Books
O'Sheel, Shaemas & Shuster, George N. & Wilson, P. W. & Reppller, Agnes & Zabel, Morton Dauwen
BOOKS Speaking for Labor J. Ramsay MacDonald, by H. Hessell Tiltman. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. $5.00. IT WAS, we take it, in order to catch a market that this interim biography of...
...Saint Bride and her lambs intruding upon the cow pasture, Saint Columba in his coracle glimpsed from a bare hilltop...
...For the Scottish Sabbath and the domestic system MacDonald stands sentinel, singing the Psalms as a sentinel might sing, "All's well...
...their strife never allows him peace...
...The Life of Mother Catherine Aurelia of the Precious Blood, by a member of the Institute of the Precious Blood...
...The collision between opposing factors in modern German thought before the war was only a prelude to the philosophical storms that accompanied the tragic events of the last fifteen years...
...The two little girls fastened with roller towels to the upper shelf of an old secretary so as to be out of harm's way, with the baby, who was in their care, fastened between them, and Grimm's fairy-tales for the amusement of the three, make a picture which should please all right-minded readers...
...This impression deepens as the book gets on...
...In Miss Chase's widely and delicately cultivated mind there is room and to spare for every figure that has lent grace to fancy and distinction to thought...
...His ink is apt to be mingled with saccharine, and he fails to realize that, in a portrait, the highest compliment is discrimination...
...Victory came at last and the Institute flourishes far and wide...
...In economics MacDonald, free trader and Socialist, stand poles asunder from Hoover, a protectionist and upholder of capital, but as peacemakers they entered into partnership...
...2.50...
...But his health has improved...
...His wife was actually a revivalist...
...Morton Dauwen Zabel...
...There used to be delightful romantic pictures of Killarney, of the fine old breed of steel engravings, all dripping with the unashamed sentimentality of a day less stern than this...
...Take a trivial yet typical instance of such eulogy...
...Howell has not yet heard of the Irish Literary Revival, or the Abbey Theatre, or Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, James Stephens, Padraic Colum-to say nothing of James Joyce and Sean O'Casey...
...He knows that the land he rambles in is now a Free State, and even that the Gaelic term is Saorstat, but he is not interested in how it came about...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...But since he managed to avoid any glimpse of the vast work going forward to hitch the Shannon for electric power, the Howell picture is therefore somewhat incomplete...
...It does not even illustrate the author's righteous love for the books she has known longest, inasmuch as Apuleius was familiar to her childhood only in the fragmentary story told by her grandfather, and innocent alike of the grossness and the naked cruelty which pleased the Roman mind...
...2.50...
...On the contrary, he sees in this venerable and comprehensive communion an expression of that international continuity, covering space and time, of which he is an evangelist...
...The Labor party has grown...
...How long he will remain at Downing Street no one can say...
...He is against Fascism but he is for the Italians...
...Hesse, an older man who had already achieved literary distinction before the...
...There is much genuine Irish lore in the book, and much racy Irish wit...
...Oliver has consistently drawn upon his personal experience as a student and psychiatrist...
...It ought to receive a wide reading, and the influence it exerts will be in keeping with the high purposes of its author's career...
...there is no reason why such a collection as this should not be very widely read...
...It is not enough that the Prime Minister should be "Labor's man of destiny...
...That seems to have been the way of it when Mr...
...Present-day American Stories, by Conrad Aiken, Thomas Boyd, Struthers Burt, Morley Callaghan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner and Stark Young...
...There were details on which Liberals disagreed with Labor...
...THE author of Victim and Victor has earned a wide and merited literary reputation...
...I think that a clear distinction should be drawn between his achievements in the domestic and foreign fields...
...These, it seems, were always springing to the lips of the two Americans as they made their way by train or boat or jaunting car about the pleasant Emerald Isle...
...Four Square is an unvarnished "yarn of myself," and ought therefore to be unusually interesting...
...The visionary student, eternally driven forward on his quest for truth and reality but always destined to fall short of his goal, has a part in many works from Tolstoy and Dostoievsky to Chekov, Andreyev and Bunin...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Having got so far on the road to peace, the question is now whether President and Prime Minister can associate the continent of Europe in their program of reconciliation...
