Books
Chase, Mary Ellen & Phillips, Charles & O'Hara, Edwin V. & Baldwin, Charles Sears & Engels, Vincent & Cram, William Everett & Shuster, George N. & Lane, James W. & Williams, Michael & Wynne, John J.
BOOKS Emily Dickinson Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson; edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $5.00. Emily Dickinson, by Joseph Pollitt. New York: Harper...
...His story begins with the coming of Jacques Cartier to the site of the present city of Quebec in 1535, and then traces the paths of heroism, often made scarlet with the blood of martyrs, up the St...
...Comedy of the Disguises...
...The monstrous shapes with which he habits his subconscious world are simply part of his apparatus...
...the courts of the Alhambra at night...
...No one knows better than Professor Haskins that it takes us—far indeed from modern letter-writing, but into the very midst of mediaeval dictamen...
...Candid, serene, detached, amused, yet profoundly concerned with life," as Mr...
...Parts V, VI and VII contain many chapters that will repay reading...
...Indeed this fine poet often reminds one of a professional mourner, going at an instant's notice through the forlorn grimaces of his trade...
...But his are so unreal in their stupidity and so entirely out of the tone of the story that their inclusion seems not only unfortunate but unwarrantable...
...Tracy says, "We face the fact there exists no adequate record of the American wilderness in terms of nature impression...
...Sitwell intends his manner to be fully as important in the reader's mind as his matter...
...as Mr...
...Manuals for Students digests suggestively certain typical books which historians of education should know better, and actually makes them interesting...
...Schlarman has gone into the making of his book...
...An indication inasmuch as its apparent popularity, and the success of its predecessor, necessarily predetermines a long, straggling line of books about foreign political prisons...
...Our authors summarize the situation thus: "From whatever viewpoint we take the rural and urban families, we have to recognize that the rural family as a union of husband and wife, as a union of parents and children, as an economic unit, as a social unit, as an institution for procreation and education of children has been more stable, integrated, efficient, and has disintegrated in a less degree in all these respects than the urban family...
...At any rate, Pamphilus, the youth, has got his parents considerably worried over him, for he cannot marry respectably if he persists in carrying on with the woman from Andros...
...One great virtue in both the books we have considered is the proof they offer that New England's finest lyric genius was not a spinster dried, like a filch of bacon, in any prim and primitive smoke...
...3.50...
...The earliest essay here reprinted was published in 1898...
...His rich sense of biographical fitness here aids him, e.g., in Pamphilus's father, but he does not always successfully achieve penetration...
...William Everett Cram...
...4.00...
...OF THE twelve essays here collected three are new...
...like a rich family whose money goes to their heads and drives out memories of those whose names should be held in reverence...
...but through Mr...
...Rural Vitality Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology, by Pitirim Sorokin and Carle C. Zimmerman...
...There is no doubt that the book leans heavily on the side of criticism...
...The conflicting interests of the British and French colonists, the many wars or alliances with the savages, leads up to the fundamental clash between British and French military and political powers, with the collapse of the French regime...
...They have used words in a new way...
...This is not the only evidence of preconception...
...It is true the writer has an eye for sensational and dramatic, for sharp contrasts (e.g., Ignatius with Lenin) and at times he presents an exaggerated story or picture, but these historical sections are in the main correct and good summaries of wide reading...
...AS I frequently have had occasion to remark, in the pages • of The Commonweal and elsewhere, people who forget their ancestors and fail to honor their virtues and achievements quickly become vulgarians...
...Burrell to do that...
...I. HIS, the final volume of Dr...
...J. H. Schlarman, whose wellillustrated, beautifully printed and well-documented story of the French in North America can be most heartily recommended...
...William Bartram passed on to us an impression of the cooing of Catesbys' ground doves, in the south...
...and no one who reads them, in spite of Mr...
...Miss Pollitt's book is the first effort to evoke, fullbodied, the personality of Emily Dickinson...
...Burrell's...
...The amount of studious energy which the author has focused upon the environment of her character is so plainly the result of affection and so uniformly reflected in restrained comment that one can only admire and be glad...
...The cardinal need of research in a field too long neglected is made evident, is partly supplied by summaries and quotations from the earlier period and is guided by indications of method...
...But not even Merehkovsky's fine study of Napoleon quite set me right...
