Books
Bruehl, William M. Agar, Morton Dauwen Zabel,William Franklin Sands, Francis Magyar, Francis Xavier
BOOKS Science and Sanctity Spirit in Evolution: From Amoeba to Saint, by Herbert F. Standing. New York: The Dial Press. $5.00. IT IS a pleasure to find a scientific writer who is not afraid...
...Teaching Leadership Boyleader s Primer, by Kilian J. Hennrich, O.M.Cap...
...1.25...
...But is the material therefore all there is...
...YOUNG has not quite achieved success in this book of short stories and sketches...
...Countless and diverse attempts have been made to explain evolution by purely material means...
...It sears the religious mind like the hot breath of a desert wind...
...Now the positive testimony of countless multitudes of human souls all down the ages since the dawn of history as to the supreme value of these spiritual realities cannot logically be put aside by those who merely bring negative statements to the effect that they themselves have no such spiritual experience...
...But they rise above and reach out beyond the material as a tree, drawing its sustenance largely from the soil, grows out into the pure air above...
...He shows wise but helpless men, mistaken men (it is astonishing how greatly silly mistakes can affect a world), vain and ambitious men and incompetent men in high office...
...Standing, far from making the gratuitous assumption of a materialist that spiritual experiences are a delusion, regards the attainment of higher and higher spiritual levels as the goal toward which man, and therefore organic evolution, is aiming...
...The tremendous risk of freedom is the possibility of its abuse...
...In Jugoslavia no law regulating the question of nationalities has been passed...
...Street-Car is a feeble echo of Sandburg's journalistic notations, and the tribute called Bach pays no convincing homage to great music simply because it never arrives at a genuine evocation of that music...
...Her first poem here, Alien, is a brief allegory of tragic power, clearly and succinctly mastered...
...Those men who apparently were shaping our destinies were puppets...
...William M. Agar...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...The author writes: "If there be, indeed, beyond the level of mental functioning a new level of experience called the life of the spirit, this life must have its own needs, its own characteristic activities, its own powers of response to a spiritual environment...
...Mil•waukee: The Bruce Publishing Company...
...It discusses the different tendencies in the organic world, such as "response to environment," "nutrition" and so forth, up to "evolution of values" and shows how each of these tendencies developed and led up to man—physical man—but did not stop there...
...This is particularly true of The Passionate Road, in which two experiences are told one within the other, yet unrelated to each other or to their scene of action...
...The Czechs have pursued a policy of deindustrializing Slovakia, so as to promote the Czech industry in Bohemia without at the same time developing Slovakia's immensely rich agricultural and forest resources...
...Francis Magyar...
...Thus biology follows the anti-materialistic trend seen among many of the leaders of physical science...
...John Marsh was born in Massachusetts of old Puritan stock, and after his graduation from Harvard in 1823 went to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, as a teacher, in order to obtain sufficient money to enter Harvard Medical School...
...Her themes are young boys and girls, night-walking, brides, Beethoven, Joseph Conrad, and moonlight, all of which have won her delight and occasionally a firm phrase...
...London: Thornton Buttenvorth, Limited...
...But in her best work Miss Flexner speaks for herself, often with sharp beauty of phrase and cadence, and sometimes with haunting implications...
...1.50...
...To those who grew up between 1880 and 1900 with any knowledge of Europe, the war was a certainty...
...Basically Miss Flexner's difficulty is exactly that of these other minor poets...
...Only God worked through the aeons of geological time, with the whole of creation for His material...
...He does not grant villainy even to the one whom the mob chose to enshrine as arch-villain, the emperor of Germany...
...I shall never forget him coming down the duke of York's steps, bent and white, and those flaming blue eyes of his...
...674 THE COMMONWEAL October 29, 1930 Evolution so treated can be compared to a loving parent guiding a child to choose what is best so that when he attains the years of discretion he may choose correctly...
