Books
Winkle, Cortlandt van & Anderson, Walter V. & Boyd-Carpenter & Haley, Carmel O'Neill & Fawcett, W. McRae
306 THE COMMONWEAL July 16, 1930 BOOKS Uncaptured Chaucer The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer; translated into modern English verse by Frank Ernest Hill. New York: Longmans, Green...
...However, in spite of these and similar handicaps in almost every line of the original, Mr...
...The story is in its essence a romance of character and adventure woven around the life and work and tribulations and amazing death of Brebeuf in the Huron country, then held to be the end of the world and inhabited by the five potent Huron nations, distributed in over twenty-five forest palisaded towns...
...It deals with contemporary English society, and is frankly polemic...
...Rosenfeld: "American music is not jazz...
...and so forth...
...Milne to publish it as a novel with a split title...
...W HATEVER manner of woman the Countess Tolstoy may have been (and argument regarding the matter will never reach an end), it is certain she was an accomplished diarist...
...the sounds of his vowels are not ours, nor do we hear his final "e," softening and smoothing and lending a magical lilt to the numbers...
...Briefer Mention The Diary of Tolstoy's Wife: 1891-1897...
...Though the correspondence with Mr...
...And she went smiling, innocent and coy" is not the equivalent of "That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy," where "coy" means merely "quiet"—she didn't guffaw as did the good wife Alys...
...then it was the public that incontinently worshiped at his feet...
...For, with a veile that wimpled euery where, [His] head and face was hid, that mote to none appear...
...Marion Crawford is interesting and full of charming comment on life and things in general, as well as hints on how to avoid literary errors, there is little given to the reader of what the authoress herself thought and wrote...
...2.50...
...The figure of the marvelous Brebeuf is paramount from beginning to end, walking in the midst of mortal peril with an enchanted life...
...The relief in the volume is provided by the sparkling sense of humor possessed by the Duchess...
...Music: 1900-1930, by Alfred J. Swan...
...Hill is a poet in his own right, and if there must be a "translation" of Chaucer, he is one to do it acceptably...
...Not that one could do more in one hour than merely read, for Mr...
...First, it was his Scotch nurse, Mary Gray, who used to tell him "how the Gordons had murdered and had been hanged and drowned...
...And so I welcome Mr...
...THE numerous volumes of the Jesuit Relations, compilations of letters from the earliest French Jesuits among the Indians, are not uniformly exciting, but the reader is apt suddenly to find himself face to face with characters and events and incidents which set him wondering what manner of men these Jesuits were who were able to regard experiences so extraordinary as everyday happenings in their lives...
...He has put his art first and given us, on the whole, a worthwhile biography...
...But this is in marked contrast with her record of the world war in which trivialities abound...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...And then we follow Brebeuf and his companions paddling their canoes up the cataracts from Quebec to the Huron forests...
...But, unhappily, the antique song, the mellifluous melody that ravishes the ear on reading Chaucer, cannot be recaptured...
...Hill's translation...
...Benedict Fitzpatrick's highly wrought style, often praised, has never shown to better advantage...
...Her descriptions of diplomatic life in Rome are interesting and illuminating, especially the paragraphs dealing with the Austrian embassy before and after the arrival of the Prince Lichtenstein...
...Louis and St...
...Because this biography is longer than the biography of Disraeli and because it is decked in a more demagogic style, it is capable of being accused of an attempt to introduce Ludwigan commercialism and will be so accused by those on the lookout for such imitation...
...Andre Maurois happily strikes a medium...
...This chart of American musical expression is all modern, as indeed "American music" is a premature—almost a precipitous —term...
...I hope it is but an earnest of things to come and that we shall soon have from his hands a complete rendition of The Canterbury Tales, so that all who will may read it complete, or as complete as Chaucer left it...
...It is a slender book, made up of articles selected from monthly causeries which appeared in the Dial...
...and Chaucer wrote for auditors, not readers...
...In the first, Maurois saw a Disraeli who wore a mask in public to hide his inner personality...
...It is good verse...
...But is it proper to present him so often as a man who was not responsible for his acts...
...Don Juan Humanized Byron, by Andre Maurois...
