE title of this book truly suggests that empire is...
...Mencken she lives in Baltimore-and there the similarity ends...
...Both died before the coming of full success, but so strongly had they laid their foundations that lesser men were able to finish what they had begun...
...in which, for instance, to quote Miss Reese: "Death was a solemn fact, not to be run away from, but to be faced, a cup which must be drunk down to the dregs...
...Together' Nicholson and Lawrence, both having alternated throughout their Indian service between soldiering and protecting the poor from oppression, broke the great Sepoy mutiny and saved India to England...
...Their independence of viewpoint sometimes leads them to vary from the usual version of characters and events...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...MARTHA BAYARD...
...Isles of Romance, by George Allan England...
...Touching us only faintly in the distant Philippines, it touches England closely...
...Pierre, the Magdalens, Sable Island and the Islands of the Swallows lose their inherent romance when described by one who was too busy exclaiming "How romantic !" actually to savor romance...
...He compares what is called "modern thought" with the subjectivism of the Sophists, with this difference...
...MISS REESE is not a performer in the three-ring literary circus on which the eyes of the major portion of our literary reviewers are fixed...
...there is no means of testing it in relation to external reality...
...After the sinister defeat of St...
...She is past the age when the adventures and delights of life are accessible to her, but behind the mask of gentle romantic irony the germ of malice is working in the flesh...
...Possibly it cannot be otherwise...
...Islam opened its heart to him, and this sympathy of his combined with his high intelligence and boundless appetite for study, made him a marvelous interpreter to the West of the Moslems he loved...
...2.5o...
...We have appreciated particularly the sections devoted to the later compositions, notable the Winterreise cycle...
...Monmouth...
...Much bravado, endless intrigue, incessant plotting, a masonic atmosphere of secrecy, do not relieve the aridity of the pattern, nor make for true dramatic values...
...Valley Forge...
...The life of Anthony Wayne is "pictorially speaking...
...Also it was against Paraguay, not Uruguay, that the three South American republics combined...
...The chapters headings of A Victorian Village give a hint of the sort of book it is: The Smell of Cedar, The House, Ghosts, War, The Orchard, Daddy Black and Others-no "asking forbidden questions, no pumping hidden shame...
...In the end two lives remain unaltered...
...Cecil Rhodes lives in these pages somewhat less vividly than the other empire-builders...
...Mencken would no doubt be disinclined to grant Miss Reese the title of contemporary, for despite her German mother it is a talent which is quite frankly Victorian...
...Ticonderoga...
...In this respect it is by no means a new theory...
...Nothing is more stirring in this stirring story than the description of Wayne and his men standing in the orchard on that sweltering day at Monmouth, gracefully contemptuous of the issues of life or death, holding their fire against the cold steel of Monckton's grenadiers...
...Miss Cher reveals on every page a long-established knowledge of Roman ways...
...It is one of the best things we have seen this fall, and it is even further proof that in this language we have not his fellow...
...It is said that the Arabs met and defeated "the steel-clad legions of Rome," and while it is true that the seventh-century Roman troops were armored, nevertheless they were not legions but mostly cavalry...
...And here in this charming little book of memories she most delightfully proves it...
...Not that they lacked sympathy...
...Silvio, typifying the healthy pride and creative vanity of the South, goes on to new conquests...
...Abdullah is at no pains to whitewash the treachery and savagery of his Afghan countrymen...
...The tragedies and disappointments of her friends, seen through her eyes, assume a pathos of triviality which is intensified by the placid majesty of Rome...
...HOFFMAN NICKERSON...
...But Burton, although well able to assert his dignity when necessary, reveled in going native...
...Sometimes shiftless and cruel, he is almost always dignified and manly...
...New York: Farrar and Rinehart...
...The life of Waverly and the York Road-how Victorian they are in their sound!-is not the life that Mr...
...Where pure intellect halts may not some other "attribute" of the mind go on...
...EDWARD HAWKS...