...A man of unusual intellectual gifts, possessing a flair for languages and a natural aptitude for leadership, he soon gained the confidence of the Indians, acted as government agent to them, wrote a dictionary and grammar of the Sioux language, and finally married an Indian half-breed...
...Winter Night, For Them the Night, and Fragments are almost as good...
...To return freely the creatures must be able to choose freely...
...Since 1919 no fewer than 700,000 refugees have been quartered on Hungary, forming an unemployed legion equal to almost 10 percent of the whole population...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...In the reviewer's opinion, the facts hitherto mentioned should be eloquent proof of the inconciliatory spirit prevailing in the new states...
...He i= completely unaffected by the cloudy hates and bitterness of the war period...
...Her technical deficiencies, moreover, are seriously emphasized by her facile treatment of the sonnet form...
...It would be foolish to thing that the boyleader can rely entirely on his own resources and his native tact...
...At best they lie on a page, unresolved by lucid poetic intention and indistinguishable in their essence from prose...
...The great mistake has been the assumption on the part of many that there can be no other, or spiritual, explanation...
...WHATEVER may be its cause, the fact stands out that the modern home is unable to cope adequately with the important problem of satisfactorily directing the leisure-time activity of the boy...
...Leonard Cline's own honesty as a novelist requires no concession of critical favor for his verse...
...The book is for the non-technical reader...
...The war was the end of a period and a point of departure in the evolution of Christian civilization...
...Out of Every Day, by Agnes MacCarthy Hickey...
...As is shown by many of her briefer poems, by mere diversions like French Clock, and by slight marginalia such as Autumn Rain, and Limitation, she lacks the creative ability to capture new provinces of meaning...
...The origins (1900-1914) he lays to Germany...
...True, the emphasis that science has given to the purely material is good and natural enough since that is what science deals in...
...Song of a Scythe, by Arthur Truman Merrill...
...It is a story-telling hour, and Mr...
...One is inclined to thank some special American Providence, some tribal deity that during all that time we had no career diplomacy and no nationalistic interests abroad, and are now able to construct a basis for our international relations with the lesson of the war well learned...
...The two Hungarian members of the Skuptsina had to pledge themselves to support the government before they were elected...
...The aim of this volume, small in compass but encyclopaedic in scope, is exclusively practical...
...1.50...
...But unfortunately the stories he has projected against these backgrounds do not always fuse with them —in some instances they refuse to do so...
...3-50...
...Standing sets out to prove not only that there can be such an explanation but also that it is by far the most plausible one...
...He will find such information in Father Kilian's excellent Primer...
...The wrong choice in the past meant overspecilization and extincton or parasitism...
...1.25...
...After-Walker, by Leonard Cline...
...The abiding love of the Creator for His creation caused Him to desire the free return of love by His creatures...
...L O BE interesting and to be important are not necessarily the same thing...
...He could go still further back if it were within the scope of his book...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...2.50...
...There are no villains in the background to that central figure...
...Atmospheric facility, however, is one of the slightest of poetic assets...
...Here again we find him exerting his strong influence on the growing country, first as a doctor, then as a soldier, as a rancher, a gold miner, the owner of a vast fortune, and finally we see him as host to a beggar, who is none other than the son he had left in Illinois twenty-five years before...
...Will the testimony of a color-blind person to the effect that he can see no difference between red and green be accepted as invalidating the experience of one who has normal vision...
...In all that long development men were torn between the essential contradiction of high ideals of justice and peace and the old code of the barbarians, based on force and violence even when the decision was ascribed to God...
...Francis Xavier Disney...
...What other basis have we for accepting the validity of any fact of consciousness but that of personal experience...
...Without this surveillance, suggestive ability and sincere emotional feeling are invariably wasted as far as poetic results are concerned...
...Ordinarily one would suppose that this power would stand him in good service as a poet...
...The American desert has given Mr...
...Nothing would be easier than to continue the enumeration of injustices committed without interruption...
