Books
Winkle, Cortlandt van & Kilmer, Kenton & Milton, George Fort & Kernan, Julia & Fiske, A. Longfellow & jr., James W. Lane
BOOKS Lincoln's Successor The Critical Year, by Howard K. Beale. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5.00. IN THE reweighing of the historical evidence of that bitter period which Claude...
...Thus the Democrats constituted his natural support and hope...
...Contrasts Mrs...
...He has also searched the amazing Sumner collection, and it has afforded him an unusual number of illuminating sidelights on radical maneuvers...
...On pages 372 and 373, he argues that the May Song is maturer than the Fifth Elegy and the Nightingale...
...One gains a fine insight into the propaganda methods from this volume...
...The flower of knighthood, like any other bloom, had its day and then began to go to seed...
...So with M. Maritain...
...The story, swift and uncomplicated, gains a certain vitality and power of interesting from the dramatic contrast of the characters...
...The narrative is set at a tempo of action possibly too languid for the average American reader...
...A. Longfellow Fiske...
...Moreover, Mr...
...The vows of poverty and celibacy were scarce better observed than that of obedience...
...Beale demonstrates to the satisfaction of the reader that there did exist a vigorous, well-organized and largely unscrupulous radical propaganda against the President and his policies...
...Once the confusion is resolved, however, by consideration, scenes and characters appear, and a certain beauty of style...
...THE agreeable little island of Malta is evidently no stranger to dissensions in the bosom of the Church...
...The atmosphere, while unsparingly realistic, is made human by a strong sense of the power of religion...
...Tillyard is not acceptible to everyone, and the arguments adduced for the new arrangement are not particularly convincing, the method is excellent and no great harm is done...
...and if, on page 94, "Alausi" is a mere printer's error for "Alauni...
...honest and well-meaning, but a fool, pliant in the hands of traitors, copperheads or anybody who would toady to him...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...One looks in vain for notes or references of any kind...
...Clutterbuck is a trifle overdrawn and grotesque...
...All the paraphernalia of history have been discarded...
...an illiterate, illmannered, intemperate fellow, stubborn, intolerant, quarrelsome...
...Deploring the commercialized ornamentation of modern churches, he reasons that if only the modern church art did not seek to smite the breast of the worshiper with its own highly personal thoughts, the conditions would be again good for a genuine sacred art such as the primitives had...
...It is a book of great contrasts—contrasts in characters, but also in writing, in strength of characterization and description...
...No man without a deliberate and almost unchangeable bias could read carefully this volume of judicial tone, sound scholarship and careful appraisement of facts without concluding that Andrew Johnson was the hapless victim of a group of fanatic partizans...
...In doing so, he says he is reluctantly forced to disagree with Mr...
...But if this modernism, in the admirable instinct "to find a form of expression that will not convey a lie," becomes, in Maritain's glorious phrase, the suicide of an angel—through forgetfulness of matter, it will have only itself to blame...
...It is not strange that their fiery spirits found an outlet in feuds between the chapters within the Order, and revolt against authority within and without...
...e., aestheticism) is made the ultimate end of man, the perfect joy of beauty, which is a religious joy, will not be attained...
...As to the artist himself, since the virtue of art is a perfection of the spirit, and if properly Christian, heightens religion (without necessarily becoming ecclesiastical), he must possess and not be possessed by the rules for producing beauty...
...T. S. Eliot and the anti-Miltonists...
...Knighthood in decay—a depressing spectacle...
...2.50 THIS human story about a small town in England might have been written by Dickens, were it not that it lacks something of the Dickens's magic of expression and ability to hold and sustain the reader's interest...
...Pocock, however, is a little more serious and less playful, and at times in his subtle irony reminds the reader of Thackeray...
...Tillyard, for the sake of clarity and a striking formula, does not try to fit Milton into a Procrustean bed, ignoring embarrassing statements and amplifying those which fit, after the manner of M. Saurat who, as a result of this method, has written the most interesting and the clearest book on Milton, but a very dangerous book...
