A PAGE OF EXCLUSIVE FEATURES
A PAGE OF EXCLUSIVE FEATURES ''MEET GENERAL GRANT" HflEPF would be a coal fire In the grate. Under the ¦-jt-Jets that streamed up to throw shadows on the WJznt of Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant...
...It also "sired the gogetter...
...and love a dream within a dream...
...But out on the field he M raised almighty hell with the enemy...
...And the small BTnstening so attentively to the reading from the Choirs of General Ulysses S. Grant," this columnist...
...they are dreary reading indeed, compared with •¦asterly job that Woodward has done for his subJjj But just the same those two fat, brown volumes *" their gold eagles make a memorial to the ur.con¦"ttle spirit of man more enduring than any of the "••nd and one statues of the General which loom 'cross America...
...The masses have had nothing to do with formulating this dangerous absurdity except to accept it as they received it from the Intellectuals...
...He learns at last Jhat crimes of horror and perversion spring not from extraordinary circumstance but from commonplace event...
...We have never been able to subscribe to this view...
...And then, we have the large groups of troubled young men who cannot attempt conventional marriage for all of their natural bent because our economic disorder fills the future with certain Insecurity...
...Under the very noses of those who flattered him he kept on his Impassioned rebellion, against religion, against the Injustice of the French legal'system, against the economic system of his time...
...Grace Stone Coatea...
...I When my grandfather died, he made special provi|[n that J> should have the two volumes of Grant's llemotri" with the gold eagles blazing on their brown Lren...
...No normal woman is born to single-cursedneM...
...He will refuse to be "adjusted" to the madness, knowing that "balanced" judgment will return when the eccentrics who rule the world have recovered from their carouse...
...He did not cut much of a figure on dress parade," *arks Woodward dryly...
...weaving at last the meeting of Jeremy and Tulip under a chinaberry tree, where as Is the way of lovers, they began to give each other things...
...Among the men and women he considers are Jonathan Edwards, Father Rapp, Robert Owen, Frances Wright, Charles Grandison Finney, Dwlght L Moody, John Humphrey Noyes, Andrew Jackson Davis, Bronson Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Carry Nation, Alexander Dowle, Amelia Bloomer and others...
...For #these there are kindred thousands of timid mates, who parallel every act and emotion of theirs, and one Is confronted with a long thin Una creeping into eternity on the aame plane with another long trembling line, and never a curve or convergence in the hopeless length of living...
...Garrison, are not singled out as wholly eccentric...
...even of Lorrie, who convenlent"y forgets "that she had contributed in nny way to this horrible network of unpleasantness gathering around her...
...I Here was a primitive, as Woodward points out...
...Even through these latter-day efforts for freedom, one cannot see a protest against motherhood, or desire for affection and love from men...
...I as I read the book, I discovered that while the adpirsrion of an old man and a youngster at his side, ¦Baching delectable chestnuts, may have concentrated It the military achievements of the General, there is ¦arty else about Grant, the man, to capture the imaIbution...
...Another was certain that If we popularized the primitive communism of the American Indians we would win the Indian vote...
...A new caravan of Canterbury pilgrims— in a stalled motor bus—lingers under a liquid am bar tree to satirize not modern life alone, but its chroniclers as well...
...And when his voice failed him I ae could no longer dictate, he sat there, propped J with pillows writing away until the end came...
...He keeps this type from the limelight and hopes that time, experience and education will make him see his own folly...
...that cultivates the myth of "Nordic superiority" and hunts out heretics with savage ferocity —this Nationalism did not issue out of the mine, factory, field or workshop...
...Freda R. Joel...
...to itory of those last days throws a shining and **xt*l light over the dull pages of "The Memoirs...
...The rest at humanity would have to wait through a whole era of Yule tides before I came upon Its multiform desires...
...The Highlights of Voltaire JT is never difficult to transcribe to book form the life of a dull man...
...And should the subject under discussion Include any of the thousand titles about the relationship of the sexes, then the entire audience Is a mass of loneliness...
...If ever there were tenderness in his being, it has vanished utterly, or Is just the polished shell of a technique he keeps for his uses to play with, when the occasional woman chances his way...
