Books
Ryan, John A. & Farley, Ambrose & Agar, William M. & Brunini, John Gilland & Chase, Mary Ellen & Larsson, R. Ellsworth & Mitchell, Broadus
BOOKS Ethics in Sociology Society and Its Problems: An Introduction to the Principles of Sociology, by Grove Samuel Dow. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. $3.00. THIS is the third edition of a...
...8.00...
...It is a pity that Strzygowski's book could hot have been put into better English...
...Then after many voyages back and forth he returned finally to this country to live with his family, secure at last in his position...
...Poet and painter, Gilbert Gale is balanced precariously on that frail fence which divides madness and sanity...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith...
...Among other contentions, more or less ably illustrated from the recent works of Lytton Strachey, Emil Ludwig and Andre Maurois, the author insists that the new biography "is essentially detached and dispassionate...
...Only Mr...
...THIS readable book presents the story of a truly remark- able man...
...Nevertheless, the book is a useful one of its kind and contains no more misinformation than the average text-book of practical sociology...
...Every important topic is here discussed with authority and talent...
...3-50...
...In addition to an introductory chapter, it contains six parts which deal respectively with Social Forces, Population, Evolution of Social Institutions, Analysis of Society, Social Pathology, and Social Progress...
...Chidsey...
...its enthusiasm is infectious...
...I must admit that the chief significance to me of Mr...
...These writers do not make the hasty mistake of reprobating mechanical advance...
...It convinces you that the factors which are responsible for low-cost production are not the only ones in the mind of the expert...
...We are gravely informed that the Irish "are our leading politicians and swing the vote of their nationality almost as a body...
...It holds out some hope that work, even that performed under greatest speed and pressure, may approximate play...
...It is the very bias of Strachey, yes, even the very blasphemy of him, that makes his portraiture so diabolically charming...
...In The Poet and the Lunatics he has developed his ideas about madness more lightly, though no less effectively, than he did in his opening chapter of Orthodoxy...
...In consequence the reader of the usual round of detective stories, since he must crack many shells of abstract dissertation before he can reach the kernel of crime and its solution, will find Gilbert Gale much less satisfactory as a successor to Father Brown than Home Fisher...
...TO ALL whom the lore of European building and ornament fascinates-and likewise to all who are themselves engaged in structural art-the present book by Professor Strzygowski may be recommended with genuine enthusiasm...
...The world had rejected him and placed his name among the indolent and the wasters...
...The Enchanted Mesa...
...And accordingly they moved to place him with the crazy...
...Strachey a spectator, an impartial observer of Cardinal Manning in Eminent Victorians, of Lady Hester Stanhope in Books and Characters, of Philip II in Elizabeth and Essex...
...When they appear at all (and they are most infrequent) they are given almost entirely to the addition of some dramatic detail instead of to references which might prove of real assistance to the more ambitious reader...
...3.50...
...The biographer of the new school," he writes, "is neither a hero-worshiper nor a detractor...
...edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld...
...One wishes his foot-notes were more adequate...
...New York: Dodd, Mead and Company...
...John A. Ryan is professor of moral theology and industrial ethics in the Catholic University of America, and director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference...
...E. E. Cummings, whose typographical experiments have too long obscured the depths to which the roots of his poems are engaged in the English language, can be said really to adhere to an English tradition of poetry...
...Endowed by nature with charm and a variety of talents as well as some of this world's goods...
...3.50...
...Unless one attributes more importance than they deserve to the earliest poems in this collection, poems not yet wholly alienated from the direction English poetry was taking in America during Mr...
...His enemies could not admit the wisdom of righting the world by looking at it upside down...
...As a matter of fact, the sociologist with his theory of social progress cannot help passing judgments upon the value of actions in relation to the goal of social progress...
...He develops the ability to "go on the wild journeys of such wild minds," but is generally able to find his way home again...
...On some controverted questions, for example, the sterilization of defectives, the book is more conservative than the majority of manuals of sociology written by non-Catholics...
...2.00...
...The topics which it presents are in the main those which find treatment in most of the larger text-books of practical sociology...
