Books
Sands, William Franklin & Repplier, Agnes & Healy, Patrick J. & Carver, George
BOOKS The Bolshevist My Life, by Leon Trotzky. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $5.00. WRITING an autobiography has always been a pleasurable experience; but My Life must have afforded...
...JVlRS...
...Other little boys have been stung by bees (he was lucky to have it happen only once...
...All the authors have crowded into the limited space allowed to them vast stores of erudition, and whether one assents to their judgments or not, their findings must be looked on as a sincere expression of mature scholarship...
...Though the mind of the church, its monastic institutions and ideals, its organization and law remain essentially unchanged, the thought of the present, as reflected in this book, is irreconcilably alien to the aspirations and outlook of that earlier period...
...The Unknown Washington, by John Corbin...
...The Tiger's Testimony Grandeur and Misery of Victory, by Georges Clemenceau...
...Volume VI: Victory of the Papacy...
...This case happens to be summed up in Messrs...
...There are some misprints, and one wishes the author had not tossed aside so lightly the case made by modern investigators for "Celtic and Arabic" influences...
...4.00...
...A perusal of this volume will reveal how all pervasive its influence was...
...Miln has made an honorable contribution to the cause of international sympathy...
...no failing faculties of a tired old man there...
...Madison, Hamilton and Adams, the writer feels, have been stressed to the detriment of their chief—of the first "great engineer" who built canals and roads and promoted western development...
...It must not be concluded from the foregoing, however, that Miss Sitwell's book fails of distinction...
...George Carver...
...The signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty stripped Russia of pride and honor...
...J. HIS anthology, written to accompany the author's Wandering Scholars, offers little that is distinctly new to compilers of verse written in Latin between the first and thirteenth centuries...
...2.50...
...It would seem that in spite of his latest apologist Pope must remain the Pope of tradition...
...Paterson reality and admire the beauty of her descriptions, her idyllic portrayal of an idyllic people and an idyllic love story, her romance attaining satisfactory heights...
...A bit dull in style and confusing in organization, the book can have little appeal for the casual reader...
...Clemenceau "gnashed his teeth in secret" at Pershing's "tight-lipped smile" and obstinate refusal to change his main plan, which was "to solve all these military problems at one blow...
...One feels that the present book conserves quite a little more of the true lyric quality while failing, relatively speaking, to offer a really rich and subtly motivated blank verse...
...Aspects of Mediaevalism The Cambridge Mediaeval History...
...But it is obvious that Mrs...
...Jacob of Manchester, does not bring out clearly the full measure of papal supremacy or the character of the man in whom that supremacy was vested...
...Nearly half the chapters are devoted to the national histories of the countries of Europe, Italy, England, France, the Scandinavian countries, Spain, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary...
...The thirteenth century is generally regarded as the most flourishing period of mediaeval life...
...For the serious student, there is a challenge in Mr...
...Sometimes hidden away in student's quarters, writing pamphlets for dear life...
...They had troubles of their own...
...The little man, as he passed, heard the boy exclaim, overcome with pity, 'Poor man!' 'Poor man!' said his father...
...But this mediocre leader has gone far, and bids fair to go further...
...One can think of it only as an extremely valuable contribution to the corpus of Pope criticism...
...Is the old fighter of 1870, the tiger of politics, the essential Frenchman, the civilian incarnate, the same old Clemenceau to the end...
...Corbin's defense of Washington from scandal mongers and from sober historians, who minimize the general's contribution to constitutional government in the critical period after the War and in the not less critical years of the recently established nation...
...After this the agitator's career was the career of all his kind...
...IMAGINATION can have free sway in a novel whose setting is the forests of Thuringia just prior to Caesar's invasion of Gaul...
...Trotzky's revolutionary reactions were natural in a brilliant, disgruntled youth, widely, but not deeply, read, and most inconveniently poor...
...Briefer Mention Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, by Helen Waddell...
...New York: Richard R. Smith...
...By the same token he can be trusted to put up with Trotzky if that able and bitter extremist ever makes good his footing in the land...