...Beale thinks, and I agree with his view, that Johnson also had at that time a majority of the people of the North as well...
...Tillyard takes his reader on a somewhat arduous journey throughout all the poetical and all the more important prose writings of his author...
...Mr...
...Hence the attributes of God, the theological virtues, especially wisdom and contemplation par excellence, should adhere to it...
...Space does not suffice to follow the intricate maneuvers of the rival political groups during 1866...
...Although the two misspellings in the second quotation on page 271 may again be a printer's error who prefers the modern "boils" and "devilish" to "boiles" and "devillish," how can Mr...
...John of Jerusalem is for the most part a story of feuds and bickerings, of struggles for precedence and high office that ill befitted the scions of the noblest houses of Europe...
...There are too many passages devoted to conjecture and pretty fancies...
...In that sense, although from other points of view it is diametrically opposed to Christianity, contemporary art is far closer to a Christian art than academic art...
...The grand mastership became a more and more perilous honor: there was friction with the clergy of Malta and gusty outbursts against the Inquisitors sent by Rome to keep an eye on knightly circles...
...an insolent, clownish drunkard, whose excesses disgraced the White House, whose family could not be recognized by respectable society, whose lack of dignity and incapacity in office made us hang our heads in shame before foreign nations...
...Yet so engaging is Miss Schermerhorn's account of the traditions and ideals of the Knights, so rich and colorful her picture of their long and baroque afternoon, that we recommend her book to those interested in "days of old," even at the risk of depriving them of their illusions...
...It is most emphatically in the Dickens's style, and too much so...
...Beale has made use of the original manuscript of the diary of Gideon Welles, and has demonstrated that the printed volumes thereof contain many elisions and many changes...
...2.00...
...Tillyard written an introductory chapter showing succinctly just what the renaissance meant to Milton and what he had absorbed of it, and had he defined Puritanism and followed its shifting fortunes during the poet's career, and had he shown how close in some respects Milton was to the Puritan outlook and how diametrically opposite he stood in other respects, we should have had a clearer notion of Milton's literary development...
...Admirably translated, it contains all one need know about aesthetics and right appreciation...
...Change the soul, the inner principle [of the most 'advanced' moderns], imagine the light of faith and reason taking the place of the exasperation of the senses . . . , and you have an art capable of high spiritual developments...
...CROFTS has deservedly earned a reputation for university texts of exceptional attractiveness and quality...
...But the northern Democrats blindly and selfishly played their own petty party measures, and held aloof from the great union movement which the President sought to project in the fall of 1866...
...The stage is so large, the style so hurried and compressed, the action so dazzingly swift, the actors so numerous, that the general reader would soon find himself bewildered...
...The Oxford edition, and all others Ithat I know, read "work...
...Or what shall we say of the substitution of "stretching" for "reaching," in the quotation on page 255 which, as printed, goes in part: "Forth stretching to the Fruit, she pluck'd...
...or, as a reductio ad absurdum of this method, after the manner of Herr Mutschmann, whose articles are also very clear and very entertaining...
...Hanford...
...Wright's historical romance is the granddaughter of Alfred the Great...
...Baudelaire's and Rimbaud's theories of aestheticism (with a difference) and Severini's theories of cubism...
...These are only samples, and by no means exhaust the list...
...At the beginning of 1866 (his "critical year") Johnson probably had with him a majority of the common people of the country...
...translated by Harlan Hoge Bollard...
...Tillyard is at his best when tilting against Mr...
...Unfortunately, there are a great many good citizens, ruled exclusively by that respectability and prudence that caused the sickness of nineteenth-century art, who think an artist's originality and freshness should be curbed, and that art should always conform to the same canons...
...Without doubt The Critical Year is a real forward step toward a better conception of Andrew Johnson and the beginning of Reconstruction...