...Much, of course, to May 7, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL the indignation of the reviler...
...But you should read the book for yourself...
...All parties to the so-called battle were agreed on the fact that the will is free...
...and possibly the first attempt to introduce her work to a larger public was made by Professor Pattee's anthology of American literature...
...Nor is it true to say that before his time spiritual writers and directors had insisted that this union could be attained only by mystical ecstasy...
...Shepard leaves me, at the close of his book, with the feeling of having once more lived richly because simply, for a little while...
...Artificial the novels of Henry James, for instance, are, and because Wilder, too, views his characters as shades possessed of the fragile grace of Tanagra figurines, with perhaps as little reality as marionettes (although he conceals the wires better than the expansive James) so may he be said to be artificial...
...Here, above all, I find at last a clear, sound summing up of Emil Ludwig's much-lauded Napoleon, a book which has puzzled me...
...Across this path of the development has come the influence of a Russian sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, a compatriot of Kerensky, who for the past several years has been connected with the University of Minnesota...
...The Story of the Jesuits The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits, by Rene Fiilop-Miller...
...Charles Wadsworth, Colonel Higginson, Samuel Bowles, the Dickinson family circle—are likewise outlined in clear and illuminating perspective...
...He is a sensitive observer, and his style is beautifully clear, even when he writes on the double plans of the conscious and the subconscious, a job which forces almost everyone else into agonies of utterance...
...She will live and die alone...
...Both of these volumes achieve what reading is properly designed to achieve...
...In eight parts, subdivided into 103 brief chapters or sections, the author reviews much of the vast literature that concerns the Society of Jesus since its foundation in 1540...
...The authors indicate among the dangers to the future existence of a highly urbanized society, a further disorganization of the family, further increases in irreligiosity, criminality and political instability...
...He has the gift of choosing with astonishing accuracy the very passages and incidents which best recall to mind those b5rgone days and the widely differing characters of the men he writes about...
...Shepard writes about childhood and unicorns, dolls and ink-bottles, and a score of such other "little" things as enter deeply into our lives almost without our knowing it...
...He did not dream of suggesting that without it, by mere human endeavor, one could achieve union with God...
...Behaviorism, Wood Lice and Pavlov's Dog...
...No two authorities would agree on the most representative list...
...In socio-economic status, the farmer-peasant is par excellence of the proprietor class, the percentage of owners within the whole agricultural population being notably higher than in any other large occupation...
...Chrysis reminds the reader of the woman in Karel Capek's Makropoulos Secret, who has lived 300 years, looks sweet sixteen or a cosmeticized thirty, and contains bottled up the very quintessence of fatalism...
...He tells us that in 1873 the question was brought before the Judicial Committee of the German Federal Council, without stating what the decision was and without telling us how frequently it had been adjudged since, so that no well-read person would dare put forth as a Jesuit maxim today that any end, good or evil, justifies means that are evil...
...THERE is much history in this book and more philosophy...
...The schools of yore knew her not...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...He is also, like lovers of the decorative, fond of the serene purple passage...
...From almost every point of view it is a success...
...Pessimism was rampant: "The most difficult burden [of life] was the incommunicability of love...
...True, it has been revised, and supplemented as the others have been with those precious bibliographical notes on which students have learned to rely...
...New York: Coward-McCann, Incorporated...
...4-50...
...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...
...Bianchi's Life and Letters brings a good book to the fore once again...
...You may marvel at his skill, his versatility or his astonishing productiveness without feeing that what results has had its expected impact...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...Since the Jesuits found that confession was to be a powerful means of winning people to religion, they had, according to the author, to make it attractive, to make it easy for penitents to receive absolution, "to bring as many sins as possible within the compass of absolution...
...3-90...
...Nevertheless there were always lovers of poetry to whom her name was, in a manner, sacred...
...So, the author tells us, are most men...
...Any institution which is strong in the country has the promise of the future...
...Her savory dinners and all-night drinking-bouts with their conversations recall the hospitality of Callias in Plato and could as easily, if stenographically reported, produce another Banquet...
...John J. Wynne...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...But that salt was rapidly losing its savor...
...But the import of the story is the thing and brings me back to that other sense, with which I started, in which by no manner of means can Wilder be called artificial...
...Part II on Ignatius Loyola is perhaps the weakest one in the book...