...From the transmuted Symbolism from which was derived Imagism, to Dadaism, Surrealism and finally the Neo-classicism of Paul Valery, one finds in these fifty-odd poems of Blue Juniata mementoes of all of those revolutions and counter-revolutions with which the steady accumulation of tradition has appeared, in France, to be impeded, in much the same way that an avalanche appears to be impeded by the boulders that presently it will pulverize and assimilate as part of itself...
...its style, though in no sense distinguished, has vitality and alertness...
...Yet those nationalities form a very much smaller proportion of the population than the Irish element forms of the inhabitants of Boston...
...One statement is as true as the other, as misleading and as malicious...
...This book furnishes a more humane picture of psychology in its practical industrial applications than others have done...
...Cowley's writing is toward a complete assimilation of the French tradition...
...and Star-Dust and Stone...
...Queen Anne's General Marlborough, the Portrait of a Conqueror, by Donald Barr Chidsey...
...But those to whom detective fiction is not an intellectual holiday will find even greater satisfaction in this new figure...
...From childhood on Audubon loved the woods and its inhabitants, chiefly the birds...
...The book, in short, is pleasantly young, like Mr...
...The lunatic is the man who has lost everything but his reason...
...But it is not wholly as a technician that Mr...
...All these irresistibly draw the attention from the subject of the biography, the Duke of Marlborough, to the biographer himself, and not, we venture to assert, to good purpose...
...The second topic is of absorbing interest...
...No evidence is provided in support of this interesting piece of pseudo-information...
...E. E. Cummings's nonsense novelette is hardly above the level of similar efforts in the college comics, and distinguishable from them chiefly by Mr...
...Two chapters are devoted to relatively special topics: the pre-Romanesque art of the Croa-tians, and the royal tombs of Scandinavia...
...Or one might point out that for the last twenty years it has been "almost impossible" to elect anyone to the office of governor of Minnesota who was not a Scandinavian or of Scandinavian extraction...
...yes, and that's true in philosophy as well as art...
...Because he is a poet-and to be a good poet, according to Mr...
...LUNACY has always been an absorbing subject for Mr...
...From this experience the poet gains an insight into the mind of the lunatic, for he is at once "like him and unlike him...
...Gilbert K. Chesterton and from its incredible and fantastic jungle he has frequently emerged with truths that are as startling as the soil from which they sprang...
...one overlooks Mr...
...He is the author of A Living Wage...
...Loose generalizations, unscientific statements of fact and superficial judgments seem to be about as frequent in this work as in the average sociology text...
...IN THE Atlantic Monthly for March, 1929, there appeared under the title The New Biography a diagnosis of those manners and methods which seem almost too common to most of the present-day biographers...
...One more example of the things that are not so which he offers us, falls under the head of politics...
...Nor is that tone helped by occasional explosions into a mild profanity, into slang and into a flippancy of language devoted particularly to descriptions of amorous intrigues which, although they may in Charles II's court have been as careless as Mr...
...The solid timber construction of early eastern Europe may indeed, as Strzygowski contends, have developed its own forms of vault and cupola...
...But it contains very little in the way of first-rate prose...
...In many ways his book is captivating...
...After bankruptcy forced him to take stock of himself, he finally realized that he could not continue to live two lives...
...Briefer Mention The New American Caravan...
...One forgives a kind of smart journalese, both in style and viewpoint, which repeatedly lends a superficial tinge to rather serious matters...
...moreover, it is derogatory to the tone of the book...
...Even if they are not intended to be such, they will be so accepted by the average reader or student who has not derived from some other source a definite ethical code...
...2.50...
...He is commemorated in marble and bronze, and in the name of the society -that protects his well-loved birds...
...The story of the years that followed, spent alone in the woods or wandering from town to town selling pictures of animals or painting portraits for a living, is an epic in perseverance...
...The attempt of the author (who is an associate professor of sociology at the University of West Virginia) to distinguish between sociology and ethics, and particularly his assertion that "sociology leads toward ethics but stops before reaching it," are not entirely convincing, nor borne out in the subsequent pages of his own volume...
...Broadus Mitchell...
...the keen analysis of character and mood, are present...