...Such introductory material and notes as were included in the second edition are retained...
...But even in its certain decay it was surrounded by a gorgeousness and glamor that lasted until the whole withered thing was blown away by the great wind of the French Revolution...
...This chapter, the Epilogue, is the best written, the most vital and the most impressive in the book...
...Kenton Kilmer...
...This careful research lends a tone of authoritative value to the book...
...translated by Brian W. Downs...
...It is these people—who, more unfortunately, comprise a certain number of Catholics—that M. Maritain, one of the three great neo-Catholics today, is at brilliant pains to edify...
...1 HE rather improbably named central figure of Mr...
...It describes certain inhabitants of peaceful Dixton most cleverly, and enters into their lives intimately and with discernment...
...It is, nevertheless, a novel quite human, amusing and readable, with flashes of near-genius in description and characterization...
...that the war had been fought to keep the South in the union, and now that it had been won, it was ridiculous to seek to thrust it out...
...It was this fevered radical propaganda, operating through channels of pulpits, editorials, public speeches, pamphlets and whispered canards and lies, which largely turned northern sentiment away from the President, and caused the defeat of the Johnson policies at the ballot box or boxes in the fall of 1866...
...that "conscious traitors" should not be placed in the houses of Congress, but that whenever the southern states should elect to represent them men who personally could take the oath, these men deserved admission...
...Discipline became lax and the decline continued apace...
...The Student's Milton...
...But Dr...
...But beauty appertains "to the metaphysical and transcendental order...
...Boston: Houghton Mijflin Company...
...Indeed, anyone who cared to take the trouble would find himself well repaid for reading this book slowly and carefully, consulting also on occasion an encyclopedia or history for the identity of the minor characters here insufficiently placed...
...All possible space is saved in the construction of the book, the top of the printed page coming where the heads are usually found...
...a spiteful, inflated, and unprincipled egotist...
...The interest would be intense but the understanding vague...
...But this is a sin of omission...
...George Fort Milton...
...My nature, on the contrary, is rather defensive in its character.' " Similarly, after a careful sifting of the evidence, Dr...
...The number of problems in the category of high lights upon which both its text and its pleasingly long notes descant is incredible for so small a book...
...Julia Kernan...
...The hexameter meter is fluent, if not precisely poetic, and clings to the original with such exemplary fidelity that it can be read with real pleasure to the accompaniment of the Virgilian text...
...A little less of Dickens and Thackeray, and more of the author's own personality and unaffected style, would have improved the book wonderfully...
...Our scepticism is sometimes rewarded...
...Johnson could get but little support from the Republican party, although he had been a candidate with Lincoln in 1864...
...Gregorian chant, Bach, Satie, and Stravinsky...
...But the attention given to the greatest landmarks in the life of the Order—the siege of Malta and the battle of Lepanto—is scant in comparison to the accent on less edifying and more decadent aspects of its history...
...The list of illustrations reads like the catalogue of a thirteenth-century collection in some great museum, and the reproductions are excellent...
...The beautiful, according to Saint Thomas, rests in what delights the mind...
...On June 12, 1798, one of the stoutest fortifications in all Christendom, held for two hundred and fifty years by these noble "athletes of Christ" was handed over without a struggle to a plebeian little Corsican, who paused in his progress toward Egypt scarce long enough to dictate the terms of surrender...
...Without laboring his analyses, the author really manages to limn in a clashing, strong-willed, austere ruling family: the elfin and unchanging daughter, the strong and suffering mother, the uncle in whom all the flinty greatness of "Ethelwulf's spawn" is centered...
...Its main elements were the recognition that the southern states were still members of the federal union, and deserved restoration to federal relation as soon as possible...
...Tillyard states on page vi that he quotes from the Oxford edition of Milton's poems, the carelessness with which he does so is not a little disconcerting...
...and when, on page 258, Mr...