...Essays Intimate and Critical The Joys of Forgetting, by Odell Shepard...
...Edwin V. O'Hara...
...RECALLING when one first heard of Emily Dickinson is an interesting and relatively instructive pastime...
...Sitwell's book...
...There are today over twenty-two thousand Jesuits in the world...
...We remember them by the things they did and said and thought...
...Vincent Engels...
...Matters come to a head when Pamphilus meets the young sister Glycerium (who is not supposed to go out) wandering on the island, when she falls in love with him, discovers she will bear him a child, and dies in childbirth—shortly after the death, whether due to mental shock or ennui one never learns, of Chrysis...
...Parkman's masterly volumes, which are, however, not always reliable when they are concerned with the religious motives of the French (although in no sense could Parkman be termed a bigot) are no longer generally read...
...5-00...
...Perhaps, indeed, in view of the facts that the most memorable feature of the book is its description and that the method throughout is expository rather than dramatic, Mr...
...The ease, rather the eloquence with which he writes is often disconcerting, and in his more ambitious things almost always suspect...
...there is the passage in Senlin which many of us still have by heart...
...It would take a review that would be at least half as lengthy as Dr...
...John Bartram salvaged for us, out of the dark of the middle eighteenth-century forests, the song of an Indian, heard by himself alone, wakeful at night in Penn's woods...
...but the bare addition that Alberic's Breviarium "includes a consideratio rithmorum which takes us far from letterwriting" may mislead the uninformed...
...It is mostly an apologetic, with some criticism...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...Its field was variously conceived as a survey of rural social institutions, an estimate of rural adequacy, a program of rural betterment, a picture of the farmer's contribution to the great society...
...And yet he admits Jesuits had personal initiative and individual freedom and that this was the secret of their power...
...Among these popularizers high place must be given to an author new at least to The Commonweal, Dr...
...He exaggerates the office of the confessor as a judge...
...yet the book might well be guaranteed to hold the attention of those who care only for the study of human life, and for whom the rough forest and the swampland are a thing apart and somewhat terrifying...
...The eight parts are studies of The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius, The Society, Free Will and Moral Philosophy, Jesuit Missions, Methods, and Education...
...The archives of Europe as well as America have been ransacked for hitherto hidden facts, which throw fresh interest upon the pages in which his clear and simple prose relates with unflagging zeal the high romance of the French martyrs and missionaries, voyageurs and military men, and the intrepid women whose names stand so high in the annals of the French in America...
...It is not to be expected that in a work so vast in scope and so varied in content—a critical study of a world-wide and most active organization for 400 years—that the author would treat every subject with the same correctness and familiarity...
...Michel and Chartres, Professor Haskins has been steadily showing how to study mediaeval history...
...As a whole the volume may be overwritten—such phrases as "She went out into the hills and fields, and carried parts of them home in her arms," of which there are many, are not right...
...Coming down to writers of our own time, he says, "The nature men have given us new word-sets...
...So they "found an easy way of transforming a large number of mortal into venial sins...
...Life in the Middle Ages: Volume IV, by G. G. Coulton...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The author proffers as obvious an example of sentimental literary hysteria, as one might dread to find on a publisher's list...
...The feat is most noteworthy for that muddle-head John of Garland, who is discreetly damned with the following faint praise...
...an institution that is weak in the country is decaying at its roots...
...The urban family has already lost some of these functions...
...TpHERE is a certain sense in which the work of Thornton ¦*¦ Wilder is artificial and there is a sense in which artifiiciality is the last thing that could be said of him...
...Not only are scientific research workers providing for fresh material relating to the pioneers of many races and many creeds, who opened up the new world and prepared the paths for the great northern republic, the United States, but trustworthy and reliable popularizers of the historians are also appearing, together with creative artists, like Willa Cather and Mary Austin, and Thornton Wilder, who are drawing upon the rich treasure unearthed by the historians, and made known to the public by the popularizers, in order to create poetry, novels, plays and music...
...The connection of ceremonious correspondence with the mediaeval tradition of rhetoric is hinted...
...The last chapter, Forest Man as Naturist, is the most fascinating of all...
...The author submits as if it were something new the doctrine that intention is a serious factor in morality, and that this apparently simple assumption enabled the Jesuits in many instances to absolve sinners...
