Books
Purcell, Richard J. & Crowley, Paul & Brunini, John Gilland & Strahan, Speer & Cunningham, Doris & Wright, Cuthbert & Larsson, Raymond Ellsworth & Parker, E. L.
BOOKS Renaissance Contrasts The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio, by Thomas Caldecott Chubb. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. $4.00. FOR good or ill, when he was two-thirds through his...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...His imaginary illnesses add another link to his many diosyncracies...
...To understand him and the problems raised by his work is to understand Machiavelli, to understand the great Popes of the Renaissance who, as Jacques Maritain says, trusted too much to beauty and too little to grace, to understand Cesare Borgia and, in a sense, even the Renaissance saints...
...English readers are shocked at his looseness, yet he could not have been the sporcaccione he has been made out to be, or Petrarch would hardly have hailed him as the half of his own soul...
...Chubb produces his book, a thorough and creditable study of Boccaccio, perhaps the best modern book on the man and his work in the language...
...A sympathetic sketch of King Eadmund of East Anglia outlines what is known of the Saxon chieftain (841-870) who was crowned by Bishop Humbert and who suffered martyrdom as a prisoner of pagan Danish conquerors...
...Yeats is clearly discerned, and the early poems of Mr...
...5.00...
...So much quiet, sympathetic sense is a litttle disturbing after so much recent ecstasy but one gets used to it...
...man conquers or he endures...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated...
...He wrote and circulated a series of Latin works which eventually touched upon almost every subject under the sun...
...Zeno, an abnormal creature, realizes that he is different from other people, but always has what seems to him a reasonable explanation of his absurdities...
...Josephine Pollitt thought the man in the case was Major Edward Hunt...
...This phase of American history, although not entirely neglected, still provides impressive new material for the historian...
...It was not until after the Civil War that the white man commenced its development...
...MacLeish is able more capably than more widely heralded eccentrics to discover them to us...
...The Last Frontier, by Zack T. Sutley...
...Indeed, for this very reliance on the aspects of an innocent world, Mr...
...As for Boccaccio himself he was anticlerical neither in his books nor in his life...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...Eventually their counsel was heeded, adjustments were made and the last frontier conquered...
...And in 1020 Cnut gave a charter and established monks from Hulme and Ely at Bury as the secular priests were sent forth...
...Those who have done it with grace and distinction are rare as the poor of spirit...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...MacLeish has assembled are difficult of assimilation to the mass of contemporary American verse...
...Efficient Evangelism D. L. Moody, by W. R. Moody...
...But judging by such human documents as Youth in Hell, the filthy business of exploiting, abusing and perverting hapless and erring childhood, still exists, particularly in our states...
...He devotes considerable space to the relatively unimportant controversy concerning the actual line of the old Chisholm trail and too frequently concerns himself with irrelevant subject-matter...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, Incorporated...
...A man of consecrated common sense," Moody brought a business technique to bear in evangelism, and his methods of raising money for the cause were like those of an excellent salesman...
...edited by William King...
...Even as Mr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...Henry and Mr...
...INCE Dickens," says the publishers' jacket, "the reform school has been a dark mystery...
...THIS book relies solely on the character of its principal actor for interest, not on a colorful style or on the personality of the author...
...he was not elegant...
...MacLeish's progress—as, indeed, a sort of ballyhoo for sounder stuff...
...Possibly the book is a little too reasonable, but we cannot appropriately complain in these days of an excess of this virtue which is unfortunately all too rare...
...Had the blurb gone on to say in the expected fashion that since Dickens it has never been so effectively exposed as in Mr...
...Edmunds in western Suffolk...
...Good Resolutions Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo...
...Perhaps the Church should have condemned Marie de France and Geoffrey Chaucer and the host of persons who wrote, copied, sold and possessed collections of the fabliaux, but as a matter of fact she did not...
...But the best phases of Mr...
...MacLeish has accepted the state of innocence regarding himself and his universe required of the true poet, for only through this innocence is poetry achieved, from Homer to Shelly and back again...
...But one remains sceptical on either count...
...After his marriage he discovers to his surprise that he is in love with his wife, but that doesn't keep him from being unfaithful to her...
...edited by Lord Francis Hervey...
...The remarks on Emily's understanding of sound and "words" are shrewd and right, though the catalogue of her legal terminology seems quite unnecessarily inclusive...
...To believe the contemporary literary historian, they put such monsters as Squeers and Bumble out of the running...
...If Emily really went into seclusion because she could not wed this man, another demonstration has been given the world of love's blindness and woman's undependability...
