Books
Sands, William Franklin & Vernon, Grenville & Kendall, Margaret
BOOKS Definitions of Freedom Liberty, by Everett Dean Martin. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. $J.OO. ACCORDING to the announcement which accompanies ¦**¦ the Book of the Month Club's...
...The Selbys have not much to recommend them to our serious attention: a racy family patter which they spin out in numberless entertaining dialogues...
...But when it lifted on a world of nations battling each for its selfish or sordid rights, these were the men who answered Gladstone's notion of what "English gentlemen" should do by taking arms to uphold the "neutrality of Belgium...
...No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold and impartially observant sympathy...
...Julian Green's Parisians are, for the most part, indigenous...
...at the worst he is a rebel or even "a dangerous radical...
...but it would be obviously unfair to find in this fact the reason for either the superior artistic and psychological merits of his work, or the superior power of amusement of hers...
...For the group whose activities are portrayed in this record, progress toward the "divine event" lay in following, from the standpoint of Church of England orthodox belief, the course envisaged by their "grand, square and upright" leader in his faultless ministerial dress...
...It was from nonconformists principally that the charter holders of great tracts of American soil settled their lands...
...ACCORDING to the announcement which accompanies ¦**¦ the Book of the Month Club's choice, each judge came to meeting with the decision that this is the most important book which he has read this month or for some time past...
...Gladstone seemed alike...
...The mob has become a more dangerous tyrant than any individual...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The poet Gray falls asleep in the country churchyard and has a dream...
...Bertram Newman's Lord Melbourne is rather a monograph than a full-sized "life," yet the author of Cardinal Newman and of Edmund Burke has again proved himself one of the most accomplished and satisfying of living English biographers...
...The meat is served here with a rare wine sauce, which is very savory and also very good for the intellectual digestion...
...They knew their "culture" was the highest the world had so far seen, yet felt it but the herald of "some far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moved...
...This thesis goes a long way to explain why the Democratic party contains such curiously incompatible elements...
...It is a record of vitality governed by high principles, of which any fond daughter might be proud...
...6.00...
...Martin has been director of the Peoples' Institute at Cooper Union in New York for fifteen years...
...Clark is occasionally blind to religious values and more positivistic than we should desire...
...The eighteenth century Englishman had learned how to put government where it belonged, and to keep it there...
...At tea a regular outflow of splendid talk from the P. M., causes of great movements, Rousseau, Voltaire, Burke's influence on French revolution, Dr...
...We are ceasing to be free men and we do not care as long as we are prosperous...
...Martin traces the various definitions of liberty that men have brought with them to America, and the reasons for this paradoxical phenomenon...
...Goethe is the image of Dr...
...IX^ILLIAM LAMB, Lord Melbourne, was a statesman ' » whose strength and whose shortcomings were peculiarly English...
...L HE merry and inconsequential sister of a portentous and melancholy brother gives in this novel her version of Paris...
...Anne Green's are, for the most part, expatriated Americans...
...He was not brilliant in a superficial sense, he was largely devoid of passion, and his love of philosophy and abstract thought never led him to uphold the truth per se of any particular political or economic doctrine...
...It may not be known to all of The Commonweal's readers that Mr...
...1 HE significance of the seventeenth century, not yet fully appreciated, is being more and more widely recognized...
...Whether in politics, education, business or religion, and whether the religious body be Catholic or Protestant, the individual today is suspect...
...Unhappy in his married life yet loyal to the memory of the woman who had not only deceived him but made him ridiculous by her escapades with Lord Byron, yearning always for a certainty in religion and philosophy yet always baffled by it, a friend of Ireland, a worker in a slow English way for social reform, believing far less in anything than he would wish to believe, yet from the instinctive goodness of his nature acting beyond his beliefs, he comes down to us a particularly attractive figure...
...In Lord Melbourne he has a subject admirably suited for his sincere, concise manner...
...I think Papa is rather like Shakespeare...
...With Andrew Jackson's social revolution we began to set up a proletarian theory of democracy in which the mass of humanity counts, not the individual...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, Incorporated...
...Narrowness, intolerance, bigotry and impatience of foundations of America, have grown on both sides, while each vociferates that it is the only exponent of "Americanism...
...In his private life he was a student, whose sombre reflectiveness rendered him gently cynical regarding the possibility of human perfectiveness, but this habit of mind did not prevent him, perhaps indeed it aided him, in controling for nearly ten years the destiny of a party composed of members of widely divergent beliefs and temperaments...
...It was upon these new freemen that the exponents in America of English gains in self-government and protection of individual rights based their great experiment...
...The present volume of dramatic dialogues is concerned with literary men who are collectively dubbed poets, though some wrote hardly an iambic line...
...Grbnvillb Verkon...
...The American experiment began on what might be called an aristocratic concept of democracy: the building up of a society of free men in which the citizen should develop to his highest individual possibility, with no artificial restrictions...
...Paradoxically this reversal with its passion for conformity grew out of the bosom of the nonconformist element of early Anglo-American citizenship...
...It displaced the aristocratic democracy of the liberal Anglo-Saxon founders by an illiberal bigoted Anglo-Saxon lower class, supplemented later by proletarian mass immigration from the European continent who were not interested in English or American ideas of liberty but mainly in liberty to do as Henry Ford did later and make a billion dollar fortune in twenty-five years...
...Oxford: The Clarendon Press...
...The range of conversation presided over by Gladstone is indicated by this typical extract...
...A Statesman and His Daughter Mary Gladstone (Mrs...
...In and out of that circle pass not only famous figures of his own generation, but countless younger ones drawn by the Lyttelton and Gladstone children into his life at Hawarden and at Downing Street...
...Margaret Kendall...