...Nor is "A Knight there was, and that a noble man, Who from the earliest time when he began To ride forth, loved the way of chivalry, Honor and faith and generosity," quite the same as: "A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, That, fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrie, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie," where "worthy" means "distinguished," or "notable" (as in "noteworthy") ; "freedom" is properly rendered "generosity," but "curteisie," which means "elegance of courtly deportment," has been dropped from the translation...
...American musical history is a very depressing and dull affair at best (to date) but Mr...
...He is one of the all too few critics who have expressed themselves sensibly on the significant contributions of Ruggles and Varese...
...Outwardly Disraeli was a cynic, inwardly he was an impenitent "romantique" until the day of his death...
...We are first introduced to the thunder of Sieur de Champlain's guns at Quebec in 1633 and the return of Brebeuf and the Commander from France with 200 Frenchmen...
...And, hidden behind these characters of his and screened from view, is Chaucer himself, the inscrutable, the unknown and enigmatic...
...Byron's moral responsibility was no doubt lightened by ignorance and disadvantageous contact with the world but hardly to the extent that Maurois figures...
...Hill's translation is surprisingly accurate...
...It was a happy thought to give them more general circulation, and just as happily the author has polished his "Dialese" into more serviceable English...
...If an excellent poetic translation helps to bring Chaucer more admirers, Mr...
...IT IS true, I think—regrettably so—that Chaucer's poetry is caviar to the general...
...Throughout the volume there is ample evidence that the Duchess liked to move from party to party and enjoyed society, in which because of her stately figure she was a favorite...
...Pirn, by A. A. Milne...
...Jesuit and Huron Donjon of Demons, by Benedict Fitzpatrick...
...It is these flashing pen-portraits which decorate the book, which really lift it out of the level of the insignificant, so that one can sympathize with Robert Hichens in his foreword when he says: "I have become afraid of memoirs...
...Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company...
...Jazz is not music...
...then it was his prudish wife, Annabella Millbanke, who committed the mistake of marrying him...
...The Masterful Monk is not first-rate realism, but it combines the sound and often exciting eluicidations of a skilful apologist with the inventiveness of a born entertainer...
...2.00...
...New York: Brewer and Warren, Incorporated...
...There is no evidence, however, that Maurois allowed such distracting thoughts to influence him...
...There are sidelights upon the verbal sparrings within the Italian family, and descriptions of the family meal, with its Bolognese sausage seasoned with garlic, which are as humorous as they are vivid...
...We see its hero, Brother Anselm, as a triple deus ex machina, scotching a gigantic anti-Catholic plot, bringing back into the Church a beautiful and wilful girl, and turning a boy from an imaginary religious vocation to a happy marriage...
...Not even music...
...translated by Alexander Werth...
...Proud indeed may the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order be that they have been able to produce characters so nearly incomparable in fortitude and valor and angelic beauty...
...It is in the chapters discussing figures in American musical history—MacDowell, LoefHer and Ornstein down to Carl Ruggles and Edgar Varese—that we get some real sustenance from this work...
...then it was his school teacher who was too sternly melancholic...
...it runs smoothly...
...There amid the smoke, insects, clamor and fires of the Huron cabins, we are at once in the heart of the drama, that after repeated failure and ultimate glowing success was to end in an immense catastrophe...
...Franck cannot recapture Vittoria, nor Gounod St...
...from countenance and character Time has withheld his touch...
...to be borne, but of which the reader will not dare to miss a word, and one will turn in wonder from the Indians to the Jesuits, and back again, marveling at the humor, the stoicism, the lurking menace, the eerie life of the forest, the tremendous resorces of endurance and recuperation alike in the untamed and the disciplined heart of man...
...The process has involved considerable padding which, although it rounds out the characters, detracts from the fresh whimsicality of the stage version...
...j.oo...
...1.00...
...W. McRae Fawcett...
...This, of a surety, is no reflection upon Mr...
...Gregory...
...He shows the faults and the merits of the man, uninflated...
...The book, moreover, is attractive in appearance and is charmingly illustrated in black-and-white by Hermann Rosse...
...Rosenfeld is a sensitive recorder of the creative pulse and has something original and provocative to say—where your average musicoligist rarely says anything...
...Thus it may be correct to present Byron as a half-sinner...
...Benedict Fitzpatrick has directly taken some of the most powerful chapters of the Jesuit story and woven them into a tale surely as thrilling as any ever told...