...The Hunts are thereby drawn into the centre of the Dickinson story, and Miss Pollitt derives excellent copy from Helen Hunt Jackson's Mercy Philbrick's Choice, which may have had a semibiographical intention...
...Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech is more than legendary inspiration...
...Wilder's Figurines The Woman of Andros, by Thornton Wilder...
...Grace in the Salons...
...It is puzzling, because the only lack on which one can lay a finger is a negligible dramatic power, although his fondness for long narratives makes this more serious...
...Charles Sears Baldwin...
...Ignatius did not leave grace out of his scheme for religious perfection...
...This volume hardly touches the recently explored evidence of iconography which is recommended in the preface...
...Of course she was a harp rather than a steam calliope, but the harp was played and in tune...
...Some of the titles of the chapters indicate the writer's captivating mode of treatment, as, for instance: The Pope's Comma...
...Tristram Orlander, whose story this is, is a man of genius who is dogged all his life by his own shadow...
...This cannot be equally true of all of them...
...the terraces, alleys, and wine shops of Seville...
...and this decay has some causal relationship with the process of urbanization itself...
...It calls throughout for documentation, but there is none...
...The field of rural sociology is to describe and explain ruralurban differences which are constant characteristics of the rural in contradistinction to urban social phenomena...
...His bibliography lists 963 books, pamphlets and magazine articles, but he gives no reference to the passages on which he bases his statements and conclusions...
...It then proceeds to trace the development of the suppression of independence of the English colonies, with the many problems involving the French, closing with the exploits of George Rogers Clark, which put an end to British domination in the Middle-west...
...One comes to these things as to the world of birds and spring flowers...
...Among the master's recent studies two appearing originally in Speculum should especially command the wider audience: The Spread of Ideas in the Middle Ages (1926) and Latin Literature under Frederick II (1928...
...toward regeneration of the idealistic and religious outlook instead of the purely mechanistic and materialistic faiths...
...Miss Pollitt has now made that easier and considerably more interesting...
...It is not an easy subject...
...This was unavoidable...
...He knows his Napoleon...
...Burrell's fine collection of critical essays...
...She had a sense of duty, a sacrificial nobleness...
...Nature produced science and science is supposed to be an account of natural laws...
...a deep spiritual revolution should be directed toward a reinforcement and regeneration of the stoic attitude toward life instead of the epicurean...
...Here are most evident that pointing of generalization with specific leads for inquiry which continues to make his exact and ripe scholarship fruitful beyond the range of his personal influence...
...Consequently, both farmer-labor and farmer-capitalist programs are Utopian...
...But there are things we shall long remember in Mr...
...And shadows are provokingly intangible as major characters in tragedies...
...The new edition of Mrs...
...but the date is eloquent...
...New York: Harper and Brothers...
...Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe...
...yet the more science increases the more nature is diminished as fact and value, or vanishes into formulae of energy, into mathematical descriptions of atomic and electrical force...
...Lawrence, across the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi and the Ohio valleys, to Fort de Chartres and New Orleans...
...But although to tell what his laconic generalities signify is sometimes not altogether easy, the residual atmosphere is like that of a very lovely painting, say Giovanni Bellini's, of The Crucifixion...
...The author makes the strange mistake of confusing the Immaculate Conception with virginity...
...A permanent rural-urban difference is to be found in birth rate and vitality...
...In the middle-ages," we are told, "men were still far from recognizing 'the liberty of a Christian' man, 'who should be a free lord over all things and subject to no one.' " And in Jesuitism, according to the author, this view of authority survived beyond the middleages...
...4.00...
...Intrinsically the book's chief fault is that it does not stress sufficiently Emily's undeviating concern with death and immortality, so poignantly if laconically revealed by Mrs...
...toward a regeneration of the family institution, possibly in a somewhat different form, but in all essentials preserving the substantial functions of the family...
...According to him all Catholics are convinced "that every mistake made by his father confessor in judging the sins committed by his penitents must have dire consequences"—no less than exclusion from salvation, as if confessors do not let penitents sit in judgment on themselves and accept what they confess without question...
...Often enough these spontaneous notes have a rare Elizabethan fancifulness, hard to associate with New England and yet at home there for everyone who understands that district and its tradition...
