Books
Kolars, Mary & Ross, J. Elliot & Mattern, Johannes & Boyd-Carpenter & Healy, Patrick J. & Thompson, Frederic & Brunini, John Gilland
54 THE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 BOOKS A Merger of Nations The United States of Europe, by Paul Hutchinson. New York: Willett, Clark and Colby. $2.00. THIS book deals with a vision of...
...The persecution endured by the Jews is not the main theme of the book, though enough is said on the subject to show their lot was a hard one...
...As a senior he again paints Sandy, and decides to become an artist in Paris...
...Thus according to Rathenau's scheme mechanization must be so modified that the proletariat will disappear as a class held by insurmountable glass walls in a place of economic slavery...
...2.50) is a sort of Lutheran moral theology with frequent references to the inadequacies of Roman Catholic teaching...
...Alfred Scott Warthin's Creed of a Biologist (New York: Hoeber...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...But it may be truer history for being disappointing fiction...
...Although the novel now is ended, the author never has sensed that the memory of Sandy has blurred the college days of Tony...
...But of course the Germans have been colonizers far back into history, so that Miss Townsend can begin her narrative with the fifth century and still manage to devote the bulk of her book to developments since Bismarck...
...Though it deals with hectic matters, it should not deal with them hectically...
...They were the victims of systematic censure and vilification, but the author does not attempt to formulate a plea in their defense...
...Its essential characters are Diony Hall, who lives with her family in Albemarle, and Berk Jarvis, who returns from exploring the Kentucky canelands to marry her and take her back over Boone's Trace to Harrodstown...
...Today Monsieur Briand renews the idea of cooperation in Europe...
...His Glorious Body is a series of lenten meditations by Robert Norwood, an Episcopalian, all dealing with some aspect of Christ's Resurrection (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...It is as though Miss Roberts felt she must partly depersonalize these people—must draw no more than the uncomplicated outlines of their essential humanity—if she were to compass their gigantic story at all...
...Miss Roberts does not change her key for this tragic drama, and it is impossible to decide, even upon rereading the scene, whether it represents the chief failure of her simplified approach, or its chief success...
...If Russia be included in Europe, and supposing a union were formed, there would be a free trade area of 375,000,000 square miles—containing a population of perhaps four hundred and eighty millions, instead of twenty-seven states with twenty-seven customs systems, and some twenty-five different currencies, while the existing frontiers of some forty-three hundred miles would vanish, leaving only sea frontiers with Russia's Asiatic boundaries...
...But Rathenau, the Foreign Minister, originator of the policy of fulfilment which was to deliver German industry into the hands of the enemy, soon fell victim to the bullets of immature nationalist hotheads...
...The Philosophy of Jewish History The Jews in the Christian Era from the First to the Eighteenth Century and Their Contribution to Its Civilization, by Laurie Magnus...
...The limitations of Abp...
...Contrasted with this is Jeremiah the Prophet, by Raymond Calkins (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...But to Rathenau material success and worldly honors were only the means to gain the luxury of intellectual pursuits as the effective armor in life's tournament with the master race...
...Occupation must be reestablished on a free and voluntary basis...
...But there are in Africa still crown colony areas which would present difficulties...
...Why should not confederation of states lead along a path to greater human contentedness ? This book is timely, and its author is to be congratulated for presenting the subject...
...As the premise to such proposals wealth, beyond the minimum of comfort, is to be gradually taxed away by the state...
...He scarcely observed that his jerky, rat-a-tat style of writing completely riddles the pleasure of reading...
...Potpourri ALGAR THOROLD'S name as general editor vouches for the excellence of the Many Mansions Series (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Because of this Spider Web wins for itself a higher place in the lists of current fiction than it would otherwise receive...
...It stands here, without relief or tragic enhancement, simply a part of the chronicle...
...Miss Townsend reminds us, however, that they "actually amounted to only 1,027,000 square miles...
...The work is a defense and a glorification of Judaism written from the standpoint of one who finds in Palestinian Zionism and the establishment of a national home for the Jews a vindication of the superbia or "stiff-neckedness" that aroused the ire of the Romans but which they were not able to subdue...
...The assertion that Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, famed for its Messianism, is seamed with Hebrew thought, will not find much favor among the critics...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...The statement that "before the coming of the schoolmen, Scholasticism had existed in embryo among the Arabs and the Jews" is as vague and superficial as the assumptions regarding the rise and spread of Hellenism among the Arabs in the Orient and in Spain...