...They are puppets often incomprehensible in their motives and purposes...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Although most of the facts about Wayne are included, some of them we must piece together from fragments of memory, from other books...
...But there is humor too...
...Yet we have the picture, in bold relief, of a man who, while delightfully free from pose or complex, had certain angles that his forward march through our history has obliterated...
...ANDRE GIDE'S new novel is brief (it can be read in an hour) yet it does adequate justice to a story which would have tempted any English or American writer into 100,000 words at least...
...Rhodes is followed by the picturesque figure of Francis Burton, wanderer, explorer, swordsman, author, scholar, linguist, hater of Jews and friend of Moslems, who alone of Westerners succeeded in visiting Mecca in Arabic disguise...
...The ensuing action may be only a display of satirical fireworks or it may involve a genuine conflagration...
...and the strange Russian girl, Tatia, who struggles between her Allegiance to Art and her desire for a happiness which Silvio alone can give, and who, rejecting the ardent protection of Henry Fleming, finally brings about his tragic death which breaks up the colony at the villa...
...It seems, however, to involve a gratuitous creation of a new spiritual faculty which is above the intellect, some sort of illative sense, or religious instinct...
...We see Nicholson chancing upon the dead body of his younger brother, stripped naked and mutilated...
...His battle-standard is silver sheathed...
...He regarded the British with a hot hatred but seldom despised or underrated them...
...He adheres resolutely to the subject, triumphing over all temptations to write temperamental biography or grandiose description...
...Wayne's life rhythm runs in staccato measure...
...TREMENDOUSLY interesting material is vitiated here by Mr...
...The Sophists delighted in the complete destruction of all objectivity, but the moderns delight only in the destruction of religious knowledge and wish to save the validity of their general knowledge of the universe...
...They sometimes rail a little at people or ideas they do not like...
...The theme is not one of international interest, and presupposes, on the part of the reader, an extensive acquaintance with the minor European civil wars and revolutions of the early nineteenth century...
...The songs are classified intelligently, the history of each is provided, and comment that normally seems very well advised is supplied wherever appropriate...
...Georgia ; The Winning of the West, with his great victory over the Indians at Fallen Timber and the conclusive peace at Greenville...
...ONE cannot too greatly admire the discretion and knowledge with which Mr...
...It is a book to be read and reread by all who are weary of a world where rest for the spirit is asserted to be out of date...
...2.50...
...The conflict between the intellectual caution and prudence of the northern temperament and the magnificent egoism and arrogant charm of the Latins has long provided modern novelists with some of their most fascinating problems, ranging all the way from the romantic interpretations of Marion Crawford and Hall Caine to the ironic comedies of E. M. Forster, Norman Douglas, Aldous Huxley and Thornton Wilder...
...The combination of Achmed Abdullah, the Europeanized Oriental, and Pakenham, who has spent so much of his life in the East that he might be called an orientalized Englishman, makes a strong writing team...
...Socrates, he says, provided men with a bridge by which they could cross from the ideal to the real by enthroning the faculty of abstract reasoning...
...And Miss Reese in her writing is always the poet, tender, exquisitely feminine...
...One sees Gordon scandalizing the bankers of the world, as they tighten their network of debt about the foolish Khedive of Egypt, by forgiving that unhappy monarch part of the arrears due to himself...
...THE title of this book truly suggests that empire is not primarily a bundle of statistics but a state of mind, perhaps a state of soul...
...Perhaps Maryland is a pleasanter state to live in than Illinois-and Catholics may be pardoned if they take pride in knowing at least one reason why...
...THIS is spirited, informal reading based on facts which, despite the apparent ease of the telling, are presented somewhat spasmodically...
...Edgar Lee Masters remembered in his evocation of another village, and yet the suspicion will not down that, taken by and large, Waverly is a truer picture of an American village than is Spoon River...
...The town never obtrudes in her narrative, but its ancient spell of grandeur, wherein the pomp and splendor of life is always mixed with the intimation of death, hangs over the lives of the English expatriates up at the villa and the art students down in the city...