...Nightseed," where understanding restores a morbid mind to health, to the final story "Pear...
...Throughout...
...If a hard man Is ugly, a hard woman is cruel to consider...
...But for the thousands of lonely discriminating glrto who grow into a forced spins terhood, because of our crazy chaos of economic life, I would want to be a great big Santa Claus with sleds, and wagons and truckloads full of fine, intelligent lads, all with good jobs, with a desire to bring up families, who enjoy good music the fine arts, and have a love for the out-doors...
...I did not wish to go to West Point...
...And nothing in this aspect la pleasant to look upon...
...Sometimes a flood of hopelessness carries toward him and his purposes, someore so brutalized by loneliness that there is no power of thou^'at or sense of smell...
...It is true that some come In pairs, and some even singly for sheer learning...
...I think his greatest victory was won, not on any fcote-hung field, but in an invalid's chair on the porch I bis home at Mt...
...For the bachelor woman, I have little more to say than her male counterpart...
...The fact remains that one cannot distinguish the herd-majority from the civilized minority by ascribing to the former any special tendency to be taken in by charlatans...
...It became a mall order religion with loud complaints against the 'peculiar laws' by which the post office department prevented prophets from selling sacred handkerchiefs guaranteed to cure cancer and barrenness...
...The story moves to Its Inevitable conclusion, untainted by easy suggestion that had one event been altered, one friend risen to Myer's necessity, he might have avoided the fate that met him...
...The impossible and most absurd eccentric is he who sits on the social -.afety valve and laughs at all warnings that the boiler will burst If he does not permit the steam to escape...
...J*n you've met General Grant, as Woodward inj**8* you to him, you can't dismiss him as just an*r "brass hat...
...And while a great many heroines take Havelock Palis and Margaret Sanger at their Intriguing word, and go through the devastating processes that pretend to fool the natural laws, no children come from these pretty plays, and even the usual animal pets cannot dispel the gloom of Isolation...
...It seems that the Co-operative Common-, wealth will mean so much In happiness for men and women beyond the dull lines of Just economic and Industrial revolution...
...with all bis self-sufficiency, one might squeeze out a tear of pity, since isolation mar : » him quite ciearly for its own...
...The Super-Quacks Moreover, this Is true of every other queer cult that has had a history in this country as Gilbert Seldes demonstrates in an interesting book ("The Stammering Century...
...A few writers have been peeved because of a gentle declination to place their discoveries before the world...
...The pre-occupations of the lower orders may have been ignoble and silly...
...that has its flag ritual, its chosen people, and its solemn ceremonies...
...In fact over and over again we are Informed that the responsibility of awakening the French to the point of Revolution rested mainly with Voltaire,"that with Voltaire a new era of liberal thought began, which had a tremendous affect on modern civilization...
...Everything great that we know we owe to neurotics...
...Passion for Lorrie Erremew wipes out other realities for Myer...
...With these changing times, with the liberation of us all from Victorian standards of moral conduct, with the bread and butter problem for marriage and familyraising so complex and difficult, the worlds of bachelordom and spinsterhood widen and grow more populous...
...Only after the upper jjlasses had approved, the masses accepted...
...If we consider a new religion which has evolved in this country In the past fifteen years, the cult of Nationalism, a cult that has its sacred altars, saints and saints' days...
...each new thing...
...From the first tale...
...And I have lugged them around with me ever Ext...
...I^neus mental diet for a boy of six, these detailed Ljoniewhat labored descriptions of battles long ago...
...Grant was tough, two-fisted, and yet as his biografcr makes us perceive, 'an essentially lonely, wistful, Wuppy man...
...He had had a good EJjjegg in cotton in the South when the guns that Kj on Fort Sumter blew it to pieces and there was a E'C to be cared for and a slow, painful rebuilding for Er grandfather...
...Most of us are so taken up with Weltschmerx or indigestion, that we have little or no sight for the millions who wander about in this life like lost atoms that never find another one to mix up with and make for chemical affinity in some kind of happiness...
...intelligence, breeding, wealth, and experience...