...there is Punch: the Immortal Liar, and there is, best of all, Tetelestai, but the rest leave one unmoved, untouched...
...He has the further advantage of working in a field into which few poets have made extended excursions equipped with anything like half his scholarship...
...The major import, as I see it, is the spiritual ineptness of the pre-Christian Greek civilization, like that of one fly hermetically sealed in a room from which it can never emerge to fresher air...
...George N. Shuster...
...In dealing with social characteristics of the rural group, emphasis is placed upon the comparative immobility of the agricultural population not only territorially but also in regard to change of occupation and of socio-economic conditions...
...2.50...
...The Tribulations of Madame de Pompadour...
...Schlarman's volume will, I trust, direct fresh attention to a theme well deserving of fresh and persistent research, and even more deserving of general literary and artistic treatment...
...His new story concerns the lives of three persons—a lady of a certain age and of more uncertain virtue, her sister, and a young blade of respectable parentage—on one of "the happiest, and one of the least famous of the islands, Brynos," off the Aegean coast of Greece...
...It took Mr...
...Evidently none of these chroniclers of nature aspired to greatness, or achieved it, yet in the work of one and all of them is latent at least that necessary element of greatness which hands it down to us of later generations more worth ¦while now than when it was created...
...One of his favorite methods is to trace back to their sources the views and systems that were characteristically Jesuit, as, for instance, their moral philosophy to Aristotle, in Part IV...
...Perhaps, again, however, his success would have been greater had he shared Thomas De Quincey's contention that manner and matter are inseparable...
...For the sake of these we tolerate those intrusive, smart pages obviously intended to satirize certain American tourists, who quite as obviously annoy Mr...
...But it is so charming a novelty to see writing which is over rather than the prevailing under that you and I will not be caustic...
...Tracy tells us of those clear-cut personalities who each in his turn answered the call to chronicle the passing phases of wild life in the American forest and save it from being engulfed and lost "in the dark backward and abysm of time...
...Others are windows through which glimpses of the woman herself are afforded with delightful exactness...
...No doubt, I have been in the same position as most readers of Ludwig's widely circulated biography...
...So, we know, were Anna Karenina, and The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Madame Bovary...
...At a time when so much work is being done, particularly by the master of all Spanish American historians, Professor Herbert Bolton of the University of California, and May at Duke University, and by Dr...
...Historians of Our Wilds American Naturists, by Henry Chester Tracy...
...During the years that have seen the rise and fall of Henry Adams's Mont St...
...Besides the men of science whose occasional contributions to our literature might bring them properly into the field of these sketches, there are popular lecturers, photographers, artists and essays we might like to include...
...Bianchi's biography is succinct, a little tightlaced and close-lipped, but giving essential information...
...1 HIS novel, Free, coming so closely upon the heels of Condemned to Devil's Island, its author's previous venture into bad writing, is an indication and a reproach...
...2.50...
...One is compelled to ask at times whether it is not merely a formula which he has vowed to repeat...
...But though it deals almost exclusively with documents, no one has done more to widen the earlier range of that term...
...SHEPARD'S "book of bagatelles," as he calls it, might have been given the title, The Joys of Reading...
...And he knows many other things, twixt Heaven and Charing Cross...
...and he has a delightfully sure yet unofficious manner of sharing his knowledge with others...
...In stating facts he is more at home than when dealing with asceticism, theological disputes, philosophical theory and moral practices...
...I am the more ready, then, to enjoy the stimulating effects of Mr...
...It is unquestionably true of those of them who cultivated the gift...
...The situation may be summarized by saying that increase of population comes primarily in the rural districts, and the urban population is gradually being replaced by the rural...
...Studying the Middle-Ages Studies in Mediaeval Culture, by Charles Homer Haskins...
...The book is far from being a mere rehashing of the facts, theories, and discoveries of other scholars and other writers...
...It has nothing to do with the views of Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Bertrand Russell, James and the rest whom Fiilop-Miller arrays and one wonders why they are lugged in...
...Hers is a poetry which reveals all its whims to a glance, but which reserves more and more of mystery for contemplation...
...And yet without experience, what right has one to talk of the confessional...
...2.50...
...they give delight to the mind...
...WITH the publication of this volume, rural sociology in America has become of age both chronologically and psychologically...
