Books
Thompson, Frederic & Mattern, Johannes & McCormick, John F. & jr., R. M. Patterson
BOOKS Germany's Idol The Biography of President von Hindenburg, by Rudolf Weterstetten and A. M. K. Watson. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2. 50. 'T* HAT a biography of President von...
...Morale in Hindenburg's ideology signifies above all unity of purpose and action...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...of The Golden Hind Series on the lives and doings of the great explorers, this book is delightful either as history or biography...
...j.oo...
...Benson respects his subject and his reader, who is permitted to recover for himself the age and spirit of the great voyage through facts directly presented, not through the haze of an author's complexes, after the modern fashion of "psychological interpretation" in biography...
...He was typical of an age that was both conservative and progressive in its ideals...
...Parker's great succes de scandale—secures restraint by being subhuman...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...3.50...
...The reader, however, will find no difficulty in discovering a bond of unity in them in the evidence they afford of Professor Burnet's lifelong interest in humane letters as represented especially in the Greek classics and more particularly in Plato...
...Jenkins give any other impression...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...A strange way this seemed to be, even to the few well-wishers Germany had regained by that time, for a defeated and distrusted nation to reestablish respect and faith among its former enemies...
...In every address, in every public announcement, he stresses the need for unity, loyalty to the past, and duty to the present...
...Here is information which extends from coal tar products to the London conference, from good will flights to Mohammedanism...
...1 HE author of this excited treatise, disguised under the cacophonus pseudonym of Frank K. Notch, seems to be much distressed at the gregariousness of the human race...
...And beside the Brownings are glimpses of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlysle—who says to the Browning infant aged two, "Why, sir, you have as many aspirations as Napoleon...
...Magellan the man has been lost in the blazing glory of his one achievement...
...But what was accepted as evidence of the German people's ineptitude in the game of international diplomacy proved the inherent soundness of their sense of political propriety in domestic affairs and, soon after, in the field of foreign relations as well...
...But if the esteem in which Hindenburg the president is held by the outside world today means anything at all, it is indicative of the expectation that Hindenburg's presidency will be marked as a period of spiritual regeneration and material restoration of Germany...
...R. M. Patterson, jr...
...He points out, with spirit and wit, the modern manifestations of unthinking conventionalism—the anti-intellectual effect of publicity, of fashion, of patriotism, of uncritically accepted rationalistic science...
...It need hardly be added that the volume, like all those issued by the Institut, is unusually attractive...
...Whether Hindenburg, in doing so, instinctively follows his training or whether he has the vision to see that Germany's situation calls for just what he has to give, is difficult to decide at this time...
...of an indomitable courage shown less by his refusal to turn back although reduced to eating the leather from the yard-arms than by setting sail at all with foreknowledge of a mutiny...
...Lardner...
...Perhaps...
...and George Sand...
...And who likes animals, will enjoy Flush, the spaniel—his refusal to eat cream cheese on toast unless salt had been added, his devotion to his mistress and his biting of Browning because the latter carried an unbrella...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...For what greater wisdom could have dictated the choice of a Hindenburg, defender and idol of the old army, faithful servant of his majesty and military over-lord, to become the president of the republic and thereby to throw the weight of his personality and reputation in the balance on the side of the new order ? To be sure, Weterstetten and Watson do not state the case in language as bold as that, but it is thus that the situation unfolds itself to the reader...
...The picture seems true to everything one knows about life in a quiet New England town of the seventies...
...Does this seem old fashioned in the light of modern theories of education...
...tr OR those who like statistics and for those who need facta too current to be included in encyclopaedias and other books of reference, Wider Horizons will be a decided boon...
...This little book also embalms and explains many of those Japanese poems which were Emily Dickinson's letters to her friends, young and old...
...1.25...
...The subjects dealt with by Professor Burnet in these essays and addresses range all the way from the meaning of law and nature in Greek ethics to German Kultur...
...It was a difference, an incalculable difference, in degree, not in kind...
...His most important American works are his statue of Washington, for which the father of his country sat patiently and hospitably, and a bust of Lafayette ordered by Virginia...
...Whether Weterstetten's and Watson's somewhat optimistic interpretation of the results of his indefatigable labors is correct may seem doubtful to the reader of a hostile party press...
...This Andromeda in Wimpole Street by Dormer Creston, a narrative, not fiction, of the strange and poignant romance of the Brownings, does successfully not only because of its subject but also because of its own high quality...
...Professor Baldwin has chosen Bywater's version of the Poetics and Roberts' translation of Longinus for this edition, to which his own discerning comment adds no little charm and for which both teacher and general reader will be grateful...