...By the blunders of those for whom he was imperiling his position, and by the selfishness of those whose natural duty it was to have exerted all their force and strength in his behalf, Johnson's efforts were reduced almost to impotence...
...The Aeneid of Virgil...
...None the less he struggled bravely, as was his habit, for the truths that he so strongly believed in and for the measures upon which he had set his heart...
...a soap-box ranter...
...For Mediaevalists The Infidel Emperor and His Struggles against the Pope: A Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, by Paul Wiegler...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Tillyard let pass, "Bestruck with slandrous darts" (page 287) when the Oxford reads, "Bestuck," and how can he quote (page 287) "Dismiss her not," when Oxford prints, "Dismiss not her," or write (page 251) "Nor glistening" where Oxford writes, "Nor glistering...
...and conversely, if beauty does not induce contemplation or if art (i...
...Charles Scribner's Sons...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...There are many other passages which I should like to comment on, but I shall conclude with the remark that Mr...
...But they tend to shatter our faith in Mr...
...Perhaps had Mr...
...Every paragraph swarms with new names, given without introduction or explanation, perhaps referred to again, perhaps never reappearing, and there is a confusing use of pronouns...
...For by its "angelic swoon into 'abstract intellection' " it will have lost that grace so necessary to the elevation of nature...
...The policy which he sought to use toward the defeated South is here set forth with clearness and sympathy...
...translated by J. F. Scanlan...
...He truly said of himself: 'The elements of my nature, the pursuits of my life, have not made me either in my feelings or in my practice, aggressive...
...The ideas of this many-sided book would not be so allembracing had its author been a different sort of philosopher...
...IN THE reweighing of the historical evidence of that bitter period which Claude Bowers has termed the tragic era, and which might with equal propriety be labeled the age of hate— I refer of course to the savage struggles of the Reconstruction following in the wake of the Civil War—the character and the career of Andrew Johnson have come in for great attention, and the tailor-President is gradually assuming a more honorable post in our national history...
...The two main characters, Mrs...
...Clutterbuck Laughs, by Guy Pocock...
...The confusion in Milton's own ideas respecting art and philosophy is strongly presented, and if the book is somewhat turgid and confused, the ultimate blame rests upon Milton himself, who was at once a child of the renaissance and of the Puritan revolt, a poet of beauty and a writer of slanderous invective, a stern moralist who yet defended polygamy and lying as a means to accomplish his ends, an independent in religion and politics, yet humbling himself before the authority of the Bible—interpreted, to be sure, in a markedly Pickwickian sense —and a Calvinist who rejected predestination and yet clung to election and reprobation and the rule of "saints...
...Nevertheless, there is this important difference: The Infidel Emperor would be almost impossible for one not largely acquainted with the history of the thirteenth century to understand satisfactorily...
...Beale takes occasion to run to earth many of the traditional conceptions of Andrew Johnson, such as, that he was "a vulgar drunken tailor...
...In most matters, Johnson lacked assurance, sought advice, hesitated in full realization of his own shortcomings...
...His appreciations are so various as to include the Parthenon...
...Thus the burden of art is realized to be, by one who has written from the heart, not the proclamation of a soapy aestheticism void in the ability to discern good from evil, like the aesthetics of Nietzsche, but the joining of battle between the angels of darkness and light...
...Had he turned to page 115 of Hanford's handbook he would have found that he could still hold his theory and at the same time be in perfect agreement with the Handbook's author...
...Its style is crisp and forceful...
...2.00...
...Pater once said of George Moore that he had "taken more pains than critics of contemporary art sometimes do to know from within what he is writing about...
...James W. Lane, jr...
...Thus fitness, or as M. Maritain well illustrates, the superiority of the slightest sketch of Leonardo to the most finished Bouguereau, and the perfect proportion of Rouault's yokels to their artistic canon, is the focus of the judgment...
...Art and Scholasticism, by Jacques Maritain...
...This history of its rule by the Knights Hospitallers of St...