...There are in it certain episodes and characters—the whipping of the runaways, the dormitory scenes, the radiant figures of the two Tanner brothers— which bear the stamp of absolute truth, and stick painfully to the memory...
...Chesterton and Mr...
...Williams frankly says that he doesn't know what T. S. Eliot is driving at—a form of ignorance he shares with many who would rather die than admit it...
...He becomes acquainted with Signor Malfenti and determines to marry one of his daughters who were reported to be beauties...
...E. L. Parker...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...According to Villani he must have been an agreeable fellow...
...Instead we sit down to find out what the poets are actually trying to say and, mindful of the circumstance that there have been other bards, calmly arrive at an opinion...
...Not until 1539 was it polluted by a royal hand...
...Considered as detached composition, their excellence increases one's regard for contemporary poetry, and contemporary American poetry in particular: in juxtaposition with Mr...
...An active sense of social pity does not seem to be an American characteristic...
...There are in Renaissance letters few subjects more baffling than Boccaccio...
...This theory is altogether harmless and ingenious, but for some reason it fails to ring true...
...The state turned from being the mere outlet of one industry to fostering another...
...2.50...
...3.50...
...Still one feels that the present commentary, so vast an improvement over the kind of nonsense written years ago by Aldrich and others, would not have been displeasing to an Amherst upper room...
...To make something enjoyable to the nth degree he must resolve not to do it again without having the least intention of making this pleasant resolution binding...
...The irony of Svevo's method is very effective...
...To the splendor of the quattrocento and of that Italy this book bears witness...
...Chubb points out, when in the sixteenth century the Church came to "polish up her tarnished facades," the chief hostility was directed against the treatment of the clergy, and whereas "an unexpurgated edition of the Decameron was brought out under church approval, it was such stories (in which the clergy were reviled) rather than the book's general outspokenness that was disapproved of...
...But the book is really worth reading and, more than that, deserving of imitation...
...That the author is the subject's son might appear to lessen the value of the biography...
...However, his is an interesting account of the period immediately preceding and following the last great battle against the Indians in America...
...And there are equally good things written by the author about Messrs...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Yet when Ada refuses him, he proposes to Alberta, who will not take him seriously, and finally to Augusta who accepts him...
...Speer Strahan...
...One would like to believe that the state institution in the Southwest, portrayed by Mr...
...Here there is no Schwarmere, to speak of...
...they elaborated philosophies of it...
...From here the author-editor tells the story of the abbey chronologically according to abbots, up to 1097, when it had already become one of the greatest English foundations...
...With the suppression of the Danes by Aelfred at Chippenham, the Saxons could honor their fallen king, and Aelfred caused coins to be struck with Eadmund styled saint...
...We hope that the latter will be widely read...
...His chin was cleft, and when he smiled he was extremely handsome...
...But it was only at the time of his death in 1928 that he was'beginning to enjoy anything like fame...
...The poet," he tells us, "was rather stout of figure, but tall...
...But time, and the worms which, perhaps of all perishable things most respect emotion, have made short work of the edifying tracts, and left the Decameron immortal...
...This would seem to hint that "pious" literature, whose function is to minister to the Key-ito-Heaven type of mind is the invention of a later age...
...Housman hold up between them all the philosophies...
...H.ER.E is certainly a volume to add to one's collections of older English memoirs...
...The movement which Moody built up in his evangelical work and his schools at Northfield, has left its mark on American religious thought, especially in preparatory schools and colleges...
...As indirect earnest of his experience Mr...
...Once again is it the love-affair, carefully tucked behind a score of veils, which forms the chief biographical interest...
...This is not the case, for he is both self-effacing and unsentimental in the treatment of his material...
...Sutley's The Last Frontier— but for a different reason...
...He goes to a doctor to be psychoanalyzed and the doctor advises him to write his autobiography so that he may have a better insight into his character...
...On the whole one feels that here is the best comment yet written on the Dickinsonian art...
...The same may be said of Mr...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The Renaissance was after all one of the great ages of human intensity in the world's history, yet it is now hardly thirty years since investigators began to approach the age in serious fashion by specialized studies...
...It is remarkably well written...
...He is less likely, however, to dissipate the solidity of his position as an individual confronting the universe, than the majority of contemporary poets are of achieving similar footing...
...As a speaker and as an evangelist, his power and influence were remarkable, and though his methods may seem crude, he was capable of handling situations requiring great tact and delicacy...
...Lapses of Identity New Found Land, by Archibald MacLeish...