...1 HE success of Mr...
...He plays the part of implacabledestroyer alike of Brebeuf and his companions, the Jesuit mission and the great Huron confederacy...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The characterization, though rapid and not subtle, is accurate enough to heighten sympathy and interest...
...From earliest youth Byron was affected by unfavorable environments...
...He does not consider Byron an angel...
...ONE requires but a matter of recent biographies of Byron to realize how heterogeneous a man's "life" can become after his death...
...3.50...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...The shadow of the Iroquois falls athwart every chapter...
...New York: W. W. Norton and Company...
...Behind the Byron who paraded in aloofness and scorn there lurked the "inner Byron...
...This is like the position of those biochemists who pronounced death on followers of a certain potato diet, only to learn that the Irish peasantry flourished in longevity upon it—and then after many years of reinvestigation came the announcement from these same dieticians of the isolation of something or other in the potato that set up the desired anti...
...It also contains a shortened version of the Book of the Duchesse and a few lyrics, among them a ballad from the Legend of Good Women and a roundel from the Parlement of Foules...
...Certainly he has done Byron no injustice...
...Music: 1900-1930 is from The New Arts series edited by Philip N. Youtz...
...Moreover, modern speech can often disguise and not always render the meaning of Chaucer's...
...Ignace of Father Brebeuf and Father Lallemant, pictures of passion and suffering perhaps unsurpassed in Christian annals...
...Says Mr...
...When he deigns to consider the men who have contributed so immeasurably to the musical fund during the twentieth century he is very unsympathetic, finding Schoenberg and Stravinsky "destructive forces" and Bartok irritable...
...At times, one feels that he has even done him more than justice...
...5-00...
...Byron was a "sentimentalist" at heart, says Maurois, and "in his intelligence, he was Voltairean but the recesses of his spirit were deeply imbued with a Calvinism...
...The two Balkan Wars, the Turkish-Italian War, the constant friction in the Mediterranean area all seem to escape her notice...
...in the Well of English undefiled are waters of perennial youth...
...One can hardly fail to notice the similarity of treatment as exhibited in Disraeli and Byron...
...Lady-in-Waiting Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta...
...There are chapters almost too heart-rending...
...The Masterful Monk, by Owen Francis Dudley...
...But Scriabin is hardly the salient feature of music from 1900 to 1930, nor is Medtner, Rachmaninoff, nor Russia in geenral...
...The book closes with the scenes attending the capture and martyrdom at St...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...Carmel O'Neill Haley...
...Surely if Byron were to open his eyes on the situation, he would rub them vigorously...
...age cannot wither Alys, nor Criseyde nor Madam Eglantyne...
...Walter V. Anderson...
...It is the product of an earth-bound, aspiring, sacrificial, wise, silly woman whose supreme achievement was that happiness never equaled, for her, contentment...
...After all, the Knight, the Prioress and the Pardoner exist not so much for the stories they tell as for the newer light and understanding which their stories shed upon their own traits and personalities and upon the traits and personalities of their fellows as they react to the story told...
...But, even if Maurois too freely uses ignorance and worldly contact to dispel the moral responsibility of Byron, he should, to a certain extent, use them both, especially the latter...
...The volume recounts her joy at the frequent visits during the London season and her pleasure in seeing her English kinfolk...
...Toronto: The Ryerson Press...
...Swan is known as a Scriabin authority, and this book can be profitably thumbed by anyone enthusiastic about the Russian mystic's music, the consideration of which is the salient feature of the book...
...A real appreciation of Chaucer's music can be had only by reading Chaucer, a reading which, after all, does not involve much labor...
...It is based on the Jesuit mission to the Hurons, of which the famous Father Jean de Brebeuf was monarch and Ajax, the most striking drama of success and failure in all the accounts of Jesuit missions...
...ROSENFELD'S "hour" with American music is easily the most profitable hour one could spend if even mildly curious about the importance of music as a creative force in America...
...His pronunciation is not ours...
...In spite of this historic lineage, there is in this volume of memoirs a somewhat pronounced love of her English blood, introduced through the connection with the Locke family of England...
...3.50...
...Maurois sees in Byron the same complexity...
...CORTLANDT VAN WlNKLE...