...Having given German industrialists a taste of what he was capable of doing, during his short tenure of office as the organizer of the department of raw materials in 1915, Rathenau was, much against his and their will, appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1921...
...Those who are able to consider Rathenau's work apart from racial and political strife can hardly deny him a place among the great thinkers of his time...
...At the moment Mr...
...Whether Russia and Great Britain would join such a United States of Europe is difficult to say...
...He is reported dead, and because a woman must have a hunter to fend for her in the wilderness, she marries Evan Muir...
...with Feuchtwanger's Jew Suss the unshakable determination to overcome the handicap of his race in the struggle for social recognition, personal independence and power...
...1.50) is a plea for eugenics...
...THIS book deals with a vision of which many statesman and poets have dreamed...
...He was already well hated as the Jew who preached to the Gentiles self-denial and foreswearing of worldly riches while apparently enjoying and holding on to his own...
...Here the frequent maladjustment of statement and fact impairs the author's general theories and conclusions...
...So it was that on his trip to Greece, on Mount Parnassus, he found his soul, God's gift to all honest seekers after truth and peace...
...It is a scholarly, wellwritten and more than usually interesting chronicle...
...A League of Nations organized on the principle of industrial cooperation is expected to eliminate international competition as the source of war...
...HEDWIG MENDELSOHN is blood sister to Anastasia Rakonitz, heroine of Mrs...
...A few examples, chosen at random, will suffice to exhibit a tendency that runs through the entire book...
...First the freshman, Tony (the author) is an atheist...
...Berk leaves Diony, when their first child is still a baby, to track down the Indian who killed his mother...
...Whe'r I go to heaven or whe'r I go to hell or whe'r I go no place at all, whenever I go from here my strength goes along with me...
...Those preached during the war show the assurance, so familiar then, that God was on the side of England...
...G. B. Stern's The Matriarch...
...The Message of Moses, by A. S. Wadia (London: Dent...
...I take my strong part and you'll never get it inside your kettle and you couldn't eat it into your mouth...
...She is the spider and the web she weaves about the gentle Max Bickof, a weak rebel against his forced role of money grubber, is one of increasing financial demands...
...By the law of the place and the time, it is Diony's right to choose between them...
...He asks the question: How would America respond...
...Rabbi Gamaliel, we are told, finally formulated the Eighteen Blessings (Sh'moneh'essreh) to idealize the Messianic vision of the new Jerusalem which was to arise in Jewish hearts, but the generally accepted opinion is that the Eighteen are "neither the work of one body nor of one age...
...There is even less basis for rinding Hebrew influence in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius...
...the difference between hysteria and authentic ecstasy full of grace is often of the most imponderable delicacy...
...Throughout the entire time the Jew was the victim of social and political discrimination, and living, as he did, in an atmosphere of proscription and hostility, he developed or employed the talents which made him an object of solicitude to municipalities and rulers...
...Would the products of these colonial areas enjoy free trade once landed within the barriers of the mother country in Europe...
...You couldn't eat ne'er a bit of it...
...Artistically we believe it misses by being too rapid...
...Matriarch Spider Web, by Marjorie Worthington...
...My Heart and My Flesh pushed the subjective method, which in the earlier book was only the triumphant servant of its realism, to the point of uncertainty and confusion...
...When at last the invalid Hedwig releases her avid hold on life, Max as an individual is destroyed, but he faces the future with the grim satisfaction that the little fortune which she had left would insure the perpetuation in his daughter of those principles which Hedwig had most condemned and bitterly fought...
...It may be that love in the wilderness had to be direct and commonplace and lacking in the luxuries of despair, even when it was deep...
...There is the note, exactly struck and supported, of the girl's early life: a life orderly but elemental...
...WALTHER RATHENAU has been called the German Henry Ford...
...Hall is an Episcopalian...
...The present tendency toward rationalization points to an increased rather than lessened interest in the same direction...
...In the Russian empire, the diversity of religious belief and social habits, based on hundreds of years of practice, presents many a problem for solution...
...There is the speech of the people, limited by their plainness, large with their dignity, innocent and strong, like the speech of poetry...
...She makes us see that in all circumstances—even circumstances so crude and fearful that it takes all her evocative authority to make them real to our imaginations—men and women remain recognizably the same...
...the industrial unions to attend to the manufacturing and the effective and fair allocation of work among the workers...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith...
...The plan for a European United States raises acutely the rights of colonial areas...
...The late Austrian minister, Baernreither, frequently spoke of the possibility of a European Zollverein to protect European manufacturers and commerce...
