Books
Lipari, Angelo & Phelan, Gerald B. & Farley, Ambrose & Repplier, Agnes
BOOKS Concord's Greatest Emerson: The Enraptured Yankee, by Regis Michaud; translated from the French by George Boas. New York: Harper and Brothers. $4.00. THE custom of endowing a biography...
...THE first Swedish edition of this book was sold out in a week...
...However that may be, the work, which in any case should not end abruptly in the middle of the exposition of the thesis, does not commend itself either for its authoritative scholarship or its scientific method of research...
...Moreover, she does not stop to ask herself the question why so much secrecy in referring to historical events well known to everybody...
...It should not be a matter of wonder if the vogue of psychosynthesis surpassed the popularity of psychoanalysis, despite the advantage of the latter in its appeal to the libidinous...
...Summarizing the intrinsic greatness and charm of Paris, the book treats of history, art and landscape with rare affection and knowledge...
...nor does she once wonder at the stupidity of the many inquisitors, so sharp, so terrible and yet so gullible...
...When you are fully initiated you will be able to make this prayer for a happy death: "When the hour comes, when my body must dissolve and my soul evaporate, may my love be full and ripe...
...THE custom of endowing a biography with an explanatory and somewhat exuberant title or subtitle—King Spider, The Stricken Deer, The Enraptured Yankee—is to be deplored...
...We on this continent, at least, are rapidly becoming synthetic even in our food and drink...
...Poul Bjerre makes no attempt to eradicate morality by analysis...
...For "woe unto those fools who ponder about a 'life to come' and all conceivable inaccessible things...
...TT IS scarcely possible that anyone should realize the de•¦¦ fects of my book more than I," Professor Post declares in his introduction to the three published volumes of a projected detailed history of Spanish painting...
...May no thought and no longing prevent death from reaching the final depth...
...He set a higher value on character than on institutions...
...Soon you will learn to recite a new creed beginning "I believe in God's death in all the dead orbits in which suns and planets move...
...Then you must bow to the precepts of a new decalogue whose first commandment is: "Thou shalt have no gods . . . but in everything thou shalt look for the divine...
...I can do without it...
...the drift of Spanish painting and to prepare the way for the masters of the golden age...
...Carlyle took it dreadfully to heart...
...The first volume then chronicles preromanesque and romanesque painting, differentiating in so far as that is possible between the work of diverse regional schools...
...He shrank sensitively from the overflow of talk that streamed wetly about him...
...he simply obliterates religion by synthetic methods...
...Certain it is that for years before the publication of his essays he poured into attentive ears the philosophy that sounded so inspiring and was so irretrievably unsubstantial...
...The thesis is false both in content and method, and it is furthermore incongruous, ridiculous, untenable...
...what had this detached spirit in common with the vaporings of Alcott, or the easy emotionalism of Channing...
...Whether descriptive or not, such epithets are needless and in doubtful taste...
...Agnes Repplier...
...A life beyond is a chimera...
...When you have said this much, however, criticism ceases and approval begins...
...the man who was "bored by the sick and repelled by the dead...
...Dante and Nonsense New Light on the Youth of Dante: The Course of Dante's Life Prior to I2Q0 Traced in the Inferno, Cantos 3-13, by Gertrude Leigh...
...They press so closely around the central figure that we see more convincingly than ever the accuracy of Mr...
...The illustrations, of which there are many, have usually been selected and printed with care, although the typography of the book (made in Italy) is far from nearly perfect...
...Yet his chosen friend was Carlyle...
...In ADDRESSING himself to Mr...
...Destructive Synthesis Death and Renewal, by Poul Bjerre...
...men who thought the Dial intellectual, and Brook Farm practical, and Margaret Fuller an Egeria...
...Around Saragossa A History of Spanish Painting, by Chandler Rathfon Post...
...Be warned...
...If greatness consists in spreading the rich happiness of laughter, in the unflagging invention of fresh farce and in the mastery of a gorgeously funny idiom, then P. G. Wodehouse is a great man...
...The illustrative material included in the first volume is typical and may without hesitation be termed far superior to what has been available hitherto...
...translated from the Swedish by I. von Tell...
...S-OO...
...But a synthesis need not be logical: it may even be irrational—if we are justified in judging from such efforts as have been made in recent years to present a synthetic view of life and its problems...
...When Aristotle wrote his famous studies in logic they were called the Analytics...
...1 HERE are many books about the queen city of the Seine, but M. Escholier :eems to have written the most intelligent of them all...
...Philosophers will call it nonsense...
...However one would be strongly tempted to take no cognizance of the work at all if a certain provoking note—apparently the result of prejudice against the Church of Rome—were not sounded throughout the book...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The world is beginning to tire of analytic books and people...
...It was no easy matter to define each...
...The second and third have to do with the Gothic styles, which successively revealed French, German and Italian affinities...