...Should he break locee in some absurdity one may open the door and invite him to take a walk...
...The boobhaters need to correct their theory . . . The more experienced classes were the first to accept an absurdity and the last to give it up...
...and by the same accident into the obsession that destroys him...
...By his very limitations the task is easily confined to a certain number of words, one can pick apart the various -episodes that relate to even the dullest and person and say: "This I will put In, and this, and this, but now I will close my story as I am making the volume too thick...
...Nor has Thaddeus glossed over this portion of his career...
...Jeremy's trip to the rainmakers* convention ("Jingling in the Wind...
...But with this goes also the dictum that moronic beliefs and prejudices have their origin in the masses, that men of education and of wealth have had little or nothing to do with these queer lapses of normal thinking, and, as a further consequence safety and progress would be assured if government were entrusted to men of culture and education...
...It is also true that the many come to find through any chance a mate, or a friend...
...The astounding thing about almost all the quackeries, fads and movements of the past hundred years in America," he writes, "is that they were first accepted by superior people, by men and women of education...
...Tulip gives Jeremy the abtsract principle by which gifts may continue, and Jeremy broaches the very door of his secret mind and gives her his Inner and guarded and sacred deficiencies...
...But conceive of the wealth of material that surrounds the moat meagre life story of the genius such was Voltaire, whose story, (Voltaire, by Victor Thaddeus, Brentano, N. Y.), Victor Thaddeus has attempted to give us in the two hundred and fifty pages of Voltaire, Genius of Mockery...
...And Event as pilgrims to a shrine...
...All the words of the world have brought no more peace than is in the simple fact of love...
...The radical, fanatic about himself and his discoveries, refuses to make this adjustment...
...Indeed it is counter-revolutionary, yellow bourgeois, and anti-agitprop, to even suggest dsing anything for the poor, or giving them aught else than protocult, ukases from the Comintern, and a ten year subscription to the "Izvestia...
...2), gives Miss Roberts a chance to slant a laughing eye at the foibles of the day...
...A confirmed bachelor gives me the creeps...
...I pw went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm, sd I never want to command another army...
...Smoking cigarettes, telling saucy stories, and speaking about the old unspeakable questions were aa easy to acquire as short hair, shorter skirts and a taste of Rabelaisian literature...
...that is beside the point...
...If "Prelude to a Rope for Myer" is s^ark with actuality, "Ariadne," a first novel by Isadore Lhevinne (New York: Globus Press, $2.50), moves in an atmosphere of dream fantastic as the grotesques that Mr...
...Lhevinne draws for his chapter headings...
...S. A. de Witt...
...The evolution of New Thought is an example of a mystical twist given to the discoveries of physical science and finally developing into a "religion of success...
...His family fluttered ""¦d him...
...One might be normal except for a belief In mesmerism or phrenology or some religious mania or some other quackery...
...At the time it was natural enough wL tit should hire a substitute...
...PJ father had to use his authority to make me go...
...And yet, for him...
...Elizabeth Madox Roberts: New York, Viking Press...
...The balanced man Is rare," declares the author...
...There is something tough, knotty and impenetrable about him, like the side section of a rhinoceros's hide...
...The reaction to the woman when the play is over is ugly to contemplate...
...A man who lumbered into a dispteful job with head down, like a bull buffalo, and P«t obstinately butting on until it was over...
...We accept the characters as each accepts himself, understanding the Inner urgency of each...
...The author does not seem whoDy se isfled with his own sUten-ent of the problem and the book ends with a-quotation from Marcel Proust...
...Then there are a few Socialists and other radicals who have found "adjustment" to devoted service to capitalism, militarism and Imperialism Such "adjustment" appear...
...Then there are the thousands of kind, good lads, whose shyness and general Inferiority convictions build about them forbidding shells, and tortoise-like tney waddle around, fearful of any contacts, and becoming duller and less desirable with every day of fear...
...Under the ¦-jt-Jets that streamed up to throw shadows on the WJznt of Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant and Lowell, ¦f«Vi man, reading aloud from a huge book...
...The average man's equilibrium is often disturbed, but he readjusts himself...