...Jews were, no doubt, originally an agricultural people, but it is hardly exact to say that their faculty for trade —"an acquired not a native faculty"—was due to circumstances that arose in the sixth century...
...Its time is the Revolution, although that remains in the far background...
...Some critics, notably Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, look upon Russia and Britain already as world states...
...MISS ROBERTS'S first novel remains her best...
...Joseph Chamberlain must realize that a real customs union of the British empire was not as a whole project adequately discussed, because most of the colonies had already committed themselves to a system of protective tariffs as best suited to their needs...
...2.50) written, naturally, from a frankly Protestant viewpoint, but putting life and vigor into the man...
...3.75...
...One would like to feel that Mrs...
...The Rise and Fall of Germany's Colonial Empire, by Mary Evelyn Townsend...
...How, he asks, can the proletariat find its soul in this age of mechanization...
...This seems a weak position...
...The story deals with a meeting in the catacombs: a murder has been committed, a beloved young member of the flock is to be put to death for it, and while the solution of the crime is supposed to hold the reader in suspense, a number of more or less relevant anecdotes are related by members of the flock...
...We feel the mounting fear as the trail mounts through the fresh, dark, deadly shadows, where the fires cannot be lighted, and at night "the dogs knew danger and were still...
...The third year, as he studies art, he paints a head of Sandy...
...In business, mergers are the order of the day...
...With the rinding of his soul came the realization of a mission: to assist the rest of mankind in finding their individual, community and national souls...
...As a thriller, the book misses by not adhering to a strict sequential unity...
...5-00...
...The work is literary and apologetic rather than historical, and exaggerations and distortions are, perhaps, to be condoned in a work written under the stress of great emotion in a moment of signal triumph...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...This is the only happy note struck in a book crammed with the bitternesses of failure, poverty, bickering and selfishness...
...The Christian Life, by Joseph Stump, president of Northwestern Lutheran Seminary (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...All industry and trade is to be organized into functional and industrial unions: the functional unions to concern themselves with the collecting, procuring and distributing of raw materials and orders, and financing...
...Hutchinson, bristles with difficulties, but also points to a possible solution of Europe's economic woes...
...while anyone acquainted with the fiscal controversy begun by Mr...
...Christian Reunion in Ecumenical Light, by Francis J. Hall (New York: The Macmillion Company...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...His aim is rather to show that the Jews, while remaining within the circle of Mosaic observance and Pharisaic legalism, could and did retain a power of absorption and adaptation in an alien environment that kept them in the forefront of every movement, political, intellectual and social...
...dominated by the hardworking pioneer father who knows his Berkeley by heart...
...1.95) will be apparent when Jeremias gets less than two pages...
...Occasional Sermons, by Cardinal Bourne (New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...The diversity of German settlements in all parts of the world prior to the war will come home to anyone who takes the trouble to examine a stamp collection...
...This mission became his obsession in his prolific literary activity in the course of which he proceeded to offer a progressive scheme for reconstructing the social, economic and political order...
...1.40) attempts to state the necessary basis for the organic and visible reunion of all Christendom...
...1.00...
...Without lowering the barriers of this self-imposed aloofness they managed not only to overspread the sphere of western civilization, but to make for themselves a notably influential place in the great historical movements of 1,800 years...
...Tony, the sophomore, drinks, thinks and longs for another intense friendship...
...From the wealth of material which Jewish history in the Christian period offers, the author merely selects such episodes and such names as are sufficient to point the contrast he seeks to establish between the aims and ambitions of historic Judaism, and the principles and purposes on which civilization at different periods was seeking to establish itself...
...Worthington's novel must emerge as inferior...
...Supposing this to be so, there are, none the less, immense difficulties within both empires...
...It is true that they discussed the question of preferential treatment for the products of Great Britain, but hardly any discussion took place on a deliberate plan that a system of free trade should exist within the empire...
...Germany's Henry Ford Walther Rathenau, His Life and Letters, by Count Harry Kessler...
...instead the reader is forced to recognize the universality of their application...
...It is about as satisfying as sawdust in place of bread...
...Beyond question we miss the intensity of mood which we feel to be the due of such a situation...
...80 each) essays on the spirit and ideals of the chief religious orders of the Church...
...With Henry Ford he shared the phenomenal capacity for business organization...
...At the age of twentythree, Mr...
...Within his book Mr...