...Indeed, the errors are so many and so gross—linguistic, historical, philosophical and theological errors, as well as errors of logic and common sense—that only the most candid ignorance can overlook them...
...In due time you will learn to use the most sacred terms of Christian theology—redemption, Incarnation, salvation, Golgotha and Tabor—as symbols of the vicissitudes of life and death and renewal, as pulses in the rhythm of recurrent effluence...
...The staying power of Christianity is its acceptance of the facts of life...
...His role is rather that of the oracle...
...It is evidently the work of a dilettante, who may well have read some of the many good books listed in the bibliography, and may well have spent "over thirty years" in the study of Dante and his times, but the results of her labors are certainly a monstrous abortion...
...They had tastes in common, and inhibitions in common...
...I don't care," he answered...
...Without Bertie to extract from the bisc.ue, Jeeves, that Crichton of valets, who is as real a creation as Sherlock Holmes, would be nowhere...
...It is neither a manual of information nor a guide to the best hotels and restaurants...
...Be warned...
...There is a touch of Coleridge about his writing...
...and still another devoted to the great churches is written with fine verve and insight...
...New York: Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press...
...What a book old Doughty might have made of this, or what a glow Ruskin infused into far less impressive research...
...But this work is neither a scientific treatise nor a philosophical study...
...W. C. Brownell's comment: "Emerson did not care enough about his friends to discriminate between them...
...It is entirely proper that he should do so...
...Separate chapters are devoted to the more important masters—Pedro Serra, Borrassa and the rest...
...but in New England they were the high-toned diversion of the educated...
...and the meticulous tracery of the narrative is surely the best possible preparation for that ultimate synthesis of mediaeval art which cannot as yet be undertaken...
...Not Coleridge the philosopher but Coleridge the opium-saturated dreamer...
...A chapter on old houses is virtually a compendium of the Parisian past...
...she shouted...
...Requiescat in pace...
...That unfinished portrait of a vanished dream, Kubla Khan, will endure long after Death and Renewal, for all its grace and charm of words, its euphonious language and its truly poetic beauty, will have gone the way of all best sellers...
...The form alone commends it...
...In three days the world will be destroyed...
...Since that time there has been a curious connection in the human mind between logic and analysis...
...To me this discussion of the romanesque period, with its constant suggestion of Byzantine contacts and models, proved the most engrossing of Professor Post's three sections...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Incorporated...
...Emerson chose lecturing, not only as a means of livelihood—it is that today—but actually as a method of conveying his message to the world, which sounds incredible...
...Boston: Houghton Miff tin Company...
...The man who resigned his Boston pulpit at twenty-six because the attenuated ritual of Unitarianism was still too ritualistic for him...
...The narrative is brought down to about 1450, when the Flemish influence began to modify very considerably...
...Even England went to them, albeit reluctantly, as Lamb bears witness...
...But one might well write no more of them by way of comment than to say that it is scarcely possible to enumerate all the virtues of this book...
...But what matters it...
...For Dr...
...Bertie is his foil, his occasion, his catalytic agent...
...Despite his promise in the early pages of his book, the promise of a new revelation, one cannot penetrate into the secret mysteries without initiation...
...Six colored plates by Nicolas Markovitch may please some readers more than they did the present reviewer, who happens not to care much for impressionistic wash drawings of city streets in which old houses seem perennially on the verge of toppling over...
...And may no earthly beauty, no heavenly glory, bar the way to renewal in its ascent towards the height of heights...
...His doctrine is esoteric...
...The translator has done his (or her...
...His utterances are cryptic...
...An agitated Adventist met the philosopher sauntering peacefully through the streets of Concord...
...In his brilliant essay on satire, Father Knox, who is a panjandrum among humorous philosophers, speaks of Bertie Wooster with serious respect...
...The style may suffer, indeed, from that excess of scholarly care to which a modern work of the kind is doomed...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...Briefer Mention Paris, by Raymond Escholier...
...For a Christian it is blasphemy...
...and Bertie is also the emitter of that inimitable lingo that keeps the reader of this priceless nonsense constricted and weak with laughter...
...To review it thoroughly would be to accord it a consideration it does not deserve...
...Emerson bore lightly "the sorrowful burden of human knowledge...
...SANS valeur...
...who found Christianity, even in its earliest inception, distasteful to his mentality...
...It was the golden age of lectures...
...One misses the fine skill which the best French historians seem to be born with, and regrets that modern efficiency must perforce shy away from poetry...
...Other things receive attention, too, and M. Escholier is both a man of wit and a lover of his theme...
...work admirably...
...He had never been an observer of life, or a reader of history...
...In his early days Giovanni Papini wrote pessimistically in his Un Uomo Finito of the emptiness of such a philosophy of life...
...5.00...
...Then she proceeds to read into the text all sorts of impossible and ludicrous meanings, misunderstanding, misinterpreting and even distorting it in her awful translations to suit her end...