...F J. Sheeb is the senior member of Sheed and Ward, publishers, London...
...Painting landscapes, Gale was wont to stand on his head for, said he, "it's a very good thing for a landscape painter to see the landscape upside down...
...Mary Ellew Chase is a professor of English literature in Smith College, and the author of The Golden Asse and Other Essays...
...Four chapters on wood architecture form the heart of the volume and contain its "message...
...It suffers from an overabundance of episode and verbiage that merely divert attention from the central theme and add nothing of authenticity to the picture of a young Jewish student's revolt against a czarist government, his travestied trial, banishment to Siberia and escape...
...The Catholic Church, as a rule encourages large families in order to increase the number of adherents...
...Hunting Hidden Treasures, by Harold T. Wilkins...
...The director, Dr...
...Glenn Ward Dresbach is a poet of Chicago, -whose books include In Colors of the West...
...He gained almost immediate recognition and soon succeeded in having his monumental volumes published-full-sized colored plates of 1,065 birds, from the eagle and the turkey down to the smallest feathered creature...
...Chains, by Joseph Delmont...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...Ambrose Farley is a reviewer for the critical press...
...The adherents of the Catholic Church, he says, "have a much lower regard for woman than Protestants have...
...He is not a lunatic, for "the lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return...
...they recognize that ameliorations for the human complement must take the machine and its progressive improvement for granted...
...He drew and painted them...
...What a danger or, as it eventually turned out, what a boon was the limitless wilderness of America in the early nineteenth century to such a spirit...
...His standpoint is that of the spectator, the impartial observer...
...Jessica Powers is a contemporary American poet...
...Following are a few examples taken at random of these faults...
...Indeed, it is this tendency to extreme subjectivity in attitude and in treatment, this inability to lose oneself in one's subject, which seems to one reader at least the outstanding, not to say unfortunate trait of most of the new biography...
...but "objective" and "detached" and "dispassionate," never...
...Mementoes Blue Juniata, by Malcolm Cowley...
...1.25...
...Cow-ley's volume is that of a literary handbook...
...Rev...
...The flair for outlining a murder, real or projected, with circumstances that are weirdly arresting...
...and Frederick Law Olmstead, a Critic of the Old South...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...And this is true of the majority of our modern experimentalists...
...He lay long hours in the forest watching them, and indelible imprints of their form and color and actions were etched upon his mind...
...Stoyan Christowe, a former special correspondent from the Balkans, is a frequent contributor to current magazines...
...His days were still clouded by doubts and financial worries, but his star was at last in the ascendant...
...There are, however, a small number of compositions, notably Leander and Two Swans, which have more than a historic importance...
...These judgments are essentially ethical...
...But he made capital of his seeming weakness, and lived to receive the applause of that world as the fruit of his unbounded faith and energy...
...Chidsey appends an adequate bibliography to his study...
...For their gratification, Mr...
...THIS is the third edition of a work which, we are informed in the preface, has been used in "some hundreds of schools" and the second edition of which "passed through fourteen printings...
...Chidsey's English, might well be depicted with a bit more dignity...
...New York: The Macaulay Company...
...Cowley to preface three of the five sections of his book with sketchy references to the post-war scene...
...One's mind at once jumps to a dozen illustrations which surely refute such a statement...
...Wilkins has looked into "unprinted sea logs and diaries in the historical archives of the British Public Record Office and the British Museum," colonial records, old newspapers, and so on...
...Its incidents are well chosen and well executed...
...Since Gale did the only sane thing in a topsyturvy world, he must be crazy...
...The present volume, one in the Home University Library series, is a case in point...
...New York: Brentanos...
...Despite the rare appeal of its subject-matter, this volume is as hard to read as an immigrant's diary...
...Then there is a most instructive chapter on Norwegian mast churches, which leads one to believe that this northern country is destined to get its share of future architectural pilgrims...
...It expresses a point of view which the author has previously defended against sceptical critics, which is probably to be accepted with caution, but which is definitely stimulating, challenging and suggestive...
...The chapter on the nature of sociology is more intelligible and concrete than many other conceptions and statements of the science which the reviewer has seen...