...2.50...
...Butler how far appreciated...
...an incisive contempt for all other members of the American colony, which leads to the pinking of an occasional millionairess...
...This method, now gaining vogue, has its disadvantages but one thinks it enables the historian to place the right accent on details...
...Clark's book is remarkably comprehensive and judicious...
...I felt it while reading Carlyle's Hero Poets...
...Unfortunately, too, Mr...
...2.50...
...No people ever lived in mental fog more soothing to man's self-esteem...
...Government in that society was devised to protect the "inalienable" rights of the individual against other individuals, groups, majorities and even against government itself...
...4.50...
...Separate chapters deal with population, finance, art and the many other departments of social life...
...4.50...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Dollinger, books that have most affected mankind...
...If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival...
...That puts Victorian opinion in a nutshell...
...Briefer Mention The Selbys, by Anne Green...
...IN MARY GLADSTONE'S diaries, which start against the background of the Franco-Prussian War, and "Mr...
...Though the right nuance is not always found (thus our author fails to appreciate the purely psychological value of mediaeval and humanistic mysticism), one is surprised to see how frequently, in a book necessarily general, the note is just right (for example, the summary of Leibnitz, or the critique of post-Renaissance military strategy...
...An Eighteenth-century Gentleman Lord Melbourne, by Bertram Newman...
...The lower class of citizenship continued to be nonconformists in America, as they had been in England, and became impatient of the caution of those who were conducting the new experiment...
...It is apparent in Liberty that he agrees to the general objectives of that school of humanism headed by More and Babbitt...
...Newman does not belong to the "new biographers...
...With Andrew Jackson's revolutionary victory "the common masses" swept into supremacy...
...And is there anything he does not treat...
...The forum he chooses however is quite different, for in the Peoples' Institute he is addressing an audience composed very largely of workingmen coming from the conditions which have bred the remedial measure of Socialism...
...But on the whole this is the best available treatise on the whole of the seventeenth century...
...The diary opens thus...
...What sort of intellectual milieu was it in which Shakespeare and Mr...
...Newman is not a "brilliant" writer, no more than Melbourne was a "brilliant" statesman, and perhaps because of this had they been contemporaries Melbourne would have liked and understood Newman, just as his biographer likes and understands Melbourne...
...HOUSMAN has fancy and the knack of giving it literary form—two possessions of which any man might well be proud...
...Kingsley...
...In this new period the older part of the victorious mass became also interested in its new liberty to make everyone else conform to its own special pet bigotries, while the new part remained aloof until it began to find its strength...
...At best he is a "crank...
...Drew), Her Diaries and Letters...
...Nezv York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Other sketches concern Burns, Wordsworth and Ninon de Lanclos...
...Well, it made glorious promises to its own prophets, priests and poets, if we may judge from this dictum of Lord Acton (whom the circle seems to have regarded as the profoundest thinker it possessed) anent George Eliot's death: "In problems of life and thought wh...
...He agrees with the More-Babbitt school that in great part the change came with the perversion of English political philosophy by the spread of Rousseau's false concept of man...
...At heart a gentleman of the eighteenth century, he yet saw that that age had passed, and setting aside his natural instincts he set himself the task of leading the young queen into the path which she followed so successfully through nearly three-quarters of a century...
...baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing...
...Clark, the Oriel College scholar whose essays in research are well known, now offers a topical survey of European history during the period...
...That struggle ended with the Civil War...
...edited by Lucy Masterman...
...The Jacksonian victory was a revolution...
...a wide miscellaneous French acquaintance guaranteed to dispel a good many international illusions and a pretty niece whom (after a slip or two) they marry off to a nice, rich young Frenchman...
...Rights of individuals are no longer considered...
...Quite likely it is, for it deals straight from the shoulder with the reversal of American ideals and ideas in this last century...
...He never tries to make points for the sake of points, nor epigrams for the sake of epigrams, which usually means for the sake of the biographer...
...All are no less incisive than amusing, and will certainly appeal to persons seeking a way of taking literature naturally...
...The four authors to choose as guides of life, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Dante and Butler (W.E.G...
...It might also show why it is so difficult for the Democratic party to win a national election, since most Democrats are bred in those very things out of which Republican doctrine grows...
...The American idea was the outgrowth of gains made in England accelerated here by pioneer conditions...
...Papa] highly approves Lewes' Life of Goethe which is satisfactory...
...All of these, representing interests political and churchly, literary, musical and artistic, form a supporting chorus to his unfaltering utterances upon every subject that he treats from the "grandstand" on which his footing never seems to fail...
...He understood the necessity of compromise without being a time-server...
...The Seventeenth Century, by G. N. Clark...
...But, imponderable though it all is, it is written with a feathery gaiety that is charming, and the book is practically alone of its kind in contriving to suggest, as from an outsider, that the French are actual human beings instead of ambulating intellects or monsters of recherche immorality...
...That Mary felt it so is unconcealed...
...John Donne, meditating upon death, is interrupted by an anti-meditative housekeeper...
...Gladstone's famous declaration on the neutrality of Belgium," the great Victorian Prime Minister remains the pivot of the circle wherein Mary stood beside him taking notes, until his death in 1898...
...Cornered Poets, by Laurence Housman...
...William Franklin Sands...
...Englishmen already convinced of the "rights of Englishmen" became even more convinced of the rights of the individual as they developed to be Americans, in a new country with plenty of room not to crowd each other...
...Carlyle is shown exchanging conversational china with (and, of course, at) his wife...
...That is a complete reversal of what America was founded for by the people who took conscious part in the founding...
...With them has passed from sight something the world cannot afford to be without while it is searching for firm ground for fighting men to stand on "for the right...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 13