...In the title-poem and in Mad Jacob, the lengthy exposition never congeals into a salient phrase, and the topics remain uncreated as poetry...
...These lapses play havoc with her engaging freshness of enthusiasm, and leave one with the hope that, if she intends to pursue her career in verse, she will immediately undertake a rigorous course of prerequisites in form, style and other essential matters...
...Merrill topics which demand, and sometimes receive, a less conventional approach and a more spirited expression...
...All possible means are used in order to exclude Hungarians from governmental offices...
...But he is still the victim of his old ignorance as to what it is all about...
...Atlanta: The Bozart Press...
...This is a fascinating story of an unusual man, and the thrilling days of the frontiers...
...One glance, for instance, at Sir Arthur Nicolson proclaimed a wise and honest man...
...In The Land of Juan de Dios he has wrought finely and truly, but nowhere else does he reveal the same sureness and deftness of touch...
...The spiritual cravings of man are born from out these material things just as evolution throughout time has built the new upon the old...
...Her contemporaries, Leonie Adams, Louise Bogan and Marianne Moore, as well as her great ancestor, Emily Dickinson, possess that power in high degree...
...Each provides sound evidence of Miss Flexner's unquestionable talent, which has arrived, in the best pages of This Stubborn Root, at a mature expression of itself...
...The result of his investigations is the work under discussion which reveals amazingly interesting facts concerning the treatment of the Hungarian minority now under foreign rule...
...The conclusion is thus both trite and insensitive: "Therein is beauty of a kind Remote, supernal, purged and pure As wind in rainfall...
...In To My Daughter, and Bacchanale Solo, a greater attempt is made to approach the diction and rhythm of a sound poetic style, but the effort is abortive, producing a pompous and "arty" effect which reminds one of certain daring Victorians who, on trying to gain the grand manner, exhausted themselves in bombast and purple mannerisms derived from the French...
...WITH each succeeding revelation of the motives and methods of leading European diplomatists of Europe (and this is one of the best) I am more deeply impressed with the fatality, the inevitability of the world war...
...The sketches, too, are merely fragments, some painfully incomplete...
...Looks a good one...
...one said aloud...
...The suggestions offered have been well tested in practice and possess the authentic sanction of experience...
...FOR this biography of John Marsh, Dr...
...There are great and as he says unassailable figures, among whom he places Grey of England and Bethmann-Hollweg of Germany...
...Without their title-pages, these three books would soon be lost in the flood of commonplace verse issued by their publishers...
...1.50...
...Well-labeled idealism, good intentions, effort and much yearning are lavishly provided, but for a pinch of acute perception or verbal distinction the reader must go begging...
...This is an old, old question for which the author has a satisfying answer...
...He glanced at them as he passed and they straightened electrically, though it was apparently a point of honor with them to pay no attention to rank of any sort...
...The oppression of Hungarian subjects is not limited to one field only...
...The spiritual life shown to be something strong and virile, something new in the universe, is higher than anything previously attained and therefore only dimly appreciated by many, but is none the less the true, the ultimate goal of creation...
...The right choice led through the ever-ascending chain of life with increasing range and power of choice to culminate in man and free will, and the awful consequences of the power to return the love of the Creator or to reject Him...
...As a consequence we have in our days systematically organized boyleadership that supplements parental activity and sees to it that the leisure of the boy is not only harmlessly but profitably spent and exploited in the interests of self-education and character formation...
...The treatment on the part of Czechs, Jugoslavs and Rumanians compelled a whole army of former employees of the Hungarian state to emigrate to Hungary proper...
...Atlanta: The Bozart Press...
...there I find Strength to endure...
...one who can lead his readers through so vast a subject as evolution and keeping them firmly upon the ground of science can yet raise their eyes to God...
...The boyleader, therefore, will be on the lookout for practical information that will assist him in his endeavors...
...Among the avalanche of undistinguished volumes issued every season may usually be found one or two poems upon whose publicity depends the encouragement of a genuine talent...