...It is when Mr...
...The translation is clear and graceful, conveying throughout the spirit of the original...
...It was always in a certain perspective that Carlyle displayed his heroes...
...Rancor is to him the heresy of heresies...
...The trick becomes transparent after awhile, but no harm to the story for all that...
...to have bought this well-remembered game in a modern shop, to have looked eagerly for the pictures of Dickens, Carlyle and Scott, and to have found instead an unknown lady, "placid and assured," labeled Gene Stratton Porter, and underneath by way of identification, A Girl of the Limberlost-this is enough to make one doubt the much-vaunted benefactions of Cadmus and Gutenberg...
...But it was no more than a gesture and actual remedies were worked out on other lines...
...He is against French militarism, as he regards it, but he is for French democracy...
...Briefer Mention Poems of Justice...
...Teutonic Fantasy Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse...
...Oliver manages to convey to us some of the enthusiasm with which he labored and studied...
...So the bleak New England winter, freed from schoolroom lessons, was made beautiful by idleness and books...
...who nevertheless remained a student and a university man...
...HERE are eight stories, all of them interesting, most of them written with charm and distinction, and one, Ernest Hemingway's The Undefeated, which is a truly great story...
...The reason is probably that the book involves too many concessions to modesty, which is a virtue not to be indulged when one sets out to review one's own career...
...It was not easy to settle the vocation of one who was already reputed to be a saint...
...Doubtless it is journalism, not literature, yet such journalism has its uses...
...But if somebody else had told it for him, the outlines would be firmer and brighter...
...Clark's anthology includes such famous poems as Mrs...
...THE voyage of Magellan is one of the great opportunities left to the ambitious poet and novelist...
...It is none the less true that Dr...
...Howell and his friend David Lansden journeyed through most of Munster and a bit of Leinster...
...The narrative of Baltimore court work is fascinating, and I believe it will start many people to thinking about the possibilities in this conception of justice...
...and who devoted a generous part of his time to performing the duties of an Episcopalian clergyman...
...Withal, he does note rich farms and trim cottages as well as slum and cabin, but he confesses amazement at the "dignity of these residences" along the road out of Cork...
...the popular franchise was extended...
...Even so, this autobiography, disappointing probably because one had expected too much, manifests a courage, an idealism and a charity which deserve their chronicle...
...In spite of the fantastic material with which Hesse has clothed this legend, the reader soon comes to see in it a parable of the intellectual confusion of modern Germany...
...With Mr...
...GENERALLY one dislikes collections of poems selected according to subject, but this book escapes that prejudice...
...To MacDonald that kind of faint praise has become a compliment...
...Such a one is narrated in the half-dozen pages entitled Have You Martin Chuzzlewit...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Lossiemouth might expel him from a golf club...
...That MacDonald faced martyrdom with a cool foresight which counted all cost will stand forever to his credit...
...MacDonald is against Bolshevism but he is for the Russians...
...Perhaps the most engaging papers are those which record the random recollections of a childhood which held all that is best for children...
...Is it possible for the two forces, working together, to prevent a repetition of such a disaster...
...A tale of quiet descriptive beauty reminiscent of Sudermann is broken up by interludes of distorted symbolism, adapted from the expressionistic motives of modern German art...
...The idea that men like Shaw, Snowden and Keir Hardie, or even "Papa" Henderson and "Jim" Thomas, have had their souls supplied to them by Ramsay MacDonald is, after all, ludicrous...
...His stories are segments of autobiography pleasantly masked...
...New York: Greenberg...
...Forty years ago, Great Britain began to reap the results of an imperfect yet widely diffused education...
...Into this warfare he draws the people who cross his path-the young man who writes the prologue, the women he loves against principle, the friends he dares make...
...As a Socialist advocating a change in the industrial system, he has made little difference...
...Shaemas O'Sheel...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...Some of the illustrations by Joyce Margaret Howell are pleasing, and some are feeble...