...He discusses the works in chronological order, and if in doubtful cases the order preferred by Mr...
...The subsequent battles of the Knights were confined to skirmishes at sea with Barbary corsairs, for as a "crack regiment" of the noblest families of Europe, they were pledged to neutrality toward all Christian princes...
...The wealth of the Order was spent on tapestries and mosaics instead of bastions...
...The background against which she and her lover, Sithric the Dane, struggle toward happiness, is the final conquest of the Danish invaders by the Saxon dynasty which redeemed and unified England...
...Even chapter heads and running heads are missing...
...THE volume now before us might be compared to a racing bicycle stripped of all accessories—bell, brake, saddle, springs and so on—but with the tires filled with sand...
...JVJ.R...
...One might expect from these facts to find simply a "novelized biography," and the liveliness of style and the reporting of thoughts and desires on the part of the characters might incline toward that conculsion...
...Hence with the deepbosomed nature of a sea he receives the world of art to be judged and judges it as a person possessed of both sensibility and morality would: first, from its intrinsic goodness (finis operis) ; second, from the intention of the artist finis operands) ; and third, from the circumstances of the act...
...Lepanto, in which the Knights played an important role, ended the Mohammedan menace to Christian Europe, and with it the warlike purpose to which the Order had long since submerged its original mission of a life of religious observance and care of the pilgrim and the sick...
...Then in Stanton's papers, he has found some startling unpublished letters, one of which with absolute certainty convicts Stanton of duplicity to his presidential chief in the early summer of 1866...
...New York: F. S. Crofts and Company...
...Moreover, although Mr...
...Rally, so utterly different, will probably be found in most any small village either in England or America, although Mrs...
...WHILE M. Maritain urges nothing more than the respiritualizing of art and the Christianization of those artists whose work otherwise is faineant, he gives in this sterling book criticism of both the virtues and the faults of modern art...
...What Is Beauty...
...It is also "an analogous predicate"—beautiful in one place and not in another...
...g., the Engelbrekt Church, Stockholm) show that perhaps sacred art is making an attempt to show its head again...
...The first chapters of the book paint an adequate and satisfying picture of the stern regime and crusading spirit of the earlier Knights and such Grand Masters as L'Isle-Adam and La Valette...
...It is both an event and the last word...
...7-50...
...IN ORDER to present "Milton's literary development . . . illuminated as far as possible by his mental experience...
...Did Milton write this tract as a logical conclusion to politico-religious tracts on liberty with a purely theoretical interest in divorce, or did he write it "a few weeks after he had married" as a result of experiencing the bitterness of an ill-mated union...
...This picture of course is completely untrue...
...Its point of view is on the whole sympathetic to the southern problem and to presidential perplexities...
...The difficulty was that most of the effective agencies of the control of public opinion were in the hands of the radicals...
...So far as the rights of the millions of the new freedmen were concerned, Johnson was anxious to protect them to every needful degree...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Johnson was seeking to restore the southern states to their federal relations...
...Of course there are many other modes for the judgment of art and M. Maritain's intelligence is not slow to use them...
...Unusually ample selections from the prose works are likewise provided...
...It is not a book that he who runs may read, and while the crowding and compression may be to a certain extent responsible for the fact, the ill success of the translator in his attempt to alter the German idiom seems to blame in some difficult passages...
...Some of even the Protestant churches constructed in the modern spirit (e...
...edited by Frank Allen Patterson...
...The Puritan Milton, by E. M. W. Tillyard...
...Briefer Mention Elf win, by S. Fowler Wright...
...And again, in discussing the probable date of Milton's marriage, he ignores M. Saurat's note on the subject and makes the amazing statement that "the alteration of date would affect only a small proportion of my remarks," when, as a matter of fact, the entire criticism of Milton's motives for writing the first Divorce Tract hang in the balance...
...The New England historian shows that while Johnson did talk overmuch of himself, this was the product not of egotism, but of an inferiority complex: "His boasting was a shield for a naturally sensitive soul...