...Here Is the whole problem...
...Thanks to a forced change of the moral standards, a sort of convlval pleasure is derived from external play at love, and a great deal of furtively careful Indulgence prevails...
...That the volume is perforce scanty goes without saying...
...The "Balanced" Man Seldes has performed a useful service In writing this book despite the fact that his final chapter, "The Complex of Radicalism," leaves one puzzled as to his meaning...
...McGregor, where he was dying of »*er of the throat...
...And when the final scene of frenzied satisfaction Is left to the imagination, imagination does not fail...
...I Hiving served for a brief and decidedly inconspiculo period as a rear rank private in the Army during I* war, (I mean that glorious World War, which has B&fe us what we are today), anything that has to doi Lib the military bores mc to extinction...
...Only in Lidda, when the two lie greedily intertwining memories, do Viadi's dreams become one...
...B* bad resolved to write his "Memoirs" to pay Off a tv^0g load of debt...
...Should the movement be caught in some mass hysteria like that of the World War he at least has the consolation of knowing that the whole world has gone mad and wait for the brain storm to subside...
...But here the equality ended...
...THE CHATTER BOX JF I were a Santa dans la the old manner, ami It were given to ma to answer every prayer for gifts, I would first load up my sled with comforts for the poor, and companionships for the lonely ones on earth...
...Corn gold—geniusmusician Indifferent to prestige in the artists cliques of pre-war New York, sees once and loves...
...He bears her into his delirium, and she is the Centaur's daughter whose passion is universal...
...When it went into business tor itself it was incoherent and often fraudulent...
...Stenl writes with artistic competence that never obtrudes Itself...
...We are the meaning of life, says Erie, In the title story of H. A. Manhood's volume "Nightseed (Viking, S2.50...
...Even In the business world she could walk shoulder-lined with all the male go-getters and bull-slingers and put the big deals across...
...We have no doubt that the crusaders of the National Security League believe that they are "balanced" and that nobody] else is...
...where love grows terrified and both torera are lost, every tragedy is precipitated by thought divorced from sympathy...
...At any rate he gave me Earthing he had, including his hero and hot chestI U soon as he came in the house there would be a Lb and a hug and then a dive into overcoat pockets tbot chestnuts which I adored...
...Through the fresh eyes of Khadija, woman of Arhaj's harem, Miss Roberts looks at the blare and glory of a metropolis, and sees the great god Bunk sky-signed among the constellations...
...The magnificent and lamentable family of the neurotics is the salt of the earth...
...For "love is a royal visitor which that proud ghost, the human spirit, settles in elegant chambers and serves with the best...
...Without charm, with little imaginaUon^.with the fire ¦JJhe had, securely banked from the eyes of outJ*J there was in him such integrity of purpose, such •*Ool honesty that a whole generation of young * would go marching cheerfully into death behind II slouching figure...
...e was nothing much left of him—except guts, •'••papermen came poking into his affairs...
...Thaddeus has not missed any of the major points in Voltaire's life...
...She becomes the inspiration of all that he creates, and element in all that he experiences...
...Biologically she is and must continue to be the female of the specie with all the eternal seriousness of her purpose and the intricate dreads and dangers that beset any too great liberties with herself...
...If an aberration afflicts a few of the upper class or its intellectuals, crusading brings it to the attention of the "lower orders...
...It was Marx who said that the "ruling Ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling class...
...Lucas Myer, sensitive and observant young Jew, with a mind "like an outfit of railway signals, susceptible to any message that came to it," is flung, helpless through accident, against corroding Gentile prejudice...
...Feeling, the understanding that is another word for love, is the only path by which man may arrive at his own meaning: and the ——*e n_s no i.,r.,,,iig e...
...McAlister Coleman...
...For not only was Voltaire's own life rich in incident but the effect of his writings upon racial thought of his day and down through to our own times has no parallel In the writings of any other writer...
...I Woodward quotes Grant as saying, "I never liked price in the army...
...He paid little attention to the erratic and eccentric cults that have found a nest in certain regions or certain sections of the population yet Seldes shows in this book that the Marxian view holds good for the creeds of the queer as well...
