Books
Ryan, John A. & Riggs, T. Lawrason & Boyd-Carpenter & Mitchell, Broadus & Sharp, John K.
BOOKS The Marseillaise France, A Nation of Patriots, by Carlton J. H. Hayes. New York: Columbia University Press. $4.50. THIS volume deals with "the means by which Frenchmen of the present day...
...In the case of Dreyfus, Clemenceau believed him guilty, but he was roused by the clear evidence that the conviction of Dreyfus had been obtained by a breach of the law...
...was not, as certain critics would have it, a question merely concerned with the messiahship...
...The final chapters are thus a disappointment, and the reader, having been led by skilful argument to the conclusion that the vacancy of Our Lord's tomb is a historic fact inexplicable on any natural grounds, is likely to feel a marked sense of anti-climax during the discussion of matters which are after all of very secondary importance...
...The illustrations, some of them in color, maintain a rare objectivity...
...Their statements to the effect that Christ had threatened to destroy the temple and rebuild it were indeed conflicting, but all agreed in the mention of the three days' interval...
...Things emerged from that old-world story," he tells us, "which previously I would have thought impossible...
...Morison concludes that the stone was moved by the guards because "something happened which caused one of the watchers hurriedly to awaken his companions and to proceed to a closer inspection of the tomb...
...The South grows more and more urban...
...New employments besides the cotton factory are opening...
...The organizing campaign now in progress in the South, backed by the American Federation of Labor in much more than a formal way, is based on the assumption that Dr...
...The high priest's adjuration, "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Living God...
...It can be seen that he lived vividly, aggressively, and all persons who so live leave behind them many fellow-citizens, who can only see the fighter as a political enemy, the keen and caustic writer as an unpatriotic scribbler...
...The sluggishness and lack of constructive independence in the Southern cotton mill worker are the inevitable consequences of his history and environment...
...After excellent chapters on the testimony of the most important witnesses, Peter, James and Paul, the effect of the book is completed...
...Public education has become a major purpose in the section...
...The author maintains that their national psychology is communicated to Frenchmen by agencies which operate in many modern countries, but that a distinctive influence has been exerted upon, and a distinctive element imparted to, the French national psychology by "historical circumstance...
...What is the explanation...
...It is argued with considerable force that the Jewish authorities would have felt obliged to make sure of the procurator's willingness to condemn the Prisoner early on Friday morning, and that someone, probably Caiaphas himself, visited Pilate for this purpose late on Thursday evening...
...At the same time, however, there flourished certain centralizing factors which fall under the heads of national institutions and national traditions...
...Finding that the facts did not fit into the mold of dogmatic rationalism, he nevertheless resolved to follow them wherever they might lead...
...The hours between Christ's condemnation and death are analyzed with interesting results concerning the probable whereabouts and activities of His followers...
...Morison writes, "seems to me very nearly beyond the possibility of doubt...
...Morison interpreted Caiaphas's charge and Christ's acknowledgment more correctly, he would doubtlessly have emphasized a point which certainly concerns the problem he has so thoroughly studied...
...MacDonald's book revealed more of the minds of the workers...
...New York: Harcourtj Brace and Company...
...Rhyne...
...Such is the author's thesis...
...Rhyne wrote, particularly that of raw mill hands at Elizabethton, Tennessee, have done much to confirm the hopes of the Federation of Labor...
...THIS is a study of 500 families, 2,362 persons, in four mill villages of Gaston County, North Carolina, each village being taken as representative of one of the four main types in the county: the rural mill village, the cotton mill town, the suburban mill villages, and the company town...
...2.50...
...It arrested and depressed certain centrifugal forces in the national life and prepared the way for the great agencies of popular propaganda which during the nineteenth century produced a special national psychology...
...It was the effect of Claudia's message which, according to Mr...
...Jtj...
...The narrative is human, humble and dryly humorous...
...NOT the least interesting chapter in Mr...