...Worse than that, Johnson's natural political allies conducted themselves in such a way as to alienate moderate southern opinion, and to make more difficult a presidential task which already was extraordinarily hard...
...JjALLARD'S translation of the Aeneid is well known, being perhaps one of the most usable of English versions...
...Tillyard writes, "When Eve in evil hour stretches forth her rash hand...
...There is too much space taken by uninspired literary criticism and some space devoted to wrongheaded criticism, as in the case of the Fair Infant and of the Nightingale...
...Giotto, Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Claude, Poussin, Greco, Cezanne, Rouault and Maurice Denis...
...to such a degree indeed, that one suspects the author of deliberate imitation, with the great novelist's flair for quaint and unusual names of characters, and his clever mingling of humor with pathos...
...CORTLAND VAN WlNKLE...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Its treatment of the economic background of the political battles of 1866 is thorough and quite new...
...There are clever and exceptionally strong pages, while the author's attempts at pathos are dangerously close to the melodramatic...
...He believed, however, that suffrage was a state and not a federal matter, and while quite willing for the southern states by their own action to accord suffrage to Negroes, he was unwilling to employ the federal government as an agency to force such a step...
...unfortunately there are sins of commission too...
...But M. Maritain is an Aquinian...
...Tillyard's accuracy in other matters...
...We are enabled far better to appraise an individual work, and we have unfolded before us the whole course of Milton's artistic and mental development so that we may note the changes, whether for loss or gain, which occur from the earliest paraphrases of Psalms when the poet was fifteen to Samson Agonistes and the protest against the Declaration of Indulgence...
...These are based upon all those repercussions which beauty or the beautiful as such makes upon the vision or hearing, as the finis operis and the finis operands challenge prudence, the honestum, or the sense of the good...
...All the poems are included, the Latin, Italian and Greek lyrics being accompanied by free translations (these last being, perhaps, the only questionable matter in the book...
...Most of these have been noticed with approval in The Commonweal, and it is a pleasure to say that the present Milton is fully the peer of its predecessors...
...It is true that on the occasion of his inauguration as Vice-President in 1865, Johnson did make a spectacle of himself, but after he became President, the most scrupulous search fails to reveal any evidence of his having taken too much to drink the entire term...
...One knows that so good a book is sure to find a welcome...
...Twilight of the Knights Malta of the Knights, by Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn...
...mediaeval and baroque architecture...
...2.50...
...Even the most refined superlatives known to criticism might cheapen this book, unless one said that it contains almost the whole matter of aesthetics...
...There is no index, no bibliography, no preface, no appendix...
...If, on page 25, "ipsa" is a mere printer's error for "ipse" as also the three errors in punctuation in the Latin lines quoted...
...Clutterbuck and Dr...
...The text has been established with what seems meticulous care, and the pedagogical addenda have been curtailed to a brief foreword and a glossary...
...Beale thinks it indisputable that, in a day of hard drinking, Johnson "was not one of the hard drinkers...
...But the southern states had, willy-nilly, rushed forward with a series of "black codes" which looked suspiciously like attempts by legislative indirection to reenslave the Negro...
...one also learns much of the truth about the ill-fated "swing around the circle," that famous presidential speaking tour which has gone down into history as the crowning blow to the Johnson campaign...
...Or to a yacht, decks and hull cleared, ready for the race, carrying a large cargo of fish and potatoes...
...and if the four errors in punctuation in the six lines from the Sonnet to Fairfax are typographical errors, what shall we say of the Sonnet on His Blindness, which not only shows five errors in punctuation but reads, with an excess of sibilants, "Either man's works or his own gifts," followed almost immediately by the author's, "When he says that God does not need man's works...
...The Critical Year, a careful study of the events of 1866 by a professor of history of Bowdoin College, is a further and very admirable contribution to this same telling of the truth about one of the bravest men in the history of America's national life...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 21