...Love, again in Ariadne, gives meaning to life...
...Bo these too, go about with all honest intent in their thoughts of women, and quite heroically decent In their relations with them...
...The favorite of one king, the scourge of another be was unmoved by praise or blame...
...For these women, In their endless, futile hunt for a mate, my Christmas spirit burns a dear flame...
...I jo when I came along, he may have looked upon me m i potential General Grant...
...And here I grow a bit pensive, for all of my generous Impulse...
...I know all that, but despite all the terrific treachery involved by my charitable deeds, I would nevertheless thumb my nose at the Kremlin, and distribute warm clothing, good hooka, sleds, wagons, and constructive toys to all the needy victims of capitalism...
...No doubt the eccentric has attached himself to these causes and made them ridiculous, especially when he became conspicuous as a leader, which occasionally happened, but the eccentric is not confined to the radical who advocates something new...
...that regards the foreigner as an "infidel" and its admirals and generals as crusading priests...
...a day laborer, whose obsession was medicine...
...But he just looked at them all out of ¦» eyes and plugged along to the very end...
...Manhood makes penetrating observation of life...
...So much for the men . . . With women the problem of proper tabulation Is terribly complex...
...I But I am not ashamed to confess that the other day latn I took up, "Meet General Grant," by W. E. Wood¦nid, (Published, and very handsomely too, by Horace I'Jwirnt) I found that way inside of me there lingua] a bit of the six-year-old's thrill at the mention of lit familiar name...
...this is the hell of a way to review a book and that a lot of my pacifist friends will be writing J*Westing against my praise for a book about a J*l«t...
...But their deeply rooted purposes are nevertheless forbidden, and there is the great loneliness of living without their own children...
...In her bursting out into freedom she brought along with her very little preparedness for the crass atmosphere of a man-made world...
...It can flood their dreams and all their spiritual living with the full light of a natural and high reality...
...Ariadne, mistress of Count Rcetovtsev...
...His Idea of a perfect Socialist movement was one that demanded the abolition of all schools of medicine...
...C ray grandfather had never heard of Freud and t-jon and experimental schools and what horrendous Erff the first instructions of a child might bring ¦ perhaps it was compensation for a colorless business Ler which filled my grandfather with hero worship Etbst rather forbidding, rather frowzy figure in a Epp« uniform- I know that the old man brooded over Efsct that he could not go to the Civil War and Coder through the mud around Vicksburg under Cat's leadership...
...What the author has done, however, is to present a smooth well written portrait of Voltaire which would not suffice as a reference volume but to radicals, especially the young ones, this volume will be of Interest both because of the powerful effect Voltaire's writings had upon the proletariat of his day and because of his insistence cm expounding bis principles often at the risk of his neck...
...that substitutes the State for the idea of God...
...particular quackery may have its origin in a ragged and penniless carpenter like Matthias, the "Messianic Murderer," but not till he had connected with a few Individuals of education and cash was this Imposter able to pursue a career involving "mania, delusion, sexual aberration, hallucination, catalepsy and hysteria of every sort...
...The finely-strung girl shrinks from him at first contact, and only the toughened huntress of the wilds ran tolerate his touch...
...Parsons *¦* and prayed over him...
...And then after dinEr we would sit down together and fight Shiloh all Ejr again and scramble up the sheer heights of Mistary Ridge and be gruiay courteous to the tired Lee EAppomatox...
...One gets the Impression that all radical movements are futile despite the fact that what was radical in on: period became realized in another period...
...The sixteen powerfully wrought stories of the book range from the poignant simplicity of "Brotherhood" to the tragedy of "Misery Cottage...
...Poverty is a hateful state, and they know it, and will have none of it for their families...
...Men win differ as to when a person is "balanced" and when he has "adjusted" himself to society...
...a sort of occult magic which woos dividends for the capitalist...
...Hundreds of perfect systems of money reforms, some of them accompanied with convincing charts, have" been received by The New Leader in the last three years...
...Another volume of similar length could be added without fear of duplication...
...For them my grief indeed...
...We are the meaning, not the problem...