...For Mr...
...Even so it deserves a hearing and will (one hopes) get it...
...R. Ellsworth Larsson...
...Many facts here recited show the ignorance and bigotry of both masters and men in opposing the applications of psychology to industry, for such opposition has often resulted in less ease and lower earnings to the worker, and less product and more friction for the employer...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...Nevertheless, a pleasure in its vitality cannot blind one to its faults...
...New England's Naturalist Audacious Audubon, by Edward A. Muschamp...
...and Social Reconstruction...
...L, A. G. Strong, professor at Oxford, is the author of Dublin Days...
...One might parallel this with the statement that for a much longer period of time it has been impossible to elect any important official in any one of a half-dozen southern states who was not white, Nordic and Protestant...
...It must have entailed no slight labor, and we trust that he will not now go unrewarded...
...Strzygowski holds that the northern races not merely made a real contribution, but that their purpose in building was unique and therefore creative...
...In view of the population trends throughout the western world in the last few decades, his assertion that "the world already shows indications of soon being overpopulated" is unpardonable...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Humane Production Industrial Psychology...
...Cowley's background is almost wholly French...
...Cummings's ability to keep it up longer...
...John A. Ryan...
...finding in a facile cynicism a dry substitute for the possession of a world galvanized and made whole...
...He says that for the last twenty-five or thirty years it has been "almost impossible in Boston to elect a mayor or, in fact, almost any other official who was not Irish or of Irish sympathies...
...William M. Agar is professor of geology in Columbia University...
...One is inclined rather to regret that Gertrude Stein once remarked of them that theirs is a damned generation, feeling that statement to be one in which they find a sort of morbid comfort...
...His point of view is theirs-arisen from "a feeling of timeless melancholy, dry, reckless, defeated and perverse," a feeling of impotence to call order into "a world of bric-a-brac," as Jean Cocteau has named it...
...Cowley's adolescence, through Robinson and Frost, it is necessary to admit that the direction of Mr...
...married, moreover, to a competent, steadfast wife-one would have expected his genius to blossom early and endure long...
...edited by Charles S. Myers...
...Twelve of its thirteen chapters were prepared by members of the staff of the British National Institute of Industrial Psychology...
...Johannes Mattern is a member of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and the author of several treatises on phases of political science...
...Perhaps it was consciousness of this impotence and some uncertain embarrassment concerning it which prompted Mr...
...It is a volume of short stories united by a central character-roughly, mystery stories, but mystery stories the like of which have never before been written, even by Mr...
...It is in the sequences describing Haschel's flight that the author has risen to his finest descriptive powers...
...What share did northern Europe take in the development of architecture...
...It is therefore a work of some importance in its field...
...He decided then to stake all on his knowledge of birds and his ability as an artist...
...ENGLISH investigators, at least in the social sciences, seem to have a greater capacity than Americans for the compression of their results into clear, readable language...
...The acclaim that was his as artist and ornithologist, and the later works that he published, are well known...
...In The New American Caravan the poets lead by a mile...
...Strachey, he shares like the others in the virtues and the vices of the new school...
...Chid-sey's apparent passion for jocular words, for terms and expressions now inedequate, now overdone: "puzzlement," "double-quicking it in fine style," "hypocritical affectation...
...Myers, in addition to his editorial work has supplied an illuminating introduction...
...CONTRIBUTORS Francis D. Walton is the aviation editor of the New York Herald Tribune...
...Cowley may be said to typify his literary generation...
...Donald Barr Chidsey in his new life of Marlborough can neither think nor write with the ability of Mr...
...WE TAKE a good deal of pleasure, and no little pride, in bringing this book to the attention of readers who have been waiting for a collection of the proper documents relating to buried and sunken treasure...
...But he was so completely unfitted to the tasks that the world set before him, so unable to cope with the business of making money, that his every venture failed...
...And they will be rewarded by writing which even Poe, considered a master in atmospheric description, does not equal...
...R. Ells worth Larsson, poet and critic, is the author of O City, Cities...
...The Madness of Gilbert Gale The Poet and the Lunatics, by Gilbert K. Chesterton...