...THE Golden Asse is a charming title for Miss Chase's handful of essays, but it does not really fit the volume...
...As an internationalist working for a constructive peace, he has made history...
...We have here not exactly an interpretation of MaeDonald's career, but at least what lawyers call the record...
...He opposed the South African war, and when the world war broke out, he declined office in the Asquith Cabinet...
...Beyond question, his very critics have been captured by his energy, his good temper and the radiant charm of his frank and open diplomacy...
...The conception of the psychiatric service which our author advances is admirable, and he tells his own tale with not a little humor and shrewd wisdom...
...translated by Basil Creigh-ton...
...To that attack on poverty and distress many men and women contributed-Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Canon Barnett, the Webbs, the Buxtons...
...IT WAS, we take it, in order to catch a market that this interim biography of James Ramsay MacDonald was compiled...
...From the days of the Chartists onward, the semi-Socialism of Britain has always overflowed with an abundance of soul...
...to demand justice is his obligation...
...It is evident that Mr...
...The popular press was created...
...The Belgians might arrest him as a spy...
...Hence, we have Lenin describing MacDonald's utterances as "the best example that could be given of that smooth, melodious, banal and Socialist-seeming phraseology which serves, in all developed capitalist countries, to camouflage the policy of the bourgeoise inside the Labor movement...
...Courageous Companions, by Charles J. Finger...
...but his very unpopularity, proving him sincere, became the basis of his subsequent prestige...
...Others told of seeing her black garments turn to white and red...
...What might have been a permanent majority, it is arguable, has been changed into a not less permanent minority, and to this day Labor, having failed to win 5,000,000 Liberal votes, holds office on sufferance...
...It is seldom that one individual can follow so many illustrious and beneficent pursuits, and Dr...
...His visit to Washington, arousing no unfavorable reaction either in the United States or Great Britain, means that the prophecies of Cecil Rhodes are fulfilled...
...Many of us are of the opinion that he managed to restore intelligence to its position of importance in the novelist's estimate of human life...
...As a Socialist MacDonald has been, indeed, less affective than "inspirational...
...Hermann Hesse has created such a character in the Steppenwolf, a man whose nature is dual-human, generous and noble on the one hand...
...Is that history...
...In other days he may have suggested that Karl Marx influenced more people than Jesus Christ...
...He is led to see how contradictory ethical standards failed to meet the problems of social and political morality in a huge national crisis...
...A RAMBLE ought to be an easy-going affair, and a rambler is entitled to see what interests him and ignore what does not...
...To recognize MacDonald as a superman is to render unto him his due...
...Oliver Remembers Four Square, by John Rathbone Oliver...
...On the other hand, Great Britain, by accepting that great change, has preserved the English-speaking world from the insanity of the second schism...
...However inconclusive the picture may be, it will provide material for profitable reflection, for it bears unmistakable marks of authority and acute observation...
...In those halcyon days of municipal poverty," we are told, "the long vacation lasted through the months of January and February...
...But it is a pity that he has chosen from the moderns so many mediocre specimens, and missed entirely the work of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton...
...since she was evidently not on the ramble, one guesses that she made her wash drawings from photographs and old pictures, hardly a promising way to go about it...
...In his vocabulary the word has receded into the background, and he has hammered his left wing, especially the Communists...
...The illustrations are numerous and amusing...
...but as a statesman he surveys all peoples as one family, sharing one destiny...
...There are little episodes in the life of every book lover, of every man or woman who "seeks in literature deliverance from mortality," that are as tragic as they are droll...
...In their more practical and realistic aspects, these problems have been treated in books as different as Arnold Zweig's Sergeant Grischa and Ernst Glaeser's recent Class of 1902...
...Tiltman claims for him a monopoly of supermania that he thus obscures the picture...
...wolfish, intolerant, solitary and derisive of all compromise and sympathy on the other...
...MacDonald's special remedy, the Right to Work Bill-which the present writer introduced to the House of Commons, MacDonald seconding-does not appear to be mentioned in these pages...
...He went to see a land of thatched cabins, jaunting cars and ivy-clouded ruins, and sure enough, such a land he saw...