...If one is to be witness and try to understand a tragedy, then one wants to see it enacted, not to be told painstakingly about it by an author who more than occasionally discovers in himself as well as his hero a tragic figure...
...Nor has anyone else been able to make us see so vividly what Amherst (or THE COMMONWEAL l93° cultivated New England, for that matter) was like in those days...
...4.00...
...and that title would have served him well not only to present his own volume, but to introduce along with it Mr...
...The facts just stated are to a considerable degree a reflection of the greater stability of the rural family...
...The poet happened to be a recluse, though the nature of her flight from the world has been misunderstood...
...and toward a decrease of scepticism, cynicism and other similar currents of thought...
...Her book will win and keep its place...
...The book is concerned with the French convicts of Guiana, but more especially with Stephen Latour, a student who after eight years' experience of penal systems, discovers the means of escape to lie within his reach...
...It annoys one by its repetitious and overly meticulous psychoanalysis, by its lack of illuminating incidents, in short by an expository rather than by a narrative and dramatic method...
...The joys of reading are beautifully realized in these two volumes of essays...
...They are his mythology, thus, in his poetry modern psychology (and Goya) have replaced the Olympians with all sorts of fauna decaying on the hoof...
...Coulton's book will be useful to the discriminating scholar...
...that strange blueness of the city after sunset when "there comes to Granada a moment no other city knows...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...It is, of course, in the nature of a permanent revision...
...A simple record of things said and done by a few last representatives of the Redman...
...There is so much evidence in the book of a disposition to be fair that one is reluctant to speak of certain preconceptions that mar it, but in Part IV there are several...
...It is a long time since any book has come my way that I have so thoroughly enjoyed reading...
...He is as passionately interested in spiritual states as Cardinal Newman...
...that is, dazzled by his easy, flashing style...
...Michael Williams...
...For he has in abundance everything he needs, wit, imagination, and knowledge of his craft...
...Charles Phillips...
...And yet their work, restricted as it was to simple description of the wild creatures and their ways, failed to save for us the real spirit of the American wilderness...
...Conversation through Clock and Calendar...
...These must find no end of pleasure in the contemporary Dickinson revival...
...Fiilop-Miller does not attempt to refute everything that has been said against the order, but as a rule he endeavors to show that there is another side and that much for which its members have been blamed was more reasonable than its enemies cared to admit...
...Wilson was a weaver who would not weave, Audubon a merchant who would not sell goods, Thoreau a pencil maker who would not make pencils, Burroughs a farmer who would not farm, Muir a rake manufacturer who would not make rakes...
...Into this Grecian urn of religion, already dry of faith, Wilder begins to pour the productive Christ-heralding rain of his last few pages...
...Coulton's reconstructed mediaeval anthology, is the one round which discussion is likely to wax fiercest...
...The authors consider that advice regarding the improvement of rural life belongs to the field of rural social technology rather than to theoretic rural sociology...
...The central purpose is to throw some light upon the "love affair" which is known to have modified the poet's outlook and to have called forth at least some of her work...
...Thomas Hardy and John Masefield become one's intimates in his pages...
...This Pourat makes clear in his Christian Spirituality which, by the way, Fiilop-Miller does not mention in his exhaustive bibliography...
...a cessation of propaganda in favor of birth control...
...In all this, particularly in the relation of the farm to the traditional family, may be glimpsed the philosophy of the Catholic rural life movement in its program for the building up of ten thousand strong country parishes in the United States...
...For all this the total effect of his selected poems is not great...
...Other influential figures—Dr...
...The reviewer once asked a man who was reviling confession: "When were you at confession last...
...One feels a laudable effort expended to get at the bottom of people's minds, and of spiritual wrongs, in a spiritual way...
...It restates the field of rural sociology with clarifying directness and introduces a wealth of data, drawn from foreign sources, not heretofore used by American rural sociologists...
...The Atomization of Morality...
...What a different book we might expect from Fulop-Miller if only he had studied his subject in the life instead of wading through his imposing bibliography...
...The admiration of Celeste, a local passion flower, temporarily obscures his urgent wish for freedom, and jeopardizes his chances of securing it, but being a sensible fellow he goes away...
...The hetaira, named Chrysis, entertains lavishly...
...Now millionaires pay large amounts for letters in their hand and signature, and treasure early imprints of their books...
...Briefer Mention Free, by Blair Niles...