...That it does not so end was the author's conviction after further study of the events that followed until the first Easter morning...
...The centrifugal forces, long active in France, are social cleavage, linguistic division and provincialism...
...Rhyne's view of the cotton mill worker is incorrect, or at least that the southern operatives may be roused to collective action in their own behalf...
...There are five appendices which present extracts from typical school texts, a guide to teacher-societies, an informative list of periodicals and guides to daily newspapers, Parisian and provincial...
...Chief among the former are politics and religion...
...The dominant historical cause of this national feeling, this supreme national loyalty, was the French Revolution...
...Henry Correvon is certainly one of the chief masters of this art, and his book is the finest thing of its kind yet offered the American public...
...In the next chapter various hypotheses that have been offered to explain the Body's disappearance are carefully weighed and all found wanting...
...Slowly but steadily his mind turned as the evidence was examined and, when convinced, the columns of L'Aurore daily bombarded the general staff, until opinions changed and convictions faltered along the path of doubt...
...The chapters dealing with these events are well argued and well written...
...Its acceptance by Our Lord, followed as it was by the statement that He would sit on God's right hand, constituted a claim to divinity...
...What could have caused them to break the seal—a necessity ignored by the author, and aptly emphasized by the Dublin Review...
...2.50...
...And aside from these evidences, some who know the cotton mill worker well have always believed that he possesses not only an ability to understand his rights, but to fight for them with determination and, what is more, with wise moderation...
...What he does not hesitate to assert is that the study could not have been planned or carried with greater objectivity, with stricter adherence to the scientific method or with a more sincere endeavor to consider all the pertinent facts and to interpret them with entire impartiality...
...One misses a few items in the bibliography, notably Braig's life of Kleist...
...We cannot," the author very aptly says, "insist on the strict reign of causality in the physical world and deny it in the psychological...
...Sharing the prejudices of his age against the historicity of the Gospels and the possibility of miracles, its author had planned a short monograph on the last seven days of Christ's life...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...Yet it is hard to feel that he has done more than add another guess to the considerable number already extant...
...The descriptions of the Boulanger incident and the Dreyfus trial are deeply interesting, in bringing out how the Wilson scandal, which involved a traffic in the Legion of Honor and other Republican decorations, was but a prelude to the fight over the political adventures of General Boulanger which provided Clemenceau with the opportunity to settle some of the matters which he considered he had outstanding with M. Grevy...
...Morison argues that in the primitive account he was an ordinary human being, probably the same young man who fled away naked from Gethsemane, and who is supposed to have run to the tomb on hearing from the guards that the Body had disappeared...
...IN EATLY bound in excellent leather, the present Oxford edition of the Imitation is one of the most attractive and usable pocket issues we have seen...
...Yet no Catholic can fail to be impressed by the book as a whole...
...3.50...
...It was, however, adopted by Canon Bigg for his "revised translation"— one of the best and most scholarly small editions of the Imitation ever offered...
...Labor is bound to become scarcer...
...While the basic quality of the French national psychology is nationalism, the term does not, as used by the author, connote "militarism or imperialism or spread-eagleism...
...This peculiar —and unique—influence is described in the introductory chapter, entitled, The French Nationality...
...Morison implies) is then supposed to have learned of the interview from her husband, and her dream about Our Lord to have been thus suggested...
...Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press...
...It should be remembered that he had seen and lived through the Franco-Prussion War of 1870, the Bismarck attempt to threaten France in 1875, the incident of Schnaebele, and the more modern menaces hidden under German activities at Tangier, Casablanca and Agadir...
...Broadus Mitchell...
...Hence, Frenchmen "are a nationality, with a national psychology which has real roots in ancient, mediaeval and modern tradition but which in latter times has artificially been pruned and trained in order to produce the perfect flower of supreme national loyalty...
...Looking at all considerations squarely," says Mr...
...In one important respect, however, Mr...