...Magellan was actuated by the most traditional as well as the most progressive incentives...
...For it is the revelation of this simplicity, finding fulfilment and happiness in the soldier's calling with its hard and narrow code of duty and loyalty, which is the key to Hindenburg's success as the civilian president of republican Germany...
...No collection of books about Miss Dickinson can be complete without this unpretentious volume...
...Miss Emily was like all cultivated Amherst women, except that she towered far above them in sympathy, in wit, in knowledge, in love of nature...
...Professor Burnet expressly disclaims the title of philosopher, yet philosophy is surely indebted to him for two important works on the history of Greek philosophy, and what he has to offer in the way of interpretation of Platonism, though it may be challenged at times, must always be given a respectful hearing on the merits of its scholarship...
...Briefer Mention Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor, by MacGregor Jenkins...
...Aristotle's Poetics and Longinus on the Sublime...
...This can be explained by the fact that Professor Burnet was essentially a teacher, and never really stepped out of the role...
...and that he should deplore the tendency he found growing to stress the matter rather than the form in the teaching of the classics...
...With this singleness of purpose he let it be known that he would do and give all for the fatherland but nothing for the party...
...He rails at the unthinking sheep-mind of contemporary man, just as numberless moralists have done for centuries before him...
...On the other hand, among the more than fourteen millions voting for Hindenburg, many there were who looked forward to his election as the providential deliverance of Germany from gradual disintegration in consequence of the ruthless conflict of political parties, of employer and laborer, religious and racial groups, and above all as the result of the debasing want of confidence and self-respect of the people...
...TO LOVERS of literature it will be agreeable to come upon a work which presents literature as one of the highest expressions peculiar to the human race...
...as splendid as the age to which he owed and contributed his fame...
...If the love-making seems at times a little prolix and attenuated, it at least leads one to profound speculations on the possibilities of refinement...
...lonely, formidable, silent but on fire within...
...There is pathos and a moral in this, and in the fact that his accomplishment—the greatest of its kind for all time—was technically a failure...
...a character of rather terrible steel, swift, incisive, ruthless when need be, like a sword, but like it not inflexible...
...Johannes Mattern...
...edited by Charles Sears Baldwin...
...The present monograph is an interesting and important commentary on the entire history...
...JV1R...
...To suppose her a neurasthenic recluse is to do her memory a decided injustice...
...With fine literary skill Mr...
...Whosoever says we do not progress from the savage, should read the terrific scenes of Victorian family life...
...The volume, of course, shows him chiefly as the scholar, but something of what he was as a teacher can be learned from the brief Memoir which is prefixed as a preface...
...Nor did all who, after the first futile ballot, favored his nomination, hold such a lofty view...
...that he should hold the strength of a classical training to lie in the formal discipline it gives...
...For their little book is written in a manner slightly didactic but altogether rather charmingly unpretentious...
...Individual action, especially when it is directed against established convention, has always been rare...
...Although almost all the Revolutionary patriots admired his work and yearned for his guarantee of their immortality, they were unable to solve all Houdon's monetary difficulties with Congress and other bodies...
...Julian's...
...She, too, can evoke the uproarious laugh, though she prefers to evoke the wry smile...
...On the Spanish Main Ferdinand Magellan, by E. F. Benson...
...Professor Chinard's introduction is particularly valuable...
...It is not out of keeping with his Platonism that he should believe in form rather than in matter...
...John F. McCormick...
...1 HE excellent literary fare provided by several series of reprints is not yet sufficiently recognized...
...JENKINS tells us with great charm what he remembers of Miss Dickinson, who was a grown-up playmate of his childhood...
...T* HAT a biography of President von Hindenburg should be ¦¦- devoted to such an extent to the consideration of his military career is perhaps not unreasonable...
...edited by Gilbert Chinard...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...The Brownings Andromeda in Wimpolc Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Dormer Creston...
...Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press...
...THE essays and addresses that make up this book have been put together, as Lord Charnwood tells us in his Memoir, as a fitting and characteristic memorial to "a great teacher and a great scholar...
...Perhaps Mr...
...IT IS an interesting exercise to try to discriminate between Mrs...
...a commander who showed consummate tactics and seamanship in mutiny at St...
...As the preservation of morale was the essence of life of Hindenburg the soldier, so it became the guiding norm of Hindenburg the president...
...3.00...
...Wider Horizons: The New Map of the World, by Herbert Adams Gibbons...
...it implies a national sense of loyalty and duty...
...with a Memoir by Lord Charnwood...
