SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots Books, Art Drama By George Middleton OCCASIONALLY one may be permitted to escape from the books of the moment to browse in those which may have escaped unread in the pressure of things....
...For it touches us all—this dreaming for the unattainable, whether in love or in the gifts of others...
...There is about this an unforgettable charm...
...Part I aims to give the needed information with regard to the kinds of trees to select for different purposes, where to locate them, when and how to plant them, how to take care of them and protect them from insects, fungi and other injuries...
...Some of the pictures also show the right and the wrong ways of caring for trees...
...This is supposed to be a satire on the way death will reveal the true opinions those about us hold when we have gone...
...and though it deals with an external condition foreign to our own life, the pathos is universal...
...it is indeed a poetic touch that gives also the women a share in the final sacrifice—which they meet like the soldiers themselves...
...Each species has a detailed description with a full page of photographic illustrations, showing the bark, the branching outline of the tree, the twig and the fruit...
...It has met in England with a most cordial reception...
...Exceptional treatment of trees, sometimes necessary in summer, is taken up...
...It is too bad, however, that these translations were not made by persons more acquainted with stage acoustics...
...These translations of the famous German dramatist are not-without interest if one is a student of this particularly concentrated form of drama...
...The text of the book has been divided into two parts...
...It is by far the best in Morituri—-which gains its title from the fact that the three plays deal with impending death...
...Literary Notes TREES IN WINTER (Macmillan), by Albert F. Blakeslee, Professor of Botany and Director of the Summer School of the Connecticut Agricultural College, and Chester Deacon Jarvis, Horticulturist of the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station, is a popular consideration of the planting, care and identification of trees with an introductory chapter on methods of study...
...It soon follows you into the grave...
...By means of analytical keys leading to genera and species, the reader will be enabled easily to identify a tree...
...ONE OF the last things to which Whitelaw Reid gave his attention before his death was the publication of his book One Welshman: A Glance at a Great Career, which has just been brought out in this country...
...Fate has called "thumbs down"—and the characters face their last moments in varying reactions...
...The portrait of the dead which we give to posterity, in song and form, in parchment and stone, this it is which belongs to immortality...
...Teja, for example, has a certain epic quality and catches in broad colors the psychology of the Goths...
...It will probably appear before the end of the month...
...AMONG ITS LECTURERS the Federation for Child Study now announces Scott Nearing, who spoke recently in New York City on "The Social Problem...
...Perhaps I may recall one speech of the painter to the soldier: "Not your deed has life...
...D., of the University of Missouri...
...So even if Achilles destroys the whole world, he has but to let Homer live...
...The suspense and grim power of this little masterpiece makes it worth a dozen popular successes...
...And more than one woman of sweet dreaming is cramped by the environment which holds her enchained to a path she may look from but cannot leave...
...Nearing has a new book almost ready for publication which deals in a large way with this subject—Social Religion...
...Part II deals largely with the identification of trees in winter, treating specifically of one hundred and eleven species which include the most familiar trees, both wild and cultivated, in northeastern America...
...Mar-got deals with the conflict between personality and convention and reveals an unusually penetrating study of a young girl...
...The Eternal Masculine, the final play, is unimportant though it has one novel and unexpected situation amid a mass of studied artificiality...
...It is good that we can thus get into touch with one of the most interesting of the contemporaneous dramatists, who is above all things a man of the theater, though he has many limits...
...Here we have an army completely starved out and the knowledge that only death awaits in the final and determined sortie...
...Of the four plays which comprise the first volume—linked together as they are only by the fact that roses occur in each—the most vital and beautiful is the sad story of The Far-Away Princess...
...In a stray hour I picked up the two little volumes of one act plays by Hermann Sudermann which made their modest appearance a few years ago...
...When Fritzchen made its first appearance, it made a sensation—equalled only by the later appearance of "Taps...
...Roses and Morituri, both published by Scribners, show clearly Sudermann's unusual technical skill: this note is the most conspicuous even amid the variety of situations treated...
...Streaks of Light and The Last Visit are typical continental studies in the triangle though the latter contains an unusually effective situation...
...The young son of a German officer has become involved in a scandal and there is no way out of it except to permit himself to be killed in a duel...
...Presumably in this country this contribution to Jeffersonian literature will, be equally welcome...
...The book is beautifully illustrated with more than a hundred half tones, many of them photographs taken by the authors, of unusual trees or peculiar conditions attending their growth...
...By this you shall be hereafter loved and hated...
...What is interesting about this is the fashion in which Sudermann strips the soul of the king in his last hour and shows how he has been acting a part of gory glory all the years...
...Incidentally it has some German cynicism and philosophy...
...This is an interesting and somewhat unusual consideration of Thomas Jefferson...
...This is severe but with The Far-Away Princess might easily be placed in the repertoire of any of our theaters— if we had a repertoire system...
...No matter how accurate they are they lack the idiom of easy speech...
...The action takes place where he comes back for a farewell with his mother and fiancee...
...The irony of the circumstance is that the father has to accept the logic of events, for it is he himself who has urged the son "to get experience...
...Both these plays are terrific indictments of the German code of military honor and the little tragedy of Sudermann is one of the greatest one-act plays ever written...
...A BOOK to be published in January which brings together the results of recent work in biology in general and in zoology and neurology in particular, in genetics and comparative psychology and in anthropology, and endeavors to show their significance in the anaylsis of human behavior is The Science of Human Behavior by Maurice Parmelee, Ph...
...While the title is intended to emphasize the fact that trees should be handled only in their dormant or winter condition, the authors do not confine themselves solely to the winter months...
Vol. 5 • February 1913 • No. 5