...When, however, we turn to foreign affairs, MacDonald becomes important...
...compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark...
...But one does not come away from reading it wholly satisfied or convinced...
...Oliver is not really the central figure but merely a reminiscent onlooker...
...The only question was whether the Liberal advance would be eventually checked by a Conservative reaction...
...To create art is his privilege...
...and beyond noting the figures of a civic guard or two, he saw nothing of the new Ireland...
...In 1906 that demand resulted in an overwhelming victory for Liberalism, to which force there was added a small Labor group, led by MacDonald...
...Here is an interesting ministerial experiment, but one that does not come alive in the book...
...The novel succeeds in drawing a striking diagram of the contemporary mind in certain of its aspects...
...He tells us that MacDonald "has lifted the [Labor] movement from the dust and glare of the arena and given it a soul...
...The lengthy appendices consist of decisive speeches by MacDonald, including his historic condemnation of the war in August, 1914, and with the reports of these utterances not easily available, the reprints are worth while...
...who followed this work into its modern psychiatric ramifications...
...Ireland Out of One Eye An Irish Ramble, by Charles Fish Howell...
...3.00...
...2.00...
...Wormwood-for Thoughts, and A Kitchen Parnassus, are happy examples of such ineffaceable memories...
...BEFORE the foundress of this well-known Canadian community of contemplatives was permitted to follow the only life that she desired to live, she was a problem to many good priests and bishops...
...Her difficulties were not over after the establishment of the order...
...Under other conditions," we read, MacDonald would have made "a really fine golfer...
...Despite a handicap of "about twelve," hypothesis must discern in him a mute inglorious Bobby Jones...
...The uncertainty of British politics is not easily appreciated by Americans, living under a chronological constitution...
...He was against German militarism, but he was for the German people...
...He is a statesman, not an ecclesiastic...
...Howell's Ireland is like those good old romantic etchings...
...Howell is passing clever at weaving his snatches of song and his bits of carefully assimilated knowledge into the supposed conversation between himself and his crony and various native sons and daughters...
...It was an interesting gesture which did much to arouse opinion, both ways...
...Behind the frontiers and systems and alliances, there dwells actuality- flesh, blood, brain, health, disease, art, science and faith...
...They evidently prepared themselves by a commendably wide course of reading in Irish literature and reference books, but unfortunately whatever library they had access to obviously has not caught up with modern Irish literature nor burdened its shelves with much data on recent Irish history...
...to have grasped the fact that authors were men of attainment, and possibly of genius, whose names outlive the centuries...
...But his doctrine of friendship has saved him from a trace of animus against the Catholic Church...
...2.50...
...Many persons declared that they saw the Sacred Host turn to blood while she was receiving Holy Communion...
...Hessell Tiltman, hero worship is less of an art than an emotion...
...To have played the game of Authors as an intelligent child...
...But his red was only rouge and in others, where it is real, he tries to bleed it white...
...With Lloyd George declaring war on the landlords, there did not seem to be, in the year 1914, the slightest prospect of Labor obtaining an initiative...
...George N. Shuster...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...It emphasizes a point often forgotten, that the poet's only duty is to speak in his time on behalf of his fellow-men...
...His eye was peeled for blushing colleens and ragged men, and his ear attuned for rich brogue on the lips of jarveys, and sure enough he found his heart's desire...
...His opinions also have been adjusted to the great ultimate, as he regards it...
...He loves clean rooms, domestic affection and the pure religion that gives us household laws, but raging within him is a fire that withers his desire for comfort and love...
...The form of his mysticism may be described as a subconscious Presbyterianism...
...his initiative is vigorous...
...In these circumstances the novelist again finds practical use for a character in whom the old struggle between material self-gratification and resolute spiritual idealism is going on...
...There are excellent chapters on experience with criminal types, but in all of them one detects a note of hesitation- almost of shyness-which somehow leaves the impression that Dr...
...Chicago: Willett, Clark and Colby...
...But, broadly, the parties were indistinguishable and, in the main, it was David Lloyd George whose constructive energy produced the entire system of pensions, insurance for sickness and the so-called "doles" for the unemployed, which are the basis today of Britain's social reforms...