...The book, though unduly long and crowded with uninteresting details, has humor, originality and a touch of genius...
...Few tales are better worth telling than that of how the Duchess cut off her hair to get even with her famous husband—only to learn that behind the adamantine silence with which he received the news there was hidden a deep and tender heart...
...What we see there is a fourteenth-century development and continuation of a vast body of literature which grew up in the later middle ages, in a literary tradition of at least three or four century's standing...
...Though at times the prose loses its deft ability to evoke outline and turns, unconsciously perhaps, semi-polyphonic (as in the phrase, "before the face of Mr...
...The proof rests very largely on a statement by someone whose name must be withheld, who in turn got the information from three somebodyelses...
...There is the suggestion that systematic excavations might be undertaken at St...
...MacLeish's other writings, they seem details in miniature for a structure more or less patiently implicit in whatever Mr...
...vjRITICISM of poetry is one of the most especial of literary offices...
...A King's Abbey The History of King Eadmund the Martyr and of the Early Years of His Abbey...
...Beyond this the book takes for one of its more important assignments correlating the poetry and the life...
...When he meets them he decides that Ada is the one, being the most beautiful, and he finds Augusta extremely unattractive...
...It is toward this articulation the present collection of poems advances ; uncertainly, it is true, but still advances...
...MacLeish's preceding poems, they bear evidence of an increasing strength and an increasing isolation...
...FOR good or ill, when he was two-thirds through his life John Boccaccio suffered a change of heart...
...Around the priestly protectors of the tomb, there was incorporated a college in Aethelstan's reign...
...But of this province, Mr...
...In Texas cattle-raising had become the principal occupation of the settlers, but until adequate transportation to the packing centres could be found, the Texas steer had little value...
...He went weeping from Monte Cassino at the insolence and tragedy of the monks who left their library "without a door and with a leaking roof, rilled with dust and with most of the manuscripts cut in pieces" to make psalters for children, yet at his death he willed his own books to Fra Martino da Segna, an Augustinian of Santo Spirito...
...they compiled case-books in which it was annotated and described with a variety and detail that would give gooseflesh to a modern morals board...
...3.00...
...When the Kansas Pacific railroad pushed its line into Abilene, the ranchers found an outlet, and great armies of steers were started on their march to the northern shipping point...
...He is more interested in a narration of his personal experiences in the Dakotas than in giving an adequate report of their emergence into the states of today...
...King is a competent editor who seems to have enjoyed the opportunity to revive a good book...
...Crudely written in places and bearing a bad title, it is, none the less, highly moving and important...
...ITALO SVEVO was a successful business man of Trieste...
...Nor is he more sincere with his mistress than with his wife...
...MacLeish is a poet, and he inhabits something of the bleak province of poetry, of which the geography is more certain than personal theory and impersonal criticism today lead one to believe...
...One would like to think that his book—so obviously honest, wholesomely angry and photographically real—would result in a reform of the reform school...
...Edmunds in the early eleventh century...
...The author must inevitably be prejudiced when dealing with Moody as a person, but the writing of the book and the presentation of the material have been accomplished with the most praiseworthy dignity and justice...
...In spite of Boccaccio's dismay that his light tales should be taken seriously, there is much evidence to show that he really considered the Decameron his great achievement...
...Though he employs only the enduring images as accessible to Homer as to him who reads today, and has completely eschewed the properties of Romanticism, this does not mean that the properties of contemporary science are idle tools in his hand...
...They thought and wrote so much about it that it forms the great body of mediaeval literature...
...And soon the Christian folk of East Anglia erected a worthy sepulchre at old Bury St...
...Unfortunately Zeno is not exciting enough to rouse our sympathy or our antagonism...
...MacLeish is still, though decreasingly, an irresolute inhabitant...
...In short, Mr...
...Cuthbert Wright...
...Henry's tedious style and sectional viewpoint...
...One may regret the prevalent habit of inserting here modern conceptions, as Miss Taggard seems to, which would most certainly have seemed to the New England poet both learned and heterodox...
...This biography forms a well-documented basis for a searching study of the whole evangelical movement, and should prove indispensable to any historian of religious and social influences of the last century...
...But neither the book nor the diction are objective...
...One likes to look upon a book like Mr...
...and so few would, one may presume, undertake to follow Mr...
...Having discovered an innocent world, it were folly to retreat from it with only fragments of its geography to relate...
...The social novels of Dickens, we are told, did much good...
...In so doing he reveals his own, wholly unconscious, hypocrisy toward them...