...Young's writing, languorous with the beauty of southern countries, and at all times suggestive of the fine flowering of romance...
...If you write, with detachment and in detail, of a set of sophisticated people—misunderstood married men with mistresses, romantic aberrants who have never married, beauties who run away from their husbands, night-club hostesses who get strangled by their lovers, adventuresses who go gunning for millionaires, actresses who hunt down social registerites—you are bound to be interesting...
...f I ^HE author made it his duty to travel extensively in the A former parts of Hungary now belonging to Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Jugoslavia...
...introduction by Viscount Rothermere...
...Ignorance of the technical aspects of boywork have often thwarted the best intentions...
...The Street of the Islands is really a book of mood—the mood induced in Latin countries by sunset, when the colors are departing from the sky, and blue and purple and grey shadows are advancing over the land...
...After-Walker reveals a sincere and winning temperament, but not an acceptable poet...
...It is all an open book if we are only able to read...
...Miss Flexner must be content to remain within the boundaries of established concepts or conventional emotions...
...Out of the six books listed above, the five or six pages that contain Miss Hortense Flexner's best work are adequate to counterbalance the dozens of pages of valueless verse, ranging from the late Leonard Cline's sincere but never decisive compositions to the abject creative poverty disclosed in the other collections...
...Bromfield has loaded his pages with facts, entirely believable and often curiously absorbing, about Ruby the adventuress and Rosa the hostess, Hector the mental epicene and David the money king, and has, besides, tied up their separate stories into one single and, so to speak, simultaneous story, with real technical skill...
...The conception of a godless universe working in perfect order with no mind to comprehend it is too horrible to consider...
...We learn with no little surprise, that, as late as 1927, a deputy of Hungarian descent was under police supervision in Czechoslovakia...
...William Franklin Sands...
...But if God is responsible for the world, how can we account for the failures, the retrogressions, the degeneracy and extinction of vast hordes of creatures, the cruelty and evil in nature...
...1.50...
...Charles A. Bruehl...
...What is more incomprehensible, the Slovakians are treated by the ruling Czechs against the spirit of the treaty of Trianon...
...Miss Marina Wister's book also requires that the evidence pointing to an appealing personality be separated from the traits which disclose artistic ineptitude...
...There are many whom the perception of something mightier than the scientific measurement of time and space, more apalling than the dizzy course of the electric particles that compose matter, forces to recognize the reality of spiritual life...
...WHATEVER vices the publication of minor verse may involve, it finds its justification in one positive benefit...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...A Gallery of Minors This Stubborn Root, by Hortense Flexner...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...But for the most part her aesthetic innocence leads her into topics and formal problems which she is totally unprepared to lift above the banal...
...He is painting that literary portrait from the dawning knowledge of the post-war generation...
...Not the most astute of them nor the most wholeheartedly honest could have changed things...
...Nicolson's treatment of his father's career is very striking...
...2.50...
...There is, nevertheless, a charm to Mr...
...Frequently she is unable to shake off servility to her superiors...
...Lyman has found a romantic figure whose activities during the era of the white man's conquest of the Indian played an important, if sometimes an unhealthy, part...
...The fostering of this isolated talent is excuse sufficient to offset the ill-advised vanity and incompetence of the remaining booklets...
...The book is a fine piece of work and to those who are able to check it in some measure by personal experience of some of the regions and circumstances described, it is very convincing...
...The talent of Leonard Cline was undoubtedly capable of sharp originality...
...All engaged in boywork will benefit greatly by its perusal and find in its pages the answer to many troubling questions that crop up in their dealings with the growing generation...
...Nicolson (more correctly than the framers and signers of the Treaty of Versailles) distinguishes between the causes and the origins of the world war...
...In order to sustain with any conviction the theme of a poem, a severe intellect must be at work, handling with relentless discrimination the devices of technique...