...In these voluble days, babes and sucklings, who know nothing of life, sit down to tell on paper all about the feelings and events in the lives of babes and sucklings...
...His volume, beside an appreciative essay on Chaucer, includes the Prologue, the courtly romance of the Knight, the lovely miracle of Our Lady (singularly happy in its modern dress) told by the Prioress, the rollicking mock-heroic of the Nun's Priest, and the terrifying exemplum of the Pardoner...
...There is no English poet of a bygone age who is more modern in spirit and accomplishment...
...Perhaps for this, and because he had no ax to grind, whether of art or of philosophy, because he had no special doctrine to impart, no program of reform and uplift, because he had the modesty bequeathed alone to Shakespeare that prevents our ever glimpsing from behind the puppets the real man of affairs, the courtier, soldier, diplomat, friend of princes, student of the Inner Temple, a married man with wife and children, an amateur astrologer and (to his sorrow) dabbler in alchemy—perhaps, because behind the facts of his life as behind the faces of his literary creations we yet cannot see the real man, readers of whatever creed or school repair to him, as to Shakespeare, when out of tune wth all other poets and their moods and their theories, for solace and amusement, for refreshment spiritual and intellectual, for emotional outlet, and for the sheer joy which comes in contemplating the highest art...
...The book is really much better than its opening article—Jazz and Music: Music in America—wherein the critic banishes jazz from the high estate of capital M music—so-called "serious music...
...Lawrence from the realms of the setting sun to greet Champlain, and the conclaves that followed with their flow of savage rhetoric...
...5.00...
...Hill's book will perform the double service of increasing Chaucer's reputation with the ordinary man and of giving pleasure to a reader who for the first time on turning the pages of Dan Chaucer beholds the exquisite artistry, the amazing genius for spinning yarns, the humor and gentle irony interwoven with tenderness, the sane and imperturbable observations on man, his manners and his actions, and the robustness and mellow heartiness of one whom the human comedy in all its phases fascinated and rejoiced...
...The book is a personal and Russian document of the first order...
...He has been reflected in every complimentary and uncomplimentary color of the rainbow, ranging from resplendent godliness to black archfiendness...
...then it was his mother who spent much of her time venting on him other than maternal feelings, in one instance, hurling the "shovel and tongs" at his head...
...Pim Passes By, both on the English and American stage, has inspired Mr...
...1.25...
...Rosenfeld is one critic whose discrimination is not dwarfed by considerations of patriotism...
...VICTORIA COLONNA, Duchess of Sermoneta, was ladyin-waiting to the Queen of Italy, and is a descendant of one of Italy's oldest families, the history and records of which reach back through many incidents and stormy times of Italian history...
...This novel has the drive of action which gives it a sustained hold on the interest often lacking in works of much realer artistic pretensions...
...Fated to spend her last years in quiet abnormal circumstances, embittered by the constant duel with her husband, sometimes petty and sometimes really superb, the Countess was nevertheless always the romantic housewife of an excessively romantic genius...
...The book, however, emerges as entertaining light reading...
...We are given a vivid picture of the great fleets of savage canoes descending the St...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...neither does he consider him the rake Lady Byron's descendants would have him...
...There is displayed a broad sympathy with life, remarkable in one who lived within the aristocratic fold, in which she was for years the reigning beauty...
...1 HERE is no question about Father Dudley's possessing at least one of the indisputable qualifications of a fictioneer—he can write a book in which things happen, and keep on happening...
...He was feared by Huron and Iroquois alikeas sorcerer and demon-god and the author of all their woes, with no warrior brave enough to touch a hair of his head, and finally by his sublime patience and power he overcame all and turned the Huron country, till then a stronghold of the demons, into a land of grace and gentleness of manner and speech that would have done credit to a country steeped in civilization for a thousand years...
...Chaucer, the Balzac of English poets, is primarily interested in the drama of his Pilgrimage, sparing no pains to exhibit its members four-square to all the winds...
...Apparently she did not realize the seriousness of the times in which she lived...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...Modern Melody An Hour with American Music, by Paul Rosenfeld...
...Which, by way of comment, is just too bad...
...it keeps the^ verve and rapidity of the narratives...
...This record, an earlier volume of which received more attention simply because Lyova was then more widely read throughout the world than now, seems the only feminine journal which can be said to rival Amiel...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 11