...Fair Yesterday A Victorian Village, by Lizette Woodworth Reese...
...At Valley Forge he earned from his men, through his careful plundering, the affectionate title "the Drover...
...The School for Wives shows us the disillusionment of a sensitive and warm-hearted woman who marries a model young man, or rather, one who poses at piety, learning and industry...
...Boyd attempts no psychological study here...
...Her rich churches and palaces, her streets and gardens filled with the continuous roar and whisper of fountains, and her villas whence citizen and exile alike look down upon the glowing roofs surmounted by the great dome, remain to haunt the spirit of man and observe the shifting spectacle of his life...
...Sagacious caution controlled instinctive recklessness in Georgia and the West...
...Neumann has left out nothing, in his determination to portray for us the political chaos of Italy a hundred years ago...
...In the heart of the Miami country, in that "land of many rivers, running down to the brown, slow strong mother of rivers," stands the city, his last fort, named by his name...
...Pakenham spares us nothing of the baseness of Gladstone, sending Gordon to the Soudan and then, "with the telegram giving the fact of Gordon's imminent doom actually in his pocket," assuring the House of Commons "that the man was absolutely safe and it was unnecessary to hurry...
...Is it not possible to admit what may be called a "response of the whole man," which includes intellectual, volitional and emotional responses, and yet in its totality transcends them ? He thinks that there is such a response...
...they permit themselves flings of undiscriminating abuse of missionaries...
...The book is a dull one...
...Saint Louis would have been quite at home fighting side by side or sitting at wine with them...
...Such is the substance of the argument which is worked out in detail and applied to Christian institutions with the greatest ingenuity...
...Her talent has gradually flowered out of the silences of an uneventful and modest life, but it is a talent which, in its sensitiveness and delicacy, is one of the rarest in contemporary literature...
...He had his reward...
...the fatuous niece Adela who disdains the devotion of the painter, George Rose, and hunts the rarer pleasure of Italian romance which Silvio, the wilful egoistic artist, nearly succeeds in giving her after he deserts his loyal friend Tatia...
...Clair on the Wabash, Wayne's advance into the treacherous Ohio country was as prudently and vigorously carried out as Kitchener's march into the Soudan a century later...
...ONE who expects much of The Rebels from the extraordi-Onary workmanship and epic quality of The Devil, will be disappointed...
...3-S0...
...According to John Fiske there was more method than madness in him, however...
...The Villa and the City Up at the Villa, by Marie Cher...
...Establish a contact between North and South and the spark of vital emotional drama is immediately generated...
...Capell has discussed what is at once the most popular and most difficult portion of Schubert's work...
...It is when they touch Islam and the East that the authors get into their stride...
...In none of them are the responses divided, but they are not properly blended...
...And the maze of details...
...Yorktown...
...This seems so much the best and most practical book on the subject that one hastens to recommend it warmly...
...it is volitional when its object is moral goodness...
...Where Burton penetrated the oriental mind by sympathetic study, the great three dominated by a high justice and a clear purity of purpose...
...New York: Alfred Knopf...
...2.00...
...In mind and energy her characters are consumed by desire, jealousy and frustration, and they become so involved in their relations that in spite of Miss Cher's slight concern with the more elaborate development of her meagre plot, we come to see them inextricably entangled in the web they have created about themselves...
...On the other hand his achievement seems less lasting than is here implied...
...In this element we find the group of men and women Miss Cher, by her genuine gift for incisive psychological portraiture, has created-the neighbor Woodman, who recovers interest in life through his love for a sickly stepson, Henry Fleming...
...Its practical dethronement of the intellect places it in opposition to Catholic philosophy and, it is hardly necessary to say, its practical elimination of the need of Divine Revelation opposes it to Catholic theology...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...he captained his soul in months of weary waiting...
...but we have to disentangle them at every step from new characters, a merciless deluge of them, forever obstructing the view...
...He seems to fail, too, to maintain the proper mental perspective...