...Morison discusses the apostle's conviction that their Lord had risen, the effects of this conviction, the absence of all controversy as to the fact of the empty tomb, and the ease with which the Jewish authorities might have demolished the whole movement had they possessed contradictory evidence...
...I think he is vastly mistaken...
...As to the identity of the young man in white, Mr...
...This volume is well worth reading, though perhaps the most striking and distressing revelation of the book is that of the loneliness of Clemenceau, which became more and more pronounced in his last years...
...To these four heroes the Tiger said: "Don't expect any reward from the world around you—you have to seek that within yourselves...
...The French government is the most highly centralized and the most formally national government now in existence...
...It is still true, as Burke said, that "Little minds and great events go ill together...
...Rhyne is a little equivocal about the possibilities lying in the cotton mill population, but the following may be quoted as a typical statement: "The natural aversion of the worker toward effecting social relations with other groups, coupled with the nature of the mill village itself, seem to challenge the best efforts of social workers and others interested in the future of the textile population in the South...
...That He said this singular and almost unbelievable thing," Mr...
...Pilate's wife (whose name and parentage are surely less certain than Mr...
...This book deals with his political career, from the day when he was appointed mayor of Montmartre to the eleventh anniversary of Armistice Day, when four old soldiers of France, two on crutches, came to pay their respects to the Father of Victory...
...For the author tells only what he knows in a matter of fact way and with the phlegm traditionally attributed to our British cousins...
...It is increasingly apparent that the operative is not a dolt...
...There is no such thing, in the mill operative or anywhere else, as a "southern psychology" distinct from economic causation...
...2.00...
...Son of God," as has been shown by Lagrange and Lebreton, was not a messianic title in general use...
...Professor Silz's comments on both are often suggestive and always well-considered, as witness his analysis of what "classic" and "romantic" meant to Friedrich Schlegel...
...This interpretation is, to say the least, highly debatable...
...They failed to visit him in his cottage near the Atlantic...
...The last three chapters deal respectively with: The Making of Frenchmen in Alsace-Lorraine, The Propagation of Regionalism in France, International Propaganda in France...
...Those who are acquainted with any of the other books written by Dr...
...Be that as it may, the Oxford Imitation should appeal to many in search of an appropriate gift...
...Yet it may be assumed that, if this brilliant polemical and political writer of France could see the present rising tide of praise and flood of antipathy, which the books concerning himself have raised, he would probably greet all forms of criticism and praise with some pointed, but satirical, comments upon the uses of the dead as proselytizers...
...Its arguments are to a great extent familiar to students of our own apologetics, but it presents these arguments in a singularly fresh and forceful way, and, if it has been advertised in a somewhat sensational tone, one may at least hope that it will give to a wide circle of non-religious readers the spectacle of a courageous sceptic who was really willing to follow the historical evidence of the Resurrection wherever it might lead...
...Its scholarship is impressive, its argument searching, and though its author has chiefly studied "liberal" critics, he is free from the arbitrary disregard of human realities that fequently characterizes their reasoning...
...Morison, "we receive an impression of this far-off event which is not only true to the narrative but which is palpably true to life...
...The story in the making was a hard, grimy time, but the reading is pleasant and absorbing although the print is rather fine for visual comfort...
...The following eight chapters describe in detail the operations of the vast and complex national machinery for making patriots: The Government and the Bureaucracy, The Educational System, The Army and Navy, The Churches, The Press: Newspapers and Magazines, Radio and Cinema, National Societies, Symbols and Ceremonies...
...6.00...
...And that is something we have all wanted to do again since we read Belloc's Path to Rome...
...Rhyne believes that the operative is generally indifferent toward welfare work, though most will agree with him that "the time has not yet arrived when welfare work can be entirely suspended by the manufacturers...
...Efficiency" methods are entering southern mills, and inviting revolt of workers...
...Thus for the moment we must expect, as a rule, partisan views upon this forceful personality...
...He intends it to denote merely that "supreme devotion which Frenchmen bear to their nationality and their patrie...