...In this story of the patient integrity of a people who are to us strangers, Mrs...
...Again he feels that in the historian's interest in Jefferson's liberal revolution of 1800, that the father of his country has been sorely neglected...
...In that he was supported by the president of France...
...That is no poor man...
...In all the impressions of my daily life, human inequality stood out in exceptionally coarse and stark forms...
...But even as it stands the book is one of the most fascinating reprints to have appeared in a long while...
...Little...
...That chapter is a classic of witty, cynical characterization...
...It would be impossible to attempt any criticism in detail of these or any other chapters...
...CORBIN, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, an editorial writer, a Roosevelt Republican, and author of The Return of the Middle Class has written a volume around The Unknown Washington...
...They were patient, they were polite, but they were unyielding...
...Indeed, Miss Waddell admits that her "omissions will seem unaccountable...
...Poor worn-out Tiger and poor Foche...
...There is no grandeur in that part of his recital except the grandeur of epic tragedy...
...Would it not have been a good idea to increase the number of explicatory notes, or to supply a kind of historical glossary...
...The symbol of Rice—"beauty of nature, beauty of thought, tradition, the music the centuries have woven in beautiful tapestry of belief and code, national dignities...
...I think she may fairly claim to have succeeded...
...At the end of the decade, two dead men, two giant leaders in the titanic struggle stabbing feebly at each other from the tomb...
...England, France and Italy closed their doors...
...Trotzky convinces himself in many angry pages that Lenin mistrusted Stalin, and was "preparing not only to remove him from his post of general secretary, but to disqualify him before the Soviet .as well...
...Patrick J. Healy...
...Foche was "insubordinate...
...Watson's conception of ecclesiastical organization or refrain from wondering why Dr...
...Yet the wording of the Doullens formula under which Foche took supreme allied command bears out Foche's interpretation of his duties...
...All her laborious life the widow Pang Kee dreams of a feast of beautiful pearl-like rice such as princes ate in the Forbidden City: looks forward to that epicurean climax as the reward of all her privations...
...Well, many an American officer has known that "tight-lipped smile" any time these past thirty years and "gnashed his teeth" at it (secretly too, very secretly...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Or is he a burnt-out Clemenceau, a rather blurred and childish and pathetic Clemenceau, dying as he wrote...
...The work of the distinguished scholars who contributed to this volume gives an excellent picture of the externals of thirteenth-century existence, but the very excellence of the picture merely accentuates the gulf that severs that time from the present...
...That age was ecclesiastical and religious in ideal and effort: this, like the Hellenistic period, is secular and earthly in tone, and it is no wonder that there are some who regard the middle-ages as an interlude, not a connecting link between two other epochs...
...He took the position of coordinator of allied strategy and gave positive orders only in actual concerted battle...
...This is not another new biography, though it attempts to be a true biography based on a thorough reading of Washingtoniana...
...The whole thing is a pity unless from their revelations we can learn that presentday warfare cannot be conducted efficiently by any one, and least of all by peoples who have incorporated democratic principles in their national organization...
...In the first place, it has given him an opportunity to get back at his triumphant political opponents...
...all little boys have from time to time had their hair cut...
...This volume is worthy of the period with which it deals...
...but My Life must have afforded Leon Trotzky more than his due share of enjoyment...
...His intense nationalism seems to blind him to the same nationalistic bedrock of compromise in others...
...The fall of Kerensky, the amazing triumph of Lenin, the weeks of carnage, the iron hand closing down on a bewildered and submissive people, the establishment of a new order—these things fail of their impression because of internal strife and the crowding of minor incidents...
...14.00...
...If, however, Miss Edith Sitwell's Alexander Pope fails of its major purpose, that of delineating Pope as a large-minded, generous soul, it at least serves another purpose, that of recalling him to our minds as a supreme artist among poets...
...No doubt much of that isolation came from the peculiarly venomous personal feuds of the French ruling oligarchy as well as from the mutual suspicions of civilian "free-thinking" Republican bourgeois, and royalist Catholic professional soldiers...