...Britons have seldom found it in them to go in wholeheartedly for native ways-for instance, in the early days in America, Sir William Johnson was their only eminent squaw-man...
...By her profound understanding of Rome's beauty Miss Cher invests her narrative with the breath of life, and by this virtue her novel carries an air of true distinction...
...Disregarding the somewhat irrelevant sketch of Walker the filibuster-picturesque but neither attractive nor deeply significant-the other five studies concern themselves with men who in their several ways helped build tip the imperial power of Britain...
...He modestly offers some planks for this bridge...
...6.00...
...Like Mr...
...In all human response to external reality the subject must act as a whole but the nature of the response will be distinguished by the external object...
...whose terse word at the despised Councils (which Hamilton called the Most Honorable Association of Midwives) was "Fight...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...New York: The Century Company...
...In the hands of M. Gide, neither the pathos nor the irony of the story is labored...
...Anticosti, Grand Cayman, St...
...Their emotional behavior is particularly extraordinary, and leaves one constantly frustrated...
...Religious response is the personality of man acting as a whole, and this whole is more in its unity than in its analyzed parts...
...Owing to biographical emphasis, the history here is condensed...
...England's style which is an excellent example of how travel sketches should not be written...
...But with all three clean justice came first...
...The elderly English spinster who tells the story that centers around her villa at Monte Mario is herself unable to remain aloof from these ominous complications which plague the careers of idle or irresolute people...
...A Victorian Village is informed with the melancholy of days long past, a melancholy touched with the fragile beauty of evanescent things...
...translated by Dorothy Bussy...
...and the spinster, still ironic, still disguising malice with gentleness, waits only for that final clarity of vision which comes before death...
...Yet, on being passed over by that "body of men calling itself the Congress," which talked while Valley Forge anguished and died, Wayne was one of the Revolutionary generals who neither resigned nor sulked in his tent...
...Briefer Mention The School for Wives, by Andre Gide...
...Defeated three times in as many weeks, bruised by a cannon ball, grazed by a bullet in that grey, ghastly fog of Germantown, he assured his wife it had been a glorious day...
...That he champions the validity of our apprehension of objective truth, in defiance of modern tendencies, will win him a hearing from Catholic readers...
...And he is not through: judging from its title, his next book is to be a sequel to The Rebels...
...Can we not admit something in man that will follow the intellect to greater heights in much the same way as the intellect follows the concrete image presented by the senses...
...The same concrete object presents opportunities for all the differentiated responses, but men will differ in the quality of their individual conclusions...
...Germantown...
...The response is intellectual when its object is truth...
...Delightfully written as this book is, especially in the western chapters where Mr...
...The scene of The Rebels is laid in Italy, at the time of the Carbonari revolt...
...This aloofness of theirs perhaps explains why their colonial history is more thickly strewn with revolts than that of the French, who have never lost a colony save by naval and military force...
...Bravado and Monotony The Rebels, by Alfred Neumann...
...After more than two centuries of repose, today he is moving again, and it might do us no harm to know something about him...
...It is the kind of situation about which Theodore Dreiser would go into agonies, Sinclair Lewis become most savage, and Sherwood Anderson break (again) his heart...
...Boyd finds himself again under the shadow of the Long Knives, it presupposes an amount of Revolutionary knowledge...
...The artist may not agree with the scientist, and both may differ with the moralist...
...And that is precisely what Neumann has achieved: a detailed piece of historical research, with a faint Sabatini flavor...
...The difficulty for those who substitute some sort of "experience" for Divine Revelation, is to prove that the "experience" is not a projection of our supposed religious needs...
...Brandywine...
...Nevertheless the reviewer has definitely spotted only two trivial historical errors...
...It is a theme for historical research rather than for a novel, because of its complexity and local interest...
...He had grandiose ideas, "vision" of a sort, courage and a gift for winning the confidence of the blacks...
...Far closer to the Faith than the Buddhist or Hindu, the Moslem has been throughout history the great enemy of Christendom, and may be so again...