...Though much within this book is old and will be considered as not of news value, it has this use—that it serves to show any student of human affairs that humanity in our own day is very like that of the later years of the nineteenth century...
...We are driven to the conclusion," he writes, "that when these women reached the tomb they really did receive the impresion that the Body had gone...
...To students and other discriminating readers not the least gratifying features of the work are its "documentation" and its index...
...According to the author, it is provided in part by that "lowest common denominator of the various French philosophies and patriotisms" which has been discovered and exploited by the French intellectuals, but even more by the "new engines of education and propaganda" which have impressed the aforesaid teaching of the in286 THE COMMONWEAL July 9, 1930 tellectuals "on the minds of all Frenchmen while everything else has been slurred over and blurred...
...He Is Arisen Who Moved the Stone?, by Frank Morison...
...Statistically it is the best study that has been undertaken on broad grounds...
...Most prominent among the other unifying national traditions are those designated as military, missionary and colonial, economic and cultural...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...Yet its effect is distinctly impaired by the final chapters, which deal with the problem from which the book gets its title, and with the identity of the young man in white garments whom the women found at the tomb...
...T. Lawrason Riggs...
...By all ordinary standards of human reasoning," he adds, "the mystery attached to the Person of Christ ought to have terminated with His death and burial...
...The reviewer is not sufficiently acquainted with the history of France to warrant him venturing an answer to the question whether the thesis is proved in the subsequent chapters...
...The author clearly traces the growth of Clemenceau's feelings against Germany...
...Despite modern anticlericalism and its divisive force, the unifying influence of the Catholic religion during many centuries made possible the later centralizing achievement of the state and explains the existing homogeneity in social usage and custom...
...It was in connection with that of Casablanca that Clemenceau, when the German ambassador indicated a desire for his passports, made the astonishing reply: "The Cologne Express leaves at nine...
...2.50...
...It contains excellent chapters on such subjects as garden planning, discusses varying types of design and appends a remarkably complete catalog of available flowers...
...Our Lord's "I am" (or its equivalent) was therefore "blasphemy," which a claim to be the Messiah would not have been, and made His condemnation certain...
...Morison hints that it may have, this particular result would seem the most unlikely conceivable...
...and I am sure that you will find it...
...John A. Ryan...
...L HE rock garden is steadily gaining in popularity, not merely because it affords the born horticulturist a great deal of fun but also because it is peculiarly well suited to many landscape conditions obtaining in the United States...
...This was a sufficiently formidable and complex task...
...The hopelessness of the poor white on the land is pretty much transferred with him to the cotton mill village, thinks Dr...
...THIS volume deals with "the means by which Frenchmen of the present day are rendered supremely patriotic, the agencies by which French national psychology is fashioned and fortified...
...Surely no ordinary occurrence could have led to such drastic and illegal action...
...And if something mysterious occurred, like St...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Spindles and Looms Some Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages, by Jennings J. Rhyne...
...Church, faith and prayer show new aspects in the light of his adventures and he recounts the miracle of happiness all experience at Lourdes...
...Though the fate of Captain Dreyfus hung in the balance, the French public gradually saw the vision that Clemenceau, Zola, Labori were in reality defending the republic against the reactionaries...
...But he eventually found himself writing a work far different from the one he had planned...
...May it not be dangerous to rely upon texts to the almost complete exclusion of social data...
...There follows what is perhaps the book's most powerful chapter, The Crux of the Historical Problem, in which Mr...
...One curious error, however, proves that even the Oxford University Press may nod...
...These judgments will force themselves upon any unbiased reader of Professor Hayes's volume...
...It is well indexed and printed, the scriptural quotations are italicized, and the volume bears the Imprimatur of the Archbishop of New York even though the references are not to the Douay version...
...Morison, can alone explain Pilate's attitude toward Christ...
...ERE is a study pure and simple by one who sought to throw light on two matters: the origin and definition of Romanticism, the character of Heinrich von Kleist...