...but one theme binds them: that man is undone by thought, and saved—if saved—by love...
...except historians read "The Memoirs" today...
...There should be less academic objection from the proletarian guhernias against my professed concern for the lonely...
...But great changes make great complications...
...All I ask them to do is to go and get WoodJ** book and there discover for themselves,, how * militarist Grant was and how big a man...
...TV pi*"- a browns tone house on the upper West L, of New York, The time, around 1894, when the WL gide was pioneering territory...
...that which man gives it...
...Life has meaning for him only through the possession, ta Lorrte's body, of what in ail women eludes embrace...
...The author's comment is, "And yet-" In his own movement the Socialist is not puzzled He expects eccentrics to turn up now and then...
...Some Eccentric Offah—ta The author provides an interesting pageant for the reader...
...Once, I remember, we-went across the Birk to a place in the Sixties where Grant had lived Wer be bad retired from his ill-fated Presidency...
...Some of the offshoots of early eccentricities are traced Into the contemporary period...
...That he has in parts sacrificed fascinating details is due no doubt to the almost impossible task of confining that irresponsible rebel into any conventional sised biographical study...
...Eccentricity and Fanaticism in the U. S., 1800-1900...
...And always the spider that sits at the hub of the mind weaves philosophies, religions, histories, events...
...It is never a process of Infiltration from the lower class to the upper class but just the reverse...
...Whenever I find a moment's rest from world problems, and tumultuous existence, there is always a club, or a lecture, or some sort of gathering to go to where these isolated bits of life assemble What a study In human futility they offer to the discerning thought...
...I abhor parLa, bugles and the whole- hocus-pocus and I know of L gore offensive people than latter-day generals...
...Socialist and labor organizations have had experience with queer dicks who have brought with them some quackery and attempted to hitch It to the organization...
...Some of these notables, as, for example...
...Garrison's anti-slavery views were a healthy reaction against an economic monstrosity but his association with other movements and beliefs gives him a place in the book...
...8e* one of those considerable men whom you must r"™*r to make any real estimate of the American ¦"fitter...
...The sustained quality of the book is unusual in a first novel...
...New York: The John Day Co...
...But I'm glad the old gentleman isn't here to Le bow little like General Grant I have turned out to tafter all that early training...
...Life Is a dream, art the memory of that dream...
...It is the work of politicians, and editors, generals and admirals, university professors and historians, a swarm of patriotic organizations, societies devoted to ancestor worship, authors, publicists and even a few "scientists...
...He carried her Image to war-sodden Russia, where she is one with Lidda of flesh and blood, woman and helpmate...
...This is true of manhood suffrage woman suffrage, legializatlon of trade unions, abolition of imprisonment for debt, the admission of women to the professions, the destruction of slavery, separation of Church and State...
...Some were wholly ridiculous and others were only In part absurd...
...We feel that Myer could have fulfilled himself only in a different world where Idealism is ungalled by reality...
...Vladl—Mr...
...Rustic fundamentalists quarrel with rural scientists over the will of God...
...One comes upon men of thirty and over, living their singular days and plural nights until the questing and drain of a drab monotony in irresponsible dalliance leaves them bored, cynical, and hard...
...A Fiction Foursome rJK> read Stent's "PTelude to a Rope for Myer" (New York, the Dial Press, $2.50), is to live for the time not In the pages of a book but In the mind of a man...
...Unless of course there be a pathological inversion...
...New Thought advised stock brokers to become at one with God so that they might put over big deals...
...There is an odor of spiritual halitosis that exudes from his presence, and the sensitive soul has an olefactory nerve of its ov/n...
...He fcys, "The most successful generals are primitive men, ¦base opinions on everything outside of war and solf«i are often—and, indeed, generally—extremely fcive and childish...
...There we can only be sad and understanding...
...to us as eccentricity or something worse...
...Scanning the New Books Quacks and Quackeries In the United States By James Oneal TAKERS is a common belief among certain American intellectual cynics thai a majority of the population consists of morons and there is certainly sufficient evidence to warrant belief in this view...
...I recall one...
Vol. 7 • December 1928 • No. 52