...That is, their writings are important as literature...
...Ohiyesa, an orphan papoose, brought up by his grandmother, Uncheeda...
...In the chapter on Galileo, he accounts for the study of the sciences by Jesuits not to a love of science but to a desire to prove that the world is theocentric...
...Concerned with "monks, friars and nuns," it manifests clearly the author's tendency, which is radically antiromantic and in a sense anti-Catholic...
...The Early Artes Dictandi in Italy is more technical and more important...
...Jesuit Opera and Jesuit Ballet...
...The authors promise a three-volume source book substantiating more fully from world experience the conclusions contained in the present volume...
...The New Mythology Selected Poems, by Conrad Aiken: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...This is one of several philosophical digressions which do not always improve the work...
...We must hope therefore that those whose admiration turns toward some person not described . . . will not resent an omission that implies no reflection on such a person's achievements...
...It will help to cure him of too eager a willingness to regard the Church as bound up especially with a definite era or civilization...
...Practically all the more important things that have been written for or against the Jesuits are treated in this volume...
...Sitwell's Manner The Man Who Lost Himself, by Osbert Sitwell...
...Followed through one poem after another, Mr...
...Wilder has tried to get inside of the minds of his characters...
...The Woman of Andros exhibits really the Tod und Verklarung of Greece...
...Here is a curious paradox...
...chain letters no longer terrify...
...Walter de la Mare says in his foreword, Mr...
...When comparative statistics are standardized to take into account the age and sex distribution of population, it is found in practically all countries that the rural birth rate is much higher than that of the city and that a rapid decrease in birth rate has gone on with the increase of urbanization of population...
...Perhaps some day the writers of books will think of giving the world information obtained at first hand, about sacred things like the confessional, and about living organizations like the Jesuits...
...It peers behind veils but is seldom merely inquisitive...
...The promised volumes will be a welcome addition to our sociological literature...
...Part III, The Battle over Free Will, is written in lighter vein...
...Fiilop-Miller's discussion of the end-and-means charge is far from clear...
...Shepard's exquisite dissertation on The Joys of Forgetting, will ever quite let them go from memory...
...But her heart was munificently open to the companionship of human beings, nature and great literature...
...In collaboration with Professor Carle Zimmerman, Sorokin has produced the present volume which will undoubtedly exercise a powerful and a wholesome influence on the future of rural sociology...
...The rural population of today is the urban of tomorrow...
...Sitwell's writing of narrative we shall not long remember Tristram Orlander because he is drawn as another shadow, a shadow who from the first to the last page does not speak except to expound a theory...
...it is tropical, sensual and realistic, and on its merits as a scenario and boxoffice attraction, some Hollywood magnate will pocket the customary million, and some profile be borne to fame...
...When these facts are considered in conjunction with the data which show the greater longevity of the agricultural group it becomes evident that the rural vital index is notably higher than the urban...
...Not that for one moment we hold any brief for American tourists...
...he is diffuse in plan, not diffuse enough in execution...
...He] was a pedantic professor of grammar who imagined himself to be a poet...
...The earlier actualities of North American river, prairie and forest are lost beyond recovery...
...Stilted in their diction and generally obscure in style, the numerous works . . . sometimes contain material of interest for the university life of his day...
...And as with his melancholy, so with his museum of horrors out of Goya...
...Schlarman's bulky book, in which, however, there is not a dull page, adequately to summarize its contents...
...He does not keep in mind the distinction between lawful and unlawful means...
...Possibly Emily Dickinson herself fades from view as Miss Pollitt's spotlight flits from one portion of the environment to another...
...His descriptions of Spain where most of his story is set provoke our willing admiration and complete satisfaction: the silent, grey-golden downs above Granada, the purple flags among a mass of dagger-like leaves...
...Gawaso Wanneh, an Iroquois, and Smoky Day, the schoolmaster of the woods, retaining to the last their native consciousness of mental and spiritual superiority over the white hordes that overwhelmed them by sheer force of numbers leave the reader somewhat inclined to believe that they were right...
...translated by F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait...
...James W. Lane...
...Even so, Dr...
...THIS is a most provoking book in the worst and in the best sense of that provoking word...
...It includes, first of all, the correspondence which the editor thought the public ought to have—an indispensable, extraordinary collection...