...To the body of essential poetry, however, they are not alien, no matter what the tongue, for they are exercises toward the utterance of a singleness of consciousness, articulate and whole...
...The Neapolitan interludes that led to the Fiammetta and the Filostrato are adequately sketched, and the debt recorded that Italian poetry and painting owe to the Ninfale...
...Doris Cunningham...
...Zeno reveals his inmost thoughts without the least hesitation, and his own analysis of himself is so defective that we can only smile at his mastery of the art of self-deception...
...Adverse comment is presented as well as favorable...
...Chubb's work are his treatment of the Decameron, and the friendship between Boccaccio and Petrarch...
...A legend soon grew for the saint was held as a living force in protecting the English kingdoms...
...In the first place people believe what they like to believe, and in our literature the merely pleasant is still at a premium...
...Memoirs of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough...
...MORE ambitious by far than any previous book dealing with the reticent Emily, Miss Taggard's has the advantage of whole-souled devotion...
...Miss Taggard has dug up not a little material— valentines, Amherst college magazines, unpublished reminiscences—which are held to show that the apple of Emily's eye and the source of all her woe was George Gould, who later became a Congregational clergyman...
...But it was really the introduction of wheat, and particularly winter wheat, into Kansas which emancipated the prairies...
...In fact Zeno thrives on good resolutions...
...translated by Beryl De Zoete...
...Miss Taggard has theories and moods of which she is duly fond...
...Bein, is an isolated instance...
...Chubb's as a prologue to rich achievement in Renaissance studies...
...His book, although valuable as a source, fails of the true objective of history...
...DURING that great migration which began with the California gold rush, the American prairies were considered unproductive, dangerous and unsuitable for habitation...
...A volume could not summarize more admirably...
...His face was round, but his nose had a slight depression over the nostrils...
...Williams with any great measure of confidence...
...MacLeish is trying laboriously to coordinate, which relates what he has written to that body of essential poetry to which reference is made above...
...Forty-second Street are to be considered as divergences from the general, if uneasily maintained, direction of Mr...
...He came to regret passionately the amorous tales which had beguiled his youth and manhood, and turned to piety and scholarship...
...To understand the tales, one must remember that the sins of the flesh were no discovery of the Renaissance, as Alain de Lisle, the Goliardic poets and Dante show...
...Both Mr...
...Raymond Ellsworth Larsson...
...It is a loving book which generally avoids being sentimental, and a well-informed book which may be—who knows?—surprisingly accurate...
...The Dickinson Mystery Again The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, by Genevieve Taggard...
...and though she occasionally went hungry, she possessed a dignity and a temper worthy of comparison with the stoutest...
...Richard J. Purcell...
...Sutley, natives of the land they describe from the days of its first settlement, add the value of their personal experiences and recollections to the record...
...Outside of a few artists and scholars, most people who read the Decameron nowadays do so in the hope of finding "smut...
...Wild West Conquering Our Great American Plains, by Stuart Henry...
...5.00...
...But after all the thing which really matters is the quality and temper of Miss Dickinson's mysticism—matters of the most elusive kind, perhaps, yet of grave importance...
...New York: The Oxford University Press...
...Bowles another face flickered, faded a little, and then merged"), one might say that it outshines, for distinction and absence of preciosity, all other American biographical writing excepting Henry James's...
...Briefer Mention Poetry at Present, by Charles Williams...
...The people in the books of Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, Jean de Meung and many others, are interested in love as an engrossing game...
...Kipling, Hardy, De la Mare and Masefield...
...His power appears to have lain in his evident sincerity, his vitality, his great capacity for work and his simplicity, coupled with an epigrammatic quality frequently found in the speech of simple men, which makes many of their sayings memorable without being very profound...
...Even when the Pacific coast was settling into an agricultural calm that vast territory drained by the Missouri and the Arkansas remained the peculiar possession of the Indian and the buffalo...
...2.50...
...The Duchess lived through blistery times when intrigue was the chief source of social bread and butter...
...He was not a great rhetorician...
...THE fourteen poems Mr...
...It was a situation which Washington could not altogether have controlled although had men who lived in the territory and knew the Indians, been entrusted with the settlement of affairs, much slaughter and injustice might have been avoided...
...MacLeish has written...
...Bein's autobiographic novel, it would have been closer to the truth than are most blurbs...
...Enthusiastic, of course, and possibly a little too inclined to exalt these beloved lyrics above all others, it nevertheless bristles with illustrous intuitions...