...Because of the manner in which the plan of the Cambridge Mediaeval History developed under the hand of the late J. B. Bury it has come to represent something midway between a historical encyclopedia and a set of special monographs...
...Perhaps the limitations imposed on the author forced him to describe, not the man who is generally considered to have been more than any other, the embodiment of the spirit of his times, but the consummate administrator who kept the ecclesiastical organization in motion...
...but he knows the people with whom he has to deal...
...Miss Waddell deserves the patronage of everyone who likes mediaeval song and story...
...or living safely in foreign cities—seven years in Vienna—editing a red-hot paper, the Truth, and talking endlessly to fellow Marxists in cheerful, cheap cafes...
...4.00...
...This book should be a textbook for delegates to conferences to limit armament on land and sea...
...Everybody's Greville...
...Sometimes en route for Siberia, where he never stayed...
...Allen and Jones's The Romanesque Lyric, where there are likewise translations of many poems which caught Miss Waddell's fancy...
...The world war turned Trotzky into a man without a country...
...I was paving the way for the next revolution," is the author's modest comment...
...It is an exceptionally interesting book, from the introduction to the notes...
...other little boys have thrown stones and been hit by them...
...What one cannot fail to object to, none the less, is that the author has followed the somewhat obvious current custom in contradicting the general opinion of a personality which 200 years have developed and sustained...
...What she sought to produce was merely a collection of poems she felt able to translate...
...The church was then at the height of its power and grandeur...
...The Road of the Gods, by Isabel Paterson...
...Corbin reviews in kindly tone past works dealing with Washington and his era, as he offers his own explanation of men, movements and events...
...Hamilton, in speaking of the Gallican liturgy, found it necessary to refer to it as a derivative of the mythical liturgy of Ephesus...
...But the enormous expanses of his diary virtually precluded interest on the part of anyone excepting the specialist...
...With this in view, Mr...
...edited by Philip Morrell...
...And this in a book which deals with the great happenings and the bleak tragedies of history...
...Previte-Orton...
...Perhaps Foche knew that irrespective of civilian government's consent, he could no more "order" Pershing than he could order Haig or King Albert...
...Previte-Orton, in his introduction, dwells to some extent, on this subject, and, while he is generous in his praise of its achievements, his praise is tempered to accord with the impermanence of what it accomplished...
...Some of the chapters are of preeminent merit, as for instance those on the Universities by the late Dr...
...The verse itself is printed so that the English version always faces the original text...
...he is the "philosopher upon whom is laid the task of sustaining others, himself sustained of none...
...6.00...
...f I ^HE Cambridge Mediaeval History is important not only A because of its plan, scope and contributors, but because it fixes, and for a long time will tend to standardize, thought in the English-speaking world on the subject of mediaeval life and institutions...
...The other chapters deal with Commerce and Industry, Ecclesiastical Organization, Universities, Political Theory, Heresies and the Inquisition, The Mendicant Orders, Ecclesiastical and Military Architecture, The Art of War, Chivalry and the Legendary Cycles of the Middle-Ages...
...One feels, however, that the American reader in particular will find himself called upon to know considerable English history...
...There is grandeur again in The Work of President Wilson...
...This introduction is not only an able summary of the significance of the thirteenth century, but an excellent piece of historical criticism...
...in the next chapter he emerges once more as one who "has seen himself half-way suspended between heaven and earth and has escaped being smitten by stars hurtling from their orbits...
...The Russian revolution brought the revolutionist home...
...but in no other reminiscences do we find these events set forth with such sympathetic seriousness...
...Its value will be immeasurably enhanced for readers or consultants if they take the pains to read the masterly introduction from the pen of Dr...
...The emphasis is on Washington as a builder, a unionist and a framer of the actual working government...
...It is the great Mr...
...All the drawbacks and all the advantages in presenting history in the form adopted by the Cambridge editors are revealed in this volume...
...In that part the old schoolmaster regains his serenity...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...It was so quiet there, so eventless, so perfect for intellectual life...