...There are perhaps a dozen short lyrics as fine as any which American poetry can show in our times...
...and a reproach in so far as it evinces the woful extremes to which journalese, the prose of our generation, may be forced...
...The agrarian movement will go its own way...
...Nobody in this country has been more exquisitely lyrical...
...In nearly every part of the book there is a resume of the history of the philosophical opinions which they adopted or developed, and often also a comparison of these with the opinions of later thinkers, as in Part III, The Battle over Free Will...
...FOUR hundred pages of Conrad Aiken ought to make a greater impression than they do...
...Fortunately, amid all the welter of literary interests, not to say fevers, which are prevalent among American readers today, the interest in American history is solidly present, and is destined, I believe, to grow in extent and depth, and in practical value...
...in fact, it should be a duty resting upon those who can reach the general public to urge the many claims of this fascinating record...
...They only differed in explaining how this freedom could be reconciled with the action of grace and in no sense determinists like most of the above mentioned...
...He pictures the essentially Godless flatness of pagan Greece: they worshiped their gods, not, as several modern philosophers would have us think they did, as "evanescences," but as beings...
...The third of the new essays, The Heresy of Echard the Baker of Rheims, explores a particular case of the tendency analyzed in the preceding essay, revised from its special publication in 1902...
...With a charm that is as pleasing as the voice of a quiet friend, Mr...
...The value of contact with such a character is obvious...
...Our list has aimed to be representative...
...In brief, according to all evidence, the urban family is in the process of decay...
...Part I on the Spiritual Exercises is seriously at fault...
...Showing that the essence of Christ's kingdom is always a war against the "world," it may rid some of fatuous dreaming about the past and instil resolution to accept the present and labor earnestly for its betterment...
...Aiken's melancholy wears pretty thin...
...It remains a volume which every lover of the poet may place beside her verse, as an open sesame to one's own imaginings...
...The French in America From Quebec to New Orleans, by J. H. Schlarman...
...The materials for the growing science were found in the rapidly developing wealth of information dug up by the United States decennial censuses and by local research...
...Miss Pollitt believes the man in question to have been Lieutenant (afterward Major) Edward Hunt, an army engineer, engrossed in scientific inquiry...
...3.00 Betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross, by Martin Burrell...
...An anthology equally large and interesting could be devoted to that lore which Kenelm Henry Digby loved with all his heart...
...THE title of this book naturally would attract first of all the reader who is interested in nature...
...Mediaeval studies in English were still often apologetic or sentimental...
...Uneven as is much of the style, there are not infrequently passages which recall the best of the romantic prose of the nineteenth century, particularly that of Pater...
...others are considerably atrophied...
...Peter Guilday of the Catholic University, to bring the importance of the Spanish element in American history to the attention of the public which up to now has been perhaps overfed with the achievements of the Puritans in New England, the Huguenots, the Dutch, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Cavaliers in Virginia, it is most important that fresh attention should be given to the work of the French...
...Having ferreted out all the available facts, our biographer may justly claim that her argument is persuasive if not conclusive...
...On the other hand, he is too much of a laborer to be identified with the conservative class...
...But it is distinctly marketable...
...A complete list would be encyclopedic...
...For these trends they suggest the following remedies: "There must be further improvement in city hygienic conditions and in the vitality of the urban population...
...Milton and Lord Acton are alive again...
...A great deal of patient and fruitful research on the part of Dr...
...Belleville, Illinois: Buechler Publishing Company...
...their own fathers and grandfathers, and perhaps more particularly their mothers and their mothers' mothers...
...Sitwell more than they annoy his hero and who unquestionably help to destroy whatever unity his book possesses...
...the size of the family itself is shrinking more and more...
...They have no special power and they never had any secrets...
...Matters of textual examination we shall leave to others, this not being the place to deal with them...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...From about the seventy-fifth to the one-hundredth page there is a bleak expanse fringing on boredom—a serious fault in a small book of 162 pages...
...Taking its origin two decades ago in the exigencies of the farm problem, given its bearings by the Roosevelt Commission on Country Life in 1909, it has been indebted for its development to a group of thoughtful students for the most part connected with our state agricultural colleges and the United States Department of Agriculture...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...Wilder is not merely a good story-teller with the patina and detail of a Flemish primitif...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