...What he believes he says positively and forcibly, but at the same time he is always able to offer for his belief a reason that cannot be merely brushed aside...
...One cannot forbear quoting one, an acknowledgment of a child's gift: "Will the sweet child who sent me the butterflies, herself a member of the same etherial nation, accept a rustic kiss, flavored, we trust, with clover...
...2.00...
...That that town should have contained a poet of real genius is no excuse for supposing it to have differed from others of its sort, or for supposing her to have differed, except in her great ability, from her fellow townswomen...
...5.00...
...there is no reason to suppose that it has suddenly become rarer or will suddenly become more common...
...The reader will no doubt discover in the essays and addresses a certain finality and even dogmatism...
...Browning devotees may find the book a little elementary...
...Parker's formula in these taut and crackling sketches, and the similar but more inclusive formula of that kingpin of American short-story writers, Mr...
...For the sake of morale he has time and again warned the wrangling party chiefs to come to a speedy agreement on their choice for nominations for cabinet posts...
...She, too, has the "hearing ear" that enables her to use the gabble of mediocrities and nincompoops as the material for art: to reproduce it at once with uncanny accuracy and a sure sense of its relation to character and situation...
...The difference is probably that, in out-and-out tragedy, her touch grows uncertain...
...4.00...
...3.00...
...Of these, The Last Tea could bear the challenge of any anthology...
...Laments for the Living, by Dorothy Parker...
...A Great Teacher Essays and Addresses, by John Burnet...
...Yet the best historical fruits may be gleaned from the details about the man himself, his background and surroundings, his motivations as well as his objectives...
...For the sake of morale he has visited the various states, assuring them of their constitutional right to local autonomy, and bidding for their loyalty to nation and Reich...
...Durant, the story of a man who got out of paying the piper, and Little Curtis, a merciless study in unconscious cruelty, are savage enough in their irony, it is true, but Mrs...
...Notch would be more useful if he busied himself by setting an example of fearlessly rinding the right and following it, despite all mobs, rather than by fuming in public for reasons beyond his control...
...New York: The Century Company...
...a great sailor but a great Christian, too...
...For many his nomination was but a political maneuver to secure the election for the nationalist bloc of the right in the hope of enlisting Hindenburg's prestige in their opposition to the republic, the Treaty of Versailles, and the subsequent commitment assumed thereunder...
...Here, for instance, is one volume of The Modern Readers' Series—two classics in excellent texts of standard translations, usable introduction and notes, attractive half-leather binding, handy format...
...Parker's most characteristic note is struck in what may be called her speakeasy sketches: anatomizations, sometimes blithe and sometimes bitter, of those who drink and flirt and party their way through Kfe...
...dignified, self-reliant...
...Nor is it abnormal that this part of the book should prove least attractive though not entirely without value to the civilian-minded reader...
...As chief point of interest it reveals that astounding degree of simplicity of mind required to accept the ideology of army life and training from cadet school to his retirement as field-marshal general of all the forces of the empire...
...1 HE Institut Frangais, of Washington, offers as its fourth Cahier a collection of documents and studies relative to the American career of Jean-Antoine Houdon^ the French sculptor of the eighteenth century who made busts of almost all the celebrities of his time...
...Benson helps us to know Magellan as the facts prove him to have been: a little, lame swarthy man with a piercing eye and vision...
...2.50...
...It is more than five years now since Paul von Hindenburg, recalled from his second retirement, once more set the nations aghast, this time by his acceptance of the nomination for the presidency of the young German republic and his election to that office by more than fourteen million votes...
...But even they will undoubtedly enjoy having the famous letters of the two lovers identified with the background of the action, the mundane rather than the mental life, of the principals...
...Of the three stories here dealing with the necessity for paying the piper, two—New York to Detroit, and Telephone Call—are almost hysterical, and the third—Big Blonde, Mrs...
...but it is something to the credit of the older idea that it could produce a man like Professor Burnet, who not only knew things about the classical literatures, but knew and loved the literatures themselves...
...Nor does Mr...
...For the sake of morale he has pleaded for religious and racial toleration and for a policy of live and let live between capital and labor...
...King Mob, by Frank K. Notch...
...Houdon in America...
...Frederic Thompson...
...Perhaps it is the singleness of purpose and simplicity of character of Hindenburg the soldier, and Hindenburg the president, which have determined the diction and treatment of Weterstetten and Watson the biographers...
...he represented as well as contributed to his era...
...And thus King Mob, though an entertaining book, and one with which every thinking person must have sympathy seems rather futile...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 18
