Books
Kerwin, Jerome G. & Steiner, Arpad & Hart, Charles A. & Brunini, John Gilland
BOOKS On Parnassus Beauty, An Interpretation of Art and the Imaginative Life, by Helen Huss Parkhurst. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4.50. BEAUTY, easier dreamed of than defined,...
...Or does he believe that today the numerical majority is adequately represented in Kentucky, New York or Illinois...
...Which only proves that many people do not understand what the doctrine of original sin is...
...these same qualities in Miss Spencer's villagers are unrelieved, they are personified and the village becomes the figure of doom...
...A Flock of Birds, by Kathleen Coyle...
...Or does he believe this was true only in 1849...
...Yet where they are most alike they are most unlike...
...Miss Shepherd, on the other hand, has dealt forcibly with her characters...
...Scottish Backgrounds Gallows' Orchard, by Claire Spencer...
...While the bosses ruled the cities and the utilities purchased congressmen and legislators, the political scientists searched high and low for the nature and location of sovereignty...
...What is sovereignty...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Incorporated...
...2.50...
...Norris has done an unusually good job of observation) as softly lovely, as guileful and conscienceless as a kitten, with all a kitten's power of sinking in its claws and hanging on...
...She is the kind of person who can spend "exquisite days literally drunk with music," wherefore travelers who read volumes of this character will normally prefer her to Mr...
...It is, to repeat, good, sure-fire summer fiction...
...Aligning spiritualism with religion as the original form of philosophy, and presenting the latter as a way of life rather than a theory, the author is able to pass on to naturalism as the single type of metaphysics or our belief about reality, thence to pragmatism and intuitionism as the types of theories of knowledge or our belief about our beliefs, and finally to dualism, idealism, realism and mysticism as typical attempts at theories which aim to be both metaphysical and epistemological...
...This proposition that the world is a self, I regard as a point of certainty in philosophy" in reality destroys all meaning of the term, as it is commonly understood and ultimately brings philosophy into disrepute...
...Since Madison The Development of American Political Thought, by William Seal Carpenter...
...All art is not necessarily a "general confession" in the Goethean sense, and even though man is incapable of totally ridding himself of his ego, there are memorable examples of epic, objective art also...
...Does Professor Carpenter believe there is still no diversity of interest between Louisville and the Kentucky mountaineers, between New York City and Herkimer, or between Chicago and Danville...
...QCOTTISH in background and universal in theme, Gallows' ^ Orchard and The Weatherhouse display many similarities...
...Briefer Mention Blue Rhine—Black Forest, by Louis Untermeyer...
...He guesses that the bellum omnium contra omnes idea of Hobbes is due to the doctrine of original sin...
...Indeed, the visible, audible, gustatory, tangible beauty is of the lowest order in the infinite range of possible beauties...
...she plays variations on age-old melodies instead of penetrating into new depths...
...It is not a very good guide-book but can be read...
...But in spite of some weighty objections, Beauty is a thoughtprovoking and stimulating work...
...Effie Gallows is glorified through the eyes of the schoolmaster, who because of his great love extends her the ineffectual protection of marriage...
...Almost the only excuse for the apple tree is its spring radiance or its winter austerity," she once exclaims in her esoteric aestheticism...
...Miss Parkhurst's artist is commensurate with her conception of art...
...2.50...
...Still, he is compelled to point out that her system of beauty is largely eclectic...
...No matter how idealistically they react their actuations are sharply defined...
...The artist unquestionably surpasses the average human being in sensitivity, but that alone, even at its supreme potence, would not account for creative genius, and sensuous qualities of this world would not call forth artistic creation, unless inspiration came in some specific form of immediate and actual experience...
...Where is sovereignty located in the United States...
...Garry Forbes is moved by his deep love for his dead friend in his fight to right a wrong despite the many unfortunate consequences, sorrowful to himself and to others, which may ensue...
...the author herself states that "the explanation of why man is impelled to imaginative expression of himself is that only thereby can he achieve a reconciliation of the discordant feelings and desires within him...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Arpad Steiner...
...Its discussion of the basic problems of art ought to be of interest to all lovers of beauty, and Miss Parkhurst's profound lyricism, rising at times to heights of poetry, will carry away many an objector who differs with her on fundamental issues...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press...
...Would that the author had remembered the Hegelian concept according to which beauty is the translucence of the idea through the matter...
...Think of the masterpieces which owe their existence to sordid Mammon, to the hunger for success which has taken over the role of fame and glory since the eighteenth century in the minds of the producers of beauty...
...It is unfortunate that Professor Carpenter did not see fit to enlarge upon and clarify the following statement: "But if stability in the government is to be attained, the choice must rest upon those arrangements which are consistent with the permanent not the transitory interests of the people, the spiritual rather than the material purposes of society...