...Therefore, to get the full significance of many chapters in this volume it is necessary to read them in connection with the corresponding chapters in Volume V or in some earlier volume of the series...
...I '"'HE current flair for biography seems to reenforce Hazlitt's A remark that there is nothing to be said of an author whom all the world have made up their minds about...
...In the end they put the whole family on board a transatlantic steamer and shipped them to New York which was too busy coining money out of the conflict to pay any attention to them...
...He fled to that harbor of the harborless, Switzerland, and was firmly requested to move on...
...It is concerned chiefly with two brave women of the peasant class in the province of Shantung, where rice is eaten only by the rich...
...Austin Lane Poole and on the Mendicant Orders by Dr...
...It must be said that, rich as the volume is in mediaeval lore, and reflecting as it does the historical insight of a group of highly competent scholars, it does not quite open up the soul of the thirteenth century...
...He pronounces his successful rival to be the "most conspicuous mediocrity of the party, his political equipment restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive...
...Morrell, who feels that he acted in the spirit of suggestions advanced long ago by Lord Gladstone and others, has now abridged the material so that one fairly large volume is all we are required to read...
...Part of it certainly came from the uncertain validity of decisions made by representatives of parliamentary government...
...The white heat of his Frenchness makes it something against nature that all the world should not die gaily that France might live...
...Very reluctantly he went to Spain, only to find the Spanish equally reluctant to receive him...
...a people's inexhaustible solace: the spiritual rice of China"—runs through the story...
...And Pang Soo, her daughter, returns at the climax of the wandering, stormy existence her mother had worked to make fair and secure, just in time to prepare a bowl of the exalted dainty for the old woman on the threshold of the grave...
...Pershing "disobedient...
...Lytton Strachey has been entirely successful in reforming popular conceptions...
...for although the present practice is to present an argument in direct contrariety to generally accepted views, not even Mr...
...The writing of seditious leaflets landed him at nineteen in Siberia with a wife whom he picked up by the way, and who must have been a girl of sterling worth, for she helped him to escape and stayed behind to take care of her baby girls...
...The misery of it is that millions of lives and the wrecking of a civilization hung upon an epigram...
...And his is an interpretation which cannot be neglected even by stout believers in economic determinism...
...AT THE beginning of the decade Francesco Nitti's cry of despair: "L'Europa senze pace...
...Tradition concerning him as a somewhat peevish invalid who made enemies of his friends with little or no concern as long as his ends were achieved is so well grounded that no amount of explanation concerning his generosity in money matters will avail to offset it...
...These chapters are concise summaries of life, politics, warfare and religion, and are all from the pens of recognized specialists...
...Paterson in writing The Road of the Gods has applied considerable research to guarantee authenticity wherever possible...
...The editorial work has been competently done...
...A second wife bore him sons, and while there was little money, there was plenty of interest and animation to keep life going, and a never-failing sense of importance to lend it emphasis...
...New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation...
...MILN expresses here her customary understanding of a great people too superficially known, as a rule, to Occidentals...
...Perhaps middle Germania was as she pictures it, perhaps the people of the Holy Grove tended their Druidical close, perhaps the treachery of Althea, a Greek who knew the cities of the Mediterranean world, worked her revenge on the High Priest, perhaps Greda, her granddaughter belonged to a prototype of our girl scouts...
...He has put up with things since the days of the Tartars, and he is likely to put up with them for many years to come...
...All of these things are easily traceable through his denunciation of the baneful influence of Foche after the war, in the Rhineland problems and the guarantee pact discussion: it is traceable in the bitterness of Foche's reflections on Clemenceau which gave rise to the present book, and in the quarrel over post-war reconstruction policies, which were, as the tired statesman quite truly suggests, civil and not military problems until the failure of peace and the "decadenza dell'Europa" bewailed by Nitti ten years before made them once more problems of military preparedness...
...planned by the late J. B. Bury...
...Perhaps...
...The temptation to compare thus presents itself...
...Hastings Rashdall, on German history from Henry VI to the long interregnum after the death of Frederick II by Mr...