...Northern Builders Early Church Art in Northern Europe, by Josef Strzygowski...
...Broadus Mitchell, associate professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of William Gregg, Factory Master of the Old South...
...Half-timber churches, on the other hand, are seen as forming the major achievement of the Celts in the art of building...
...Chesterton's art in transforming a quiet English garden or a wayside inn into a sinister and grotesque background is unique...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Ambrose Farley...
...The Poet and the Lunatics does not fall into any ready classification...
...They have a faculty for writing little big books...
...To presume that they were added to the book out of embarrassment seems the kindest thing to do, for the presence of this emotion would indicate consciousness of the fact that even impotence can discover more splendid attitudes for itself than those in scale with Paris bars, "the old pretzel women," "the business men dictating to three stenographers and a dictaphone...
...It is eager, fresh, sparkling...
...They are subjective to the last degree of subjectivity...
...But The Poet and the Lunatics is more singularly rich in philosophic discussion, the individual plots have been made more subordinate to the thematic material, than in either of the Father Brown books or The Man Who Knew Too Much...
...The author says that moral codes "are subject to change and differ with time, place and condition...
...The undeniable fact that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, Queen Anne and James II are made to live and move and have their being in these pages cannot entirely compensate for the author's constant intrusion of himself...
...New York: John Day...
...1 HERE is excellent poetry in The New American Caravan, notably Phelps Putnam's Daughters of the Sun, and John Gould Fletcher's Ballad of the Great Emperor...
...Yvor Winters's essay, the most ambitious thing in the book, is a turgid piece of writing...
...Chesterton himself...
...Indeed the present volume of stories is an elaboration of the celebrated statement from the earlier volume: "The lunatic is not the man who has lost his reason...
...The first is dependent upon foundations too meagre to stir up much enthusiasm, but throws some light upon the important problem of Visigothic building...
...Winters, impressed with the specialness of his point of view, inventing a most ponderous expression for it...
...William M. Agar...
...In this he is typical of those contemporary writers with whom he has been pleased to ally himself as belonging to his "literary generation...
...His fond hope that our scandalously high divorce rate will soon fall, inasmuch as we shall soon be through our "period of transition" and will "have settled down to a new state of affairs," is not supported in his pages by anything like objective evidence...
...Deft, acute, searching he certainly is, and so are Ludwig and Maurois, Francis Hackett and Philip Guedalla, lesser craftsmen though they may be when compared to Strachey...
...Chesterton, one must be a little bit mad-he is able to paint portraits which are so unerringly true that they are caricatures to everyone but the sitters who understandably conceal both their dismay and their admission of the likeness...
...He is thinking of the comfort, even the pleasure of the operative as well...
...His use of the first person and of the second for that matter (for he has a nonchalant way of addressing the reader from time to time) is annoying...
...COWLEY'S selection from the verses he has published in random periodicals during the last ten years forms, in effect, a sort of handbook of contemporary literary history...
...The chapter devoted to them is virtually a commentary upon Bede's phrase-"more Scotorum"-to describe a type of structure common in the England of his time...
...This is a slovenly statement and a misleading one...
...An INTELLIGENTLY wielded blue pencil would have brought Joseph Delmont's Chains very close to an excellent novel...
...He sees things then as they really are...
...the bizarre yet authentic intellectual processes of solution...
...2.50...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...And although Mr...
...Or are we to believe, with the humanist, that all progress came through Rome...
...Chains is well worth reading for those passages alone...
...John Gilland Brunini is a member of The Commonweal staff...
...There are good short stories by S. Guy Endore and Robert McAlmon, but the majority of contributions in this form are lifeless: without body, thin, highly mannered and dull...
...We see him finally sailing for England unknown and unheralded...
...Constantly separated from the family that he dearly loved, knowing that his brave wife must support herself and their two boys, always poor and usually destitute himself, he accomplished the seemingly impossible task of painting most of the birds of America in their natural habitats...
...The whole volume goes to discredit the narrower viewpoint of the engineer...
...its detail always counts...
...Here are two dogmatic assertions of fact, both of which are untrue and for neither of which he offers the slightest suggestion of proof...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 5