...her antagonist (on whom Mrs...
...It is to be questioned whether this teleological brand of beauty is not too etherial, too abstract for a human, who is after all a conglomerate of mud and spirit...
...The human self, which we take as an imperfect image of the whole cosmos" will not long be content with such an answer to the enigma of existence, as the whole history of philosophy has demonstrated...
...No consideration of the more recent speculations on public opinion...
...V_/NE cannot dismiss Miss Coyle's latest novel with the adjective "grim...
...Thus the whole of philosophy is encompassed in a minimum of seven types...
...There is nothing original about it...
...Thus having given sovereignty a home of safe repose among the solons the student would be asked if sovereignty were divisible, and he would indignantly reply that such was unthinkable for in two-thirds of Congress and threefourths of the legislatures of the states there was unity were it ever so invisible—the best example extant presumably of the motto, E Pluribus Unum...
...This lack of consideration for the higher, ideal content of beauty makes itself felt in the wealth of information which is scattered over the chapters on painting and sculpture, music and architecture, and literature...
...But this world of ours has other than sensuous elements also which none the less belong to the realm of beauty and which cannot be excluded from the arts...
...The reviewer emphatically does not think so...
...The Weatherhouse, by Nan Shepherd...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Well, Professor Carpenter gives us one whole chapter on the subject of sovereignty—most sterile of all subjects—and he heads that chapter, Some Recent Tendencies...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...It is not the fruit of a balanced and total view of life, which departs from a unified principle of all things and achieves harmony in a glorious symphony of all being...
...WE THOUGHT that political theorists had exhausted themselves and their topic in disputations on sovereignty...
...The explanations are all so simple, the criticisms and evolutions so fair and so conversant with all the currents of present-day thinking that the keenest interest is easily aroused in a subject which is more important for the average man than he realizes...
...Hence the dourness and meanness of Miss Shepherd's countrymen are leavened by the virtues which inhere in all men...
...2.SO...
...No doubt, there have been numerous artists of this description, but is not a great deal of this enthusiasm hoary convention and worthy of gentle "debunking...
...In its eleven chapters no endless parade of philosophers' futile attempts is passed in review in order to present an encyclopaedia of aesthetics...
...To him she is a vital creature, possessed of an extraordinary honesty and a fatalistic belief in the tragic consequences of falseness to self...
...These are important questions...
...She does not save the overly romantic Louie Morgan who, unsought and unloved, has built a lie into a pathetic and generally accepted romance but, because she realizes that compromise is a necessary part of love, effects a reconciliation through that time-worn device of human relationship...
...He is sometimes witty, often smart, occasionally illuminating...
...Nevertheless the reader must feel that he would be able to more fully comprehend a purely subjective situation if Miss Coyle had given it a concrete background of cause and character...
...He is a cousin german of the "vates" of the ancients, a sort of prophet, the superior of kings and potentates, like the Renaissance poets—a neurotic and high-strung being to be envied and pitied at the same time...
...One must not lose sight of the subtitle if one wishes to do justice to the author...
...It is in this faithfulness to reality that Miss Spencer achieves her great success, John Gilland Brunini...
...she would not then have stranded in sheer formalism, especially apparent in the chapter on prose and poetry...
...The nondescript discriminations, tid-bits of meter and rhyme, debated in the manner of old-fashioned formal poetics result in little beyond verbalism...
...BEAUTY, easier dreamed of than defined, evanescent and protean, is the subject of Miss Parkhurst's book...
...2.50...
...And yet art does infinitely more than that...
...One may well doubt, for instance, whether anywhere else in a similar few pages given over to explanation and criticism one may find a more trenchant appraisal of the new materialism so powerful today under the title of naturalism...
...Untermeyer...
...Professor Carpenter hazards one guess...
...In a language replete with sensuous and dithyrambic charm, she expounds and amplifies themes familiar since Plato and Aristotle...
...Surely these are recent tendencies...
...Why omit the ethical and intellectual beauty whose existence is undeniable and which Miss Parkhurst seems to have neglected almost entirely though the highest art is of this category even if it expresses itself through the medium of sensuous beauty...
...Perhaps in his own concluding "confessio fidei" Professor Hocking is least satisfactory...
...Species of Thought Types of Philosophy, by William Ernest Hocking...
...Still it is a short book and there may be many who will love it...
...For she has, with rare courage, undertaken a depiction of a family group faced with tragedy which rises far above a merely morbid study...
...Neither book goes far beyond the obvious and the photographs used to illustrate are the kind procurable from a mail-order tourist agency...