...Perhaps a little unwary of this, possibly with an enthusiasm well intentioned but oversimple as that of certain evangelicals, Frances Witherspoon and Tracy D. Mygatt, Mississippian and New Yorker respectively, and collectively Bryn Mawr graduates, social workers, authors and playwrights, essay an emotionally realistic novel of the early Christians...
...and when he is bullied by a stranger on a train he perceives the peril within physical power...
...God,' I says, 'what a dunce race it is here, to think it could eat strength the like of that!'" Mary Kolars...
...He does not see that really his Princeton years, in the four parts of his novel, are fashioned less by an ideal of personality than by the death of a friend...
...It is true that the past half century has witnessed the federation of Australia and South Africa as dominions...
...Doubtless this is due in great extent to the fact that Mrs...
...They are splendid little books for the communities to give an interested enquirer...
...Few American industrialists will waste much time today on the conditions which might be created by a European consolidation of tariffs...
...HPHERE is nothing more potential of misunderstanding •*¦ than religious emotion...
...But Miss Roberts's margin is so wide that even when these exceptions are taken, her novel is better than almost any other contemporary novel...
...We see the line of small dauntless beings creeping upward through the great passes...
...There is the great trek of the settlers through the mountains, told in casual pictures that cannot be forgotten...
...We count over what the pack horses carry—the cuts of woven cloth, the seeds, the few precious vessels, the salt, the bedding, the spinning wheel, the two books from the shelf of Diony's father...
...So truly imagined are the details of this record, or so integrated from boundless research, that they seem grown together into some vivid and simple whole, unchallengeable as a memory...
...Some of the "bits" in it are brilliant and considered as a whole it is well above the average...
...When life goes outen me,' I says, 'the strong part goes too...
...We feel the panic of fulfilment as, rising over the highest mountains, the towering cliff wall of Kentucky at last blocks the path...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...and replies: "The answer would seem to depend largely on the sporting attitude of American industry...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...2.00) are of varying date and interest...
...THOUGH the title of this work is somewhat inaptly chosen, it is, nevertheless, a delightful presentation of what may be called a philosophy of Jewish, or rather of Pharisaic, history...
...A philosophy of Jewish history, in fact any philosophy of history, is valid only in so far as it is consonant with fact...
...Frederic Thompson...
...The Social Work of the Churches, by F. Ernest Johnson (Federal Council of Churches) is a valuable handbook of information...
...IN HIS introduction to the present volume, Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes says that Miss Townsend is "the first person to study intensively the whole range of Germany's colonial experiences and to relate it within the covers of a book...
...When his friend, Sandy, is tossed from a toboggan and killed on a hillside stone, the perfect certainty collapses...
...then for a climax, a suspicious stranger has a sudden accession of religious fervor, admits the murder, and the whole story ends in great confusion...
...Rathenau's policy of fulfilment was carried to success by Stresemann and an approach to the organization of industry on the Rathenau plan was made in 1919 for the coal and potash industries and more recently in the chemical and electrical industries...
...The Jews had made an important place for themselves in the commercial life of the early empire...
...Underneath, the book is one structure, because all of this life is one structure...
...open to the glamourous report of their aristocratic tidewater cousins, on one side, and on the other to the visionary story of the bountiful and lovely land which Boone has found to the west, of the great meadow, Kentucky...
...And here, against these two tremendous realities that make up the whole of life, costing all that these people can invent or endure, their own story rises to its point of simple greatness...
...As the author views the subject, Judaism in preChristian times sought expression in political and nationalistic ambitions...
...Though this sort of thing may have happened and in the course of its narration it may make vivid the strenuous testimonials to their faith demanded of the early Christians, the noble imports of the book seem rather strained at than revealed by the welter of circumstances...
...Hutchinson has done good service by elaborating succinctly the ideas underlying some of the suggested plans for closer cooperation...
...Patrick J. Healy...
...Written, of course, with beautiful distinction, its very writing is subdued...
...2.50...
...Berk returns...
...Hutchinson sets out a series of arguments, in sequence, which are forceful and illuminating...
...The general tendency will be to watch the trend of political events in Europe and then employ skilled investigators to analyze any intended changes, should some form of federation become an actual fact...
...New York: Covici-Friede...
...While the author justly takes pride in Spinoza, Moses, Mendelssohn, and the Rothschilds, it is to be regretted he did not see fit to discuss the lives and influence of some of the more prominent Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
...The Jews were deservedly famous for their skill as instrument-makers in the twelfth century, but their credit as "midwives of a new birth of science" is not thereby much enhanced when it is remembered that Gerbert (Sylvester II) was no mean instrument-maker in the tenth...