...Over the work of Arthur Truman Merrill, Mrs...
...The reader is led through the development of various faculties up to the point where human personality, "harmonized and unified by the strong central power of love," is percieved as the goal of evolution...
...When will we finally rid ourselves of the deterministic implications that have grown about evolution like a choking vine about a strong young tree...
...So far they have all failed to explain, but it is perfectly proper that such attempts should be made...
...IT IS a pleasure to find a scientific writer who is not afraid of the words mysticism and soul...
...They Rise Accusing, by Clyde Robertson.New York: Henry Harrison...
...the causes (1500-1900) to England and the building of the empire...
...Lessons of Diplomacy Portrait of a Diplomatist, by Harold Nicolson...
...The fact that it is no longer necessary to be a materialist in order to be a scientist is beginning to be appreciated, and this book will advance it measurably...
...Robinson's mark is plainly seen on the sonnets, The Doctor and Contemporary, Miss Millay's on The Image, and even something of Frost's on Adopted Son...
...His Gothic novel, The Dark Chamber, displayed an imagination which lifted it far above the average run of terror stories and evoked fragile overtones of mystery without which the most ingenious plot remains a lifeless mechanism...
...His partiality for the Sioux caused many sad complications and not alone for himself: it contributed materially to the Black Hawk war, caused him to lose his job, forced him to flee with his wife and child for fear of retaliation and, after her death and the commitment of the boy to the care of friends in Illinois, it brought about his eventual trek westward to California and a new start...
...The author finds purposiveness throughout nature and discovers psychic responses low in the scale of life...
...This is the difficulty with all the verse in After-Walker...
...Truthfully it may be said that the author has compiled a book for which there exists a real need...
...A group of tall Australian Anzacs lounged near— the most irreverent, independent and unabashed of all the English heterogeneous soldiery, reminiscent of the long-bow men of older England...
...2.00...
...but we who were neophytes in diplomacy in 1900 were groping for the true and compelling causes...
...Real Romance John Marsh, Pioneer, by George D. Lyman...
...Wisdom and goodness shone from his face—but he failed...
...Every effort is made to keep the Hungarians off the voting lists and to prevent them from voting when their names are included...
...Like many other problems this task must to a large extent be taken over by outside agencies...
...Briefer Mention Twenty-four Hours, by Louis Bromfield...
...JY1R...
...Who's the little duke...
...He uses the scientific method as far as that will go, but does not hesitate to step beyond it into the realm of values and the spiritual where his material, no longer measurable by physical methods, is the experience of humanity...
...Beauty, truth and goodness only find their true meaning as the expression of the supreme worth of God— "the World Power who willed the constitution of matter willed also the goal of evolution...
...The Case of Hungary The Tragedy of Trianon: Hungary's Appeal to Humanity, by Sir Robert Donald...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...To us more than to anyone such books as Harold Nicolson's portrait of his father are absorbingly interesting...
...The Street of the Islands, by Stark Young...
...but if you fail even to suggest that any of these people has an inner core of meaning or permanent purpose, your story is probably not very important...
...The whole range of recreational activity is covered...
...Morton Dauwen Zabel...
...The present miscellany of minor poets is a case in point...
...It states simply and clearly many of the fundamental facts of biology and unifies them into a compelling presentation of evolutionary philosophy...
...Night in the Valley, by Marina Wister...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...I agree...
...It was the logical and unescapable result of the growth of that new political entity, the nation, out of the conflict between feudal anarchy and an attempt to revive the only civilization known to the Germanic tribes who overthrew it: the world empire of Rome...
...Young shows an artist's appreciation of his settings, which he describes in poetical and limpid prose...
...Clyde Robertson and Miss Agnes Hickey a rather uniform anonymity hangs...
...It is silly to set them down as fools or villains as is so much the fashion...
...Choice can only have a moral value when there is an awareness of personality as in man, but a rudimentary power of choice appears low in the scale of life...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 26