...It may be added that the volume wil make as fine a gift to one who knows Paris as to the person t tting out on his first voyage to Montparnasse...
...Wodehouse's work, the reader almost automatically formulates one of those conclusive periodic sentences begining with "If...
...Here is a perfectly marvelous abundance of information and pertinence of remark...
...but what, one wonders, did he think...
...And she never once seems to think of The Inferno in relation with the other two canticles, composing all together the most perfect trinity in the unity of art: she does not realize the incongruity of her findings in relation to The Commedia as a whole, and is not even aware of the many glaring contradictions to her thesis to be found in The Inferno alone...
...But Poul Bjerre is infatuated with his vacuous vision and waxes lyrical about the "clair-obscure...
...Thus they might add in no small degree to our general profit and pleasure...
...As long as man is possessed of eyes and ears and a modicum of intelligence he knows that all is not well with the world...
...Psychiatrists may call this philosophy...
...3.00...
...which prejudice perhaps explains the author's concept of a heretic Dante, her misunderstanding of the whole mediaeval period, and the very origin of her strange thesis...
...Angelo Lipari...
...Of course the cream of Wodehouse is Jeeves (with a strong minority report for Archie Meacham) and the formula of the Jeeves stories is one of the soundest ever discovered...
...Yet M. Michaud has given us a vivid and animated picture of Concord with its group of aspiring philosophers, and Emerson as the bright particular star of its somewhat mirky firmament...
...but who held his soul high above reproach, paying supreme homage to the moral law...
...Professor Post's sympathy with Spanish civilization, religion and achievement is unflagging and admirable...
...The motif in each case is rescue: Bertie Wooster, the lovable halfwit whom Jeeves calls master, is always, to employ his own unbetterable locution, "knee-deep in the bisque...
...The English is not merely correct...
...He did not care...
...To begin with, one must first learn to look for life in "the rhythm of the clair-obscure", the ebb and flow of disintegration and renewal...
...The content of the book is at best negligible...
...another on museuuis suffices to initiate anyone in the wonders of priceless collections...
...The author starts with a baseless, fantastic notion of her own, "the identification of the journey through the infernal regions with Dante's own journey through life," and with several other preconceived notions, such as the repeatedly exploded one that Dante was a heretic continually harassed and pursued by an army of tireless, iniquitous inquisitors who prevented him from ever expressing openly his real religious and political beliefs...
...This introductory chapter, one of the best things of its kind, should be read by all students of Spanish history and art...
...The Enraptured Yankee" sounds painfully familiar when applied to a man who all his life repelled familiarity...
...Perhaps the best story ever told of Emerson (it does not seem to have reached M. Michaud's ears, and is probably apocryphal) might have been told as well of Carlyle...
...This knowledge is the first step toward betterment...
...At all events, Bjerre pays no homage to Athena...
...From every point of view it is a big and fine scholarly job...
...One merely wishes the publishers would allow themselves the luxury of an occasional illustration in color...
...It is delightful...
...Gerald B. Phelan...
...Available information, bequeathed by a long sequence of scholars, is sifted, developments are neatly traced, and the author is almost always able to add some new knowledge he himself has acquired...
...Its author is described as "a specialist in psychotherapy and a philosopher...
...Ambrose Farley...
...yet beneath his roof was born in 1836 the most conversational of all infants, the Transcendental Club...
...Very Good, Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse...
...There is hardly a trace of fog—inner or outer—in the whole work...
...Emerson honored human nature without analyzing it...
...After noting that the individuality of a period in art history seems less a matter of racial peculiarity than of epoch, Professor Post concedes something to the widely alleged Spanish idiosyncracies—emphasis upon aristocracy, a tendency to like sombre themes, religious fervor, a love of the gorgeous, naturalism...
...Unfortunately no "person on business from Porlock" interrupted these muddled musings...
...The man who was "all incarnate reserve and discretion," and the man who was "all ejaculations and sarcasms," decided in twenty-four hours upon a lifelong friendship, and, after a fashion, clung to it...
...It is a work of "psychosynthesis...
...and that other one, all her own, that contemporary, historical events are allegorically referred to in this supposed chronological autobiography of Dante...
...Emerson," says Michaud, "saw the grandeur, but not the misery of mankind...
...Only one familiar with Swedish could say whether it accurately renders the original...
...One only regrets that Von Tell's literary gifts were wasted on such intellectual trash...
...1.00...
...a leaning toward German ideality, for example, and a mutual indifference to the supreme value of French thought...
...No better description could be asked of these enthusiasts who believed that Utopia could be reached by substituting linen for wool, and water cress for roast beef...
...Carlyle humiliated it to the dust, but bore for it an angry love...
...When completed it will doubtless take, and hold for a long time, the enviable position of the standard treatise...
...Michaud says that he treated an audience like an assemblage of demigods, which may in some measure account for his popularity...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 12