...Absolutism may satisfy the passion for unity but if reality is not an absolute unity then we must admit that the passion, when it becomes immoderate, is only misleading...
...His fiancee, Lindsay, who abhors profanation yet nevertheless feels that the suffering of the living is more important, creates the conflict...
...Jais covers the same territory and leads one off to Munich and the Bavarian Alps...
...PROFESSOR HOCKING of Harvard University here ¦* presents for beginners an interesting approach to the perennial problems of philosophy...
...The theme—the struggle of two women for a man—is given a certain vitality from their contrast: the heroine strong, repressed, touched with tragedy...
...asked the political science teacher of yesteryear of his student...
...Effie may have been all that the schoolmaster deemed her to be but it is too much to ask the reader for faith in a character which only in rare moments touches reality...
...The student would reply that sovereignty was what Sir Henry Maine said it was—if properly qualified...
...In the life of a woman who marries to legitimatize her unborn child, whose husband is murdered by one of her lovers, who unlovingly weds another bemused and devoted suitor, strong and well defined motives must be adduced...
...Think of the Olympian calm of Goethe in his old age, of La Fontaine, of that enigmatic and clever businessman who lurks behind the historic portrait of Shakespeare—to select only a few...
...Because she fails to do this Miss Spencer's bleak novel, despite its high literary quality, never quite comes off...
...1.00...
...in each there is conflict between idealism and the practical reality of human conduct...
...Margaret Yorke, by Kathleen Norris...
...By uniting the historical and systematic methods he is able to secure a few continually recurring "types" of world view which emerge from the vast welter...
...The story of Gallow's Orchard is the story of Magdalen, unsaved by Christ, and dead by stoning...
...2.SO...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, Incorporated...
...Norris's best novel, by a considerable margin, but it has enough of her famous patent combination of romance and reality to make it readable and even interesting...
...the teacher would ask...
...Why the author leaves speculation about them suspended in midair is difficult to determine...
...What does he mean by spiritual ? Surely he should not have kept this a secret...
...In writing of the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1849 he says concerning the conflict between Louisville and the rural sections: "Most men, however, perceived that where there was no great diversity of interests there was little danger in lodging political power in the hands of the numerical majority...
...Well, that is a difficult question," the student would answer if he had read his Leacock at least ten minutes before coming to class, "but after long searching someone believes he has found it lurking among two-thirds of the members of Congress and three-fourths of the legislatures of the states...
...Both are superbly written, both have dramatic power and sweep...
...At one point it seems as if Professor Carpenter is going to give some consideration to the conflict between rural anl urban areas on the subject of representation, but it turns out to be a false alarm...
...she prefers starlit palaces of dreamland to solid towers of thought built with the cold bricks of logic...
...kJNCE again the tourists are flocking to Germany...
...2.SO...
...she has called her work "an interpretation of art and the imaginative life...
...She has allied the ordeal of Catherine Munster, stumbling through the days of hope and despair which precede the hanging of her son, with that sorrow which all mothers experience in bearing the children of death...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Should she be twitted with the fact that her book is truly feminine in more than one respect...
...2.00...
...Legendary Germany, Oberammergau and Bayreuth, by Regina Jais...
...Thus he reduces the bewildering array of names which so discourage the neophyte in this field to the extent of causing him to abandon philosophy as an impossible jargon for professionals only, and is able to offer a most readable volume for the layman...
...there is no freshness of point of view...
...Hers is a beauty existent exclusively for its own sake, a Parnassian and impassible beauty, which she seeks everywhere and which she finds to be the essence and the only raison d'etre of everything...
...1 HIS is not Mrs...
...Is this view not a denial of all possible objective art...
...In fact if the publishers had desired to do so they might have given this work a more attractive title and by the machinations of modern advertisement they might have made it a best seller while still maintaining their self-respect in the knowledge that they were pushing a work of the soundest value even when measured by standards of professional philosophy...
...No considerations of the psychological approach to politics...
...Where Miss Shepherd has been undeviatingly true to the integrity of her narrative, Miss Spencer has, however artistically, cudgeled characters and events into the simplicity of her pattern...
...Jerome G. Kerwin...
...If one wishes to read a brief summary of American political thought Professor Carpenter's book is satisfactory...
...all-comprehensive, universal, and yet somewhat restricted of domain...
...Louis Untermeyer apparently enjoyed his sojourn there and didn't mind writing this handbook of a trip down the Rhine and into the Black Forest...
...This ecstatic emphasis laid on beauty leads the reader to fancy that the author sees the only "excuse" of art, as of life in general, in its ability to create or re-create beauty...
...The plot gets some additional supererogatory complications from the secret marriage of one of the principals, but everything turns out for the best in the end...
...Charles A. Hart...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 16