...Had Mr...
...Briefer Mention Rock Garden and Alpine Plants, by Henry Correvon...
...Early German Romanticism, by Walter Silz...
...The report of his conclusions begins with a detailed and searching study of Christ's trial before Caiaphas, and then goes on to investigate the activities of Judas and of Pilate...
...It is only seven o'clock...
...A Pilgrimage Tramping to Lourdes, by John Gibbons...
...it gives a measure of conclusiveness to many questions already more than broached, especially in Lois MacDonald's Southern Mill Hills...
...He comes of precisely the same blood as the dominant class...
...The politicians of France forgot him, when he could have been made president...
...The author does not take an optimistic view of the cotton mill worker's future so far as it depends upon his own ambition...
...Your excellency will have to hurry not to miss the train...
...Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, as Mr...
...Such a volume will be appreciated by everybody who is even partly a naturalist...
...John K. Sharp...
...It is concise, comprehensive and discriminating...
...As a union member, and particularly as a striker, he shows remarkable loyalty, self-sacrifice, fervor and ability to reason...
...Morison's account of Our Lord's trial is inadequate...
...Rhyne's is more satisfying as a factual enumeration...
...These live too close to the political batttle to be able to place themselves in a true and accurate perspective...
...Claws The Tiger {Georges Clemenceau), by George Adam...
...He is known from other sources to have been overbearing and truculent, and his efforts to free the Prisoner came, on the supposition of a previous understanding, as a surprise and disappointment to the Jews...
...THE books upon the life, the character, the philosophy of life of Georges Clemenceau continue to appear—each heralded as the most penetrating interpretation of the man and his methods...
...The arrangement of the text in paragraphs according to Hirsche's edition is referred to as a "new feature...
...Thereby summarily calling the ambassador's bluff...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...There are observations on people and manners and on trivial incidents, of which some are seemingly more than coincidences...
...The strikes which have occurred in the textile South since Dr...
...The South is a focus of industrial activity...
...Morison rightly regards this fact as strongly confirming the authenticity of Our Lord's reported prophecies of His Resurrection "after three days...
...As economic causes submerged them, economic alteration is now giving them a chance to develop their powers...
...Hayes will find that this one fully maintains his undisputed reputation as the master of an attractive and effective style...
...3.50...
...It is a plain, unvarnished tale of 600 miles of road, done, almost as a tramp, for a sickly infant at the instance of his wife and the urging of the London Universe...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...Morison's book is his account of how it came to be written...
...Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas Kempis...
...Especially forceful is the treatment of the witnesses' testimony...
...New York: The Century Company...
...Its aim is "to expound and explain a national psychology which has inspired Frenchmen to effect and maintain an extraordinary degree of national unity and national optimism not only during the awful military strain of 1914-18 but also during the unparalled economic stresses of the decade of reconstruction from 1919 to 1929...
...While these traditions and institutions help to explain French nationality they do not of themselves fully account for the phenomenon...
...The poor whites of the South have the lowest standard of living of any AngloSaxon people, not because they are inferior natively, but because they were banished from economic participation by slavery, and then, in the impoverished days of the early eighties, were rescued by the new industrialism only at the expense of subjection to the lowest wages, the longest hours and the unquestioned paternalism of the mill management...
...The "lint-head" feels himself inferior to the rest of society, makes no contacts with the general community, does not conceive of himself as a citizen in good standing...
...At any rate, the introductory chapter is a marvel of analysis...
...Whether it has been performed as correctly and as thoroughly as the limits of human capacity would permit, the reviewer is not competent to judge...
...THE reader walks through France in this selection of the Catholic Book Club for May...
...In these pages the fighter, the man of action, appears...
...On the contrary, he begins to resent his disabilities, and is eager to cooperate with his fellows in collective union action...
...Yet this is not after all so surprising, because the reward of real men is often to be forgotten, to be ignored by small men...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 10