...Their deeds are a moving story...
...Always a Soldier Mad Anthony Wayne, by Thomas Boyd...
...it is emotional when its object is artistic or imaginative...
...Three Rivers...
...Schubert's Songs, by Richard Capell...
...The Carbonari, one remembers, constituted a secret nationalistic party whose efforts were directed toward the unification of Italy, opposed by the Holy Alliance...
...The three remaining chapters, on Nicholson, Henry Lawrence and Chinese Gordon have this in common, that all three were Christian gentlemen if there ever were such...
...In the religious response, however, there is a whole response of the whole man to that whole external reality that is God...
...one sees Nicholson driving off with blows and curses the Nikal-saini sect of Sikhs who insisted upon worshiping him as at least a demigod...
...Undaunted he welcomed a court-martial after the Paoli affair, misnamed massacre...
...For one who found as early as Three Rivers that the breath of twisting smoke was his native air...
...The memories of Waverly are of a life leisurely, held in place but not stifled by tradition, a life in which the recognition of the basic virtues had not disappeared, a life in which the ultimate things were bravely acknowledged...
...Yet there is a third character that stays unchanged-Rome...
...and they pedantically spell Celtic "Keltic...
...Such an extremely low proportion of manifest errors commands the reviewer's faith in the authors' historical soundness...
...War, power and responsibility, that cruelly strip naked the littleness of little men, were garments of honor for Nicholson, for Sir Henry Lawrence, and for Chinese Gordon...
...And he walks, forever honored, through the pages of our history as we see him on the retreat at Three Rivers: "In a uniform of blue and white, with a ruffled stock and a cocked felt hat, the colonel was stalking along the muddy road, as if he owned it and dared anyone to deny the fact...
...A New Socrates What Do We Mean by God?, by Cyril H. Valentine...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...One smiles to think of the kindly Lawrence, allowed to work a very little at the Irish problem because of his great success in winning the confidence of people then considered an equally "inferior race"- in India...
...His indifference to material success was so well known that even the thrifty New En-glander, John Adams, commented on it in a moment of Wayne's martial glory: "This man's feelings must be worth a guinea a minute...
...AGENUINE and convincing atmospheric beauty pervades this story of English people in Italy, giving it a quality which sets it apart from many novels of similar theme...
...To this reviewer he will remain the author of The Devil...
...MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL...
...The chief characters do not fire the imagination, as did Louis XI and Oliver...
...2.00...
...But these are only little eddies which do not block the clear and sometimes brilliant flow of the narrative...
...it burnt brightly in them all...
...Yet I doubt that jaundiced natures and twisted lives were the rule in the Middle-West of thirty years ago any more than they were in the more human and civilized regions around Baltimore...
...He is moved while visiting Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas to "long to stage a movie there, or start a fishing-camp...
...Moreover the Mohammedan world is an interesting one...
...Physical danger had always the magic quality for Anthony Wayne...
...2.00...
...Our task were easier if they would, at least, stand out in relief...
...Admitting that abstract reasoning will never bring men to an adequate and satisfying knowledge of God, and wishing to avoid the necessity of Divine Revelation, with which the "modern mind" refuses to deal, the writer calls for a new Socrates who will make a bridge from the intellectual to the religious, such as the one which the old Socrates made from the sentient to the intellectual...
...Now the Islamic question, as recent newspaper despatches from Palestine have reminded us, is no joke...
...Ticonderoga was an "ancient Golgotha" to that restless, seeking spirit...
...THIS is not an easy book to read in spite of the determined effort of the writer to make himself intelligible...
...GRENVILLE VERNON...
...The Boers against whom he worked are today increasingly masters of South Africa, where the imperial connection means less and less...
...The effective possessors of that country seem likely to be either the blacks or the Dutch-speaking Afrikanders...
...If admitted, this response will not make religious knowledge independent of the differentiated faculties of the soul, but will, as it were, blend the responses of those faculties into a perfect harmony...
...MIREILLE HOLLARD...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 4