...For nuns and abbots are substituted lords and ladies...
...King Swegen's death was attributed to his spear...
...he was not learned...
...Edmund's as well as at Glastonbury, Rievaulx, Byland and elsewhere...
...3.00...
...Yet he believes himself to be sincere and thinks he is striving to become better than he is...
...Conquering Our Great American Plains is mainly concerned with that section of Kansas which centers around Abilene...
...Since the seventeenth century it has been difficult to get a fair hearing for Boccaccio among English-speaking peoples...
...Bein's story...
...He thinks he adores his father, but really doesn't until the old man is dead, for the simple reason that he knows his father understands him and realizes the weakness of his son's will...
...Bridges have never been more judiciously estimated...
...Paul Crowley...
...It is difficult to name another American poet—or, for that matter, any poet writing in English today—who can so readily convince one that he is on the point of articulating a unified world...
...Much of the fascination of such history is lost in Mr...
...The town came into prominence during the early seventies as the northern terminus of the Abilene and Chisholm cattle trails...
...He was jocund and merry of aspect, and in his speech pleasant and human...
...The arc of progress in the work of Mr...
...mariners in distress sought his succor...
...Further, his extraordinarily important mission as Florentine ambassador to Pope Clement VI in 1354, shortly after the completion of the Decameron, and that Pope's public commendation of him, is a clear-cut commentary on his reputation...
...It must be obvious that the land is full of such places, and that the majority of people are fairly indifferent to the inhumanity of man to man, or man to child...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated...
...It is this place in a geography of space, perception of which Mr...
...He does not give the government much moral credit in the final subjugation of the Sioux, who saw the terms of their treaty flagrantly violated by the miners rushing into the Black Hills at first word of the discovery of gold...
...In the mass of this writing, as well as in relation to the thirteen other poems in New Found Land, such pieces as...
...When he is forced to keep a resolution he becomes ill...
...He published his first novel in 1892 and in 1912 became acquainted with James Joyce who took a great interest in his work and encouraged him to continue...
...Such amelioration as exists is left to the state—a fine, vicious circle, the usual results of which can be profitably studied in Mr...
...and while the evidence upon which her contention rested was noticeably slight, the man did fit the circumstances...
...It is assumed that marriage was rendered impossible by Emily's father, who viewed the prospective impecunious sonin-law with too unsympathetic eyes...
...and it is up to the reader to say with what he will agree and disagree...
...And he delighted very much in conversation, thus making many friends...
...In this, like Mr...
...5.00...
...Even today for most people Italy must continue to be a tremendous experience—they may be better or worse, but they can never be quite the same again after dropping down from Modena or Domodossola beyond ledges where the vine and olive are mingled with brown villages, cream-like campanili and silver torrents into a world of pink houses, oleanders, orchestras and ices like an antepast of heaven's delight...
...His successor, Eadmund, granted by charter a large domain comprising the modern borough, and the king's renowned minister, Bishop Dunstan, was an ardent patron...
...She is loath to accept him while she feels that he loves his wife, so he immediately assures her that he does not, meanwhile forming a resolution to let Carla know by degrees that he really does...
...The main facts are simply outlined, and the author allows letters, newspaper comment and the remarks of contemporaries who came into contact with Moody to form the backbone of the book...
...Here Miss Taggard is necessarily on the boggiest of grounds...
...No account of any Renaissance writer could begin better than does this, by recalling the advent in Italy of Henry VII, hailed in such Isaian rhetoric by Dante, and a few months later enshrined in faultless alabaster at Pisa...
...These characteristics detract from its acceptability as light reading, but add greatly to its value as a document which throws light on American religious feeling during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and particularly on the methods of a great American evangelist...
...MacLeish's weakness is his lack of daring...
...and in the days of Richard Coeur de Lion's captivity or in the first Edward's sore financial straits, no authority dared strip Bury of its growing treasure...
...197 in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which depicts the economic life of Bury St...
...IN THIS beautiful little volume with a frontispiece of the conjectural restoration of the minster and elaborate buildings of the abbey, Lord Hervey has printed in Anglo-Saxon and in translation a fragment of MS...
...But even the broadest of the stories were otherwise unchanged...
...Reform Schools Youth in Hell, by Albert Bein...
...The Confessions of Zeno are supposed to be the result of this advice, and Zeno recalls his life in terms of his relationship to the people who figured most largely in it...
...2.So...
...Beyond the probability of Boccaccio's French birth and maternal parentage one does not seem able to go...
...He says: "Mr...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 22