...William Franklin Sands...
...Life separated us," is the husband's tranquil comment, "but nothing could destroy our friendship, or our intellectual kinship...
...He may have little faith in what Trotzky calls President Wilson's "anaemic professional Utopias...
...And one can also be grateful for the manner of the book...
...2.00...
...La decadenza dell' Europa...
...One or two of the scenes are unforgettable: "On a summer day a shopman and his young son walking among the mazes of Twickenham saw a thin little man, in a suit of rusty black with a cocked hat, who walked with difficulty...
...while throughout, the work is sustained by a style which for conciseness, flexibility, cadence, and "undefiled" English is such as might well be expected at the hands of one of Miss Sitwell's reputation for literary finesse...
...Is it a true picture the old schoolmaster gives us of Foche, of Pershing, Lloyd George, Poincare and himself...
...Tractability is the Russian's long suit...
...In this, as in all works on general history, or in this more particularly because of its many contributors, the system of grouping fractional phases of particular subjects in chronological sections has the advantage of offering a cross-section of the life of a specified period, an advantage not possessed by the method of discussing history in the form of monographs...
...For Pope, whose weakness for the last years was such that he had to be dressed and undressed like a child, in his fervor for God, exerted his final power of movement that he might throw himself out of bed and receive the last sacrament kneeling on the floor...
...That he was a powerful figure in the society of his day is well established, but that that power arose from anything except his genius as a poet something other than anecdotes of good nature must make evident...
...This does not imply, however, that every statement in the volume has to be accepted as a final verdict, or that a reader must necessarily bow to Dr...
...In the second place, his interest in himself and in everything that has ever happened to him is unflagging and indiscriminate...
...Many of them are not essays on topics peculiar to the thirteenth century with which the volume is concerned, but are discussions on particular phases of mediaeval life...
...And so far as matters of his personal conduct require apology, strictures upon the characters of Lady Mary Montagu and John Dennis and criticism of Teresa Blount will not wipe out remembrance of his treatment of Wycherley, of Edmund Curll, of his silliness in the affair of the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, of his falsifying his correspondence, and of his injustice to Joseph Addison...
...No effort has been spared in the preparation of indices, maps and bibliographies to make the volume helpful and useful to students...
...Sometimes in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where he lay all day on his bunk, and read French nd Russian books...
...VJREVILLE, man about town, has never been surpassed as a commentator on life in England during the early years of the nineteenth century...
...He does not say what happened to the babies...
...His jealous revolutionary and republican civilianism exacts unquestioning obedience from the supreme military command, in the military domain...
...Agnes Repplier...
...The twenty-five chapters it contains, though of exceptionally high quality, are not all of equal merit...
...Some do feel that way about it, but not all the world...
...It is a quarrel from the tomb, and in the main it turns on an interpretation summed up in a studied epigram: "Commander, our country commands that you command...
...Rice, by Louise Jordan Miln...
...Alexander Pope.' " But I like much better the last moments of his life: "The priest who performed the last office came from the dying man . . . penetrated to the last degree with the state of mind in which he found his penitent, resigned, and with his soul and heart filled with the love of God and man...
...In that sense he claimed to be international, and not subject to the French War Minister except in matters directly affecting his position as commander of the French forces...
...Accepting these things on faith one can grant Mrs...
...The Wasp of Twickenham Alexander Pope, by Edith Sitwell...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...Strange to say, however, the chapter on Innocent III, by Dr...
...New York: Horace Liveright...
...Here begins the interesting part of the history, and here the narrative grows intricate and confused with an excess of detail...
...Clemenceau's sketches of the men of the conference are gems...
...If the young Russian borrows a pair of shoes that are too tight for him, the incident is related with more zest than it deserves...
...The introduction is a masterly discussion of the present condition of the world of poetry, and at the end is appended a critique of Pope's verse that is probably better than anything that has yet been said about it...
...Its quality can be tested by the renderings of Alcuin, which seem to me incomparably the best I have ever read...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 4