...Worthington's characters are special...
...The number of Asiatic taboos— in dress, in food, in habits—are so many points of difficulty before which the advocates of any scheme of modern mass production and transportation developments, behind a single economic barrier, might hesitate...
...Kessler, the straightforward and yet sympathetic biographer, has merited their gratitude by his systematic and lucid presentation, in one volume, of Rathenau's theories gathered by him from the latter's many disconnected monographs and books...
...A comparison between the two books becomes somewhat inevitable and from it Mrs...
...These he satisfies but at a price which rates high in the sacrifice of his ideals and happiness...
...He was excessively absorbed in himself, and overlooked the pulse and color of his college world...
...Dom David Knowles, O.S.B., writes on the Benedictines, and Father John-Baptist Reeves, O.P., on the Dominicans...
...He had before his eyes, in comparison, the growing success of the German Zollverein and the loose Customs Union of the Austrian empire...
...And now, The Great Meadow, the amplest of them all in intention, suffers in its human constituent from this very amplitude...
...Mendelsohn is destructive where Madame Rakonitz is constructive...
...The former lies in her bed, a stricken mountain of a woman whose indomitable will is bent to the thwarting of her son-in-law on whose despised shoulders weighs the burden of her support and the rehabilitation of the Mendelsohn fortune...
...Stein might have paused for a longer analysis of his fermentation...
...S. Parkes Cadman has given us a stimulating address on Peace, that peace which the world cannot give (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The worker should give part of his day to serving the machine and part to brain work...
...A Novel of the Catacombs Armor of Light, by Tracy D. Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon...
...Soon, however, his intellectual endeavor revealed to him an appalling want of inner peace and self-respect...
...Here items unimaginably strange assemble themselves, in their turn, into a living and familiar record: the record of the getting of food, the getting of clothing...
...Sometimes he hesitates and betrays a sense of alarm that the United States might not view a United States of Europe with calm dispassionateness...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The two halves of the book are Diony's girlhood in Virginia, where life is hard enough, but seemly and secure, and her womanhood in the wilderness, where it is strung to terror and tragedy and unthinkable effort...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Here is a pioneer work, therefore, about a very interesting subject...
...But the bibliography is weak in Catholic material...
...Miss Roberts makes us believe not only in the unconquerable human will, but in the ineffaceable human pattern as well, repeating forever its variations of order, endurance, gaiety, love...
...But a procession of heroic and simplified men and women, fulfilling simply and with inhuman bravery their destiny of conquest, does not offer to her varied instrument a matching variety...
...Would there be freedom of movement for Asiatic and African races inside the European labor market ? The question of a federated Europe or Zollverein, raised by M. Briand, and so well presented by Mr...
...5.00...
...It is the saga of the settlement of Kentucky, and has great figures and great deeds in it, but they are dimmed and flattened, for the most part, like figures in a tapestry...
...2.50...
...2.50...
...The Time of Man was perhaps the completest instance any of our writers has given us of common and contracted materials transfused with noble feeling and noble vision into something lofty and lyrical and unforgettable...
...Perhaps men like Berk Jarvis spent their deepest exaltations, not on love, but on the religion of their destiny: " 'The Shawnees couldn't put me in their pot,' I says, 'and the Shawnees are better men...
...Briefer Mention Spirals, by Aaron Marc Stein...
...Kentucky Saga The Great Meadow, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts...
...To live, he concludes, is to bleed for a godlike perfection...
...Johannes Mattern...
...IN HIS first novel, Spirals, Aaron Marc Stein seeks a midrib for his being...
...The conquest of Judaea and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans forced the Jews back on themselves and they withdrew to the shelter of their law code, and "found, as the event showed, compensation and satisfaction and even empire within that fence...
...His book has the virtue of being clear and definite, which is a relief after so much vague writing on unity...
...Even the fine and tender directness by which she can go to the heart of simplicity itself has no such justifying object here as it had in the rich being of Ellen Chesser, "with the honey of life in her heart...
...With such richness of resources at his disposal it was not necessary for the author to force his evidence...
...1.50) is an impressionistic sketch of little value...
...These facts are accounted for by the late appearance (1884) of the empire as an imperialistic power...
...Jingling in the Wind, a little jewel of a fantasy, was too special to be called a novel...
...One might as well call him a modern Jew Suss...
...Goodier's book About the Old Testament (New York: Benziger Brothers...
...Some problems would become acute, foremost among them the position of the colonial areas of European powers...
...There is, finally, the life at Harrod's fort...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