...but the progressive forces are divided...
...Moreover the "tribute" is not paid to the asse Lucian, but to a well-kept and contented little donkey named Richard which dragged her and her sister-when it was so disposed-along the country roads and byways...
...And as a description of the natural beauties of the land and its jeweled lakes and garlanding seas-as a portrait of the face of Ireland, or its southern part at least- it is a masterpiece...
...The Saints in Maine is a delightful adjustment of alien spiritualities to a Puritan background...
...Socialism and capitalism, working against one another in 1914, failed to stop the world war...
...What MacDonald really contributed to the Labor movement was an electoral strategy, masterful and subtle, by which the funds of reluctant trade unions were mobilized for a party, independent of Conservative and Liberal affiliations...
...New England Suns The Golden Asse and Other Essays, by Mary Ellen Chase...
...P. W. Wilson...
...I am particularly afraid that this verdict applies to the chapters, which everyone will respect, devoted to religion...
...The two sides of his soul stand in fatal opposition...
...To him the map merely presents the surface of this planet...
...He typifies the many men, particularly in European countries, who have felt this enmity revived in their souls by the conditions of modern life...
...It drives him from town to town, a malcontent among men, happiest when, like the lone wolf of the steppes, he is cut off from the world with his passion for truth which the world always tries to corrupt and render incomprehensible...
...Here is a man who studied medicine and eventually became medico-legal adviser to the courts of Baltimore...
...My own view of MacDonald is simple...
...2.SO...
...Together they cover the past seventy-five years, and in that time surely no poets have spoken out against injustice with more effectiveness, constancy and sustained poetic judgment than these three...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...Well, never mind, 'tis pleasant to come upon numerous bits of too-much-neglected Tom Moore, and to find honor paid to such good old ballads as The Shandon Bells and Molly Ma-lone...
...Whether he actually heard the ghost stories and tales of magic which he puts in the mouths of Dan and Biddy, is a matter for conjecture, and unimportant...
...THE novel of post-war Germany has revived a character who invariably put in an appearance in the novels and plays of nineteenth-century Russia...
...2.50...
...In the Person of God MacDonald absolutely believes...
...It is...
...The negative and the positive in his career should be, as it were, associated in his undoubted personal magnetism...
...So was he reared, and the boy is father of the man...
...To the Protestants of Ulster, Chesterton once ascribed the virtues and limitations of a sentinel...
...To peace MacDonald has sacrificed more than his prospects...
...His life has been devoted to cultivating international friendship and friendships...
...and this, at a moment when emotionalism has all but swept fiction back to the shores of Henry Mackenzie, has been no slight achievement...
...2.00...
...Browning's The Cry of the Children and Blake's Jerusalem...
...So with Europe...
...We are told that collections of short stories are not popular...
...Like Eugenie de Guerin, she simply and naturally turns the dross of the commonplace into pure gold...
...Bebel in Germany, Jaures in France-these were the pioneers who, with MacDonald, formed the Second International...
...He becomes a symbol of man's divided nature, groping for the means of reconciliation which some are destined never to find...
...Agnes Repplier...
...Their aims included social betterment but their dominating impulse was directed toward peace...
...On the wisdom of that policy there have always been two opinions...
...He appears in the works of Werfel, Thiess, Ricarda Huch, and especially in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain...
...war, writes with charm and variety...
...Frustration haunts-him, and in his torments of indecision he tries to slay the wolf, but cannot...
...On the one hand, the centre of gravity in finance and industry has crossed the Atlantic...
...A religion that unites is to him an ally...
...The fact is that Charles Fish Howell writes more than passing well...
...and there was a demand for a higher standard of material well-being...
...It is a long while since the present reviewer has encountered book or essay or poem in which the obstinate stuff of words has been so triumphantly used to convey the colorful and living sense of the beauty of mountain and glen, lake and river, field and strand...
...This is a novel based on that voyage...
...and his association with President Hoover is significant...
...It is skilfully planned and pleasantly written...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 6
