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THE EDITOR RECOMMENDS —

BOOKS THAT MAY HAVE

ESCAPED YOU

1. "Last Poems" by A. E. Housman (Holt). Some of the most beautiful lyrics written in this century.

2. "The Men Who Make Our Novels" by Charles C. Baldwin (Dodd, Mead). Informative and useful sketches, if somewhat prejudiced.

3. "The Wind and the Rain" by Thomas Burke (Doran). An exquisite piece of autobiographical writing with fictional quality.

4. "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding (Knopf). Scarcely needs this notice, except that there is a fine new edition with an introduction by Wilbur Cross.

5. "This Singing World" by Louis Untermeyer (Harcourt, Brace). Collection of children's poetry by this master anthologist.

"SOUND

Strong and Deep

OUNDINGS" by A. Hamilton Gibbs (Little, Brown) is a story of unusual emotional appeal. It has discernment, beauty, passion, and a variety of incident. It is a sort of masculine variety of "The Little French Girl", although certainly the heroine of Miss Sedgwick's novel has little resemblance to Mr. Gibbs's Nancy. This brother of Sir Philip and of Cosmo

of deciding between the two. The war enters only as an incident to the development of a rich love story. At times Mr. Gibbs reminds me of Swinnerton, although his strokes are broader. He understands women as few men novelists do, and he knows the English and the American temperaments thoroughly and is able to picture them without prejudice. His sex motivation is straight from the shoulder, but the blows are not dealt with such brutality that good sportsmanship and taste are lacking. I like this story better than any other I have read this spring. In fineness of writing it seems to me to rank with Maugham's "The Painted Veil", Floyd Dell's "This Mad Ideal", and Lewis's "Arrowsmith". I cannot imagine anyone's picking it up and laying it down again unfinished, so moving are the simple yet beautiful and effective incidents. The same author's "Gunfodder" was fine, but in some ways this is a better book; and from the point of view of popularity it should put him on a par with his already popular brothers.

Two Novels With Touches of Poetry

OBERT NATHAN'S "Jonah"

Hamilton has drawn French, English, R McBride) and Floyd Dell's "This

and American characters with much understanding and fine skill. His novel presents a picture of love and friendship in their subtlest meaning. With no hint of actual Freudianism, it yet has great psychological significance. It draws the distinction between physical and ideal love, and shows a modern forthright girl faced with the problem

Mad Ideal" (Knopf) both have a quiet beauty and a sense of the poetry of language that commend them to thoughtful readers. Both have, too, love stories that are unusual and yet human. Nathan makes the story of the prophet real, endowing it with a vein of quiet satire which, although

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Jonah replied gravely, “We are sad because life is not simple, the way it used to be. We imitate other nations and so we are not certain about ourselves any more. We are not even sure of God; we begin to wonder if He is not a bull, or a dove, and if He is not also the God of Aram and Babylon. That is why we are unhappy. When the things we believe in are questioned, it makes us restless and sad. Patriots are the only happy people, for they believe in themselves; and if other people disagree with them, they do not forgive them for it."

Floyd Dell's novel is certainly his best since "Moon-Calf", and I am inclined to think it a little more appealing than that unusually appealing story. It is the quiet story of Judith Valentine; or rather, part of the story of Judith Valentine, for it ends in a fashion which leaves much to be wondered about this fascinating girl, this girl who would write poetry. We have had plenty of young poet heroes in our modern novels, but here it is a girl who drives blindly ahead with her ideals in rhyme and metre. Again we have presented the struggle between domesticity and artistic ambition, only here it is a double struggle - Judith has her poetry and Roy his art. Does Mr. Dell believe that marriage is impossible under these conditions? He offers, I think, no answer to his question; but he asks it poignantly and he tells a story that is interesting and lit by flares of passion and truth.

Superb and Absurd Mr. Boswell

A CHARMING new book is "Earl

Percy Dines Abroad" (Houghton Mifflin), in which Harold Murdock reconstructs, in Boswellian fashion, the dialogue which he imagines might have been heard at a dinner actually given in London in 1778 by General Paoli in honor of Earl Percy. If the dialogue is not spirited, it is at least pleasant, and the volume is of excellent workmanship in all particulars of printing, binding, and illustration. It appears in a limited edition.

Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker's two volume "Letters of James Boswell" (Oxford) gives us a book which, for flavor and charm and nonsense, almost equals the "Life of Johnson". Here is this pompous, weak, foolish yet brilliant man, in all his enchantment

and he was, you know, a curiously appealing figure. You have only to read Mr. Tinker's "Young Boswell" to discern that fact, if you have not discovered it for yourself. I take the liberty of quoting a few sentences from a lengthy epistle to Zelide (Isabella de Zuylen). Boswell writes:

If

Let not religion make you unhappy. Think of God as he realy is, and all will appear chearfull. I hope, you shall be a Christian. But, my dear Zelide! worship the sun rather than be a Calvinist. You know what I mean. I had sealed this letter, I must break it up and write a little more. This is somewhat like you. I charge you once for all, Be strictly honest with me. you love me own it. I can give you the best advice. If you change tell me. If you love another tell me. I don't understand a word of your mystery about a certain gentleman whom you think of three times a day. What do you mean by it? Berlin is a most delightful city. I am quite happy. I love you more than ever.

And so on and so on. Nor is he less emotional when writing to one of the same sex, the Reverend William Temple, concerning his resignation of the recordership:

I am quite in a fever. O! my old and most intimate friend! what a shocking state am I now reduced to. I intreat you, if you possibly can, to afford me some consolation directed to me here, and pray do not divulge my mortification. I will endeavour to appear indifferent and as I now resign my recordership, I shall gradually get rid of all communication with this brutal fellow.

Mr. Tinker's notes are numerous and helpful and, of course, beautifully phrased.

A Newsboy Novel

ITS publishers assure

TS publishers assure me that "The Prince of Washington Square" (Stokes) is not a hoax; that the young gentleman in his teens who presented the manuscript genuinely conceived and executed this amazing combination

remained a fathomless mystery to their plainly dressed classmates, but to them it was a merely flapperish secret.

Another gem from a short chapter called "Midsummer Infatuation" must not pass unnoticed: "Jack sheiked his sheba like a real son of the shifting sands in a gallant try to make her his second subjugation, but she proved too astute for him." Here is an excellent volume for reading aloud of an evening. Reading it on a train is dangerous, for fellow passengers are convinced that loud and uncontrolled laughter is a sign of actual, or at least incipient, lunacy.

Signposted Reading

of sentiment, heroics, and sophistica- THE librarian of the University of

tion, never knowing at all how very funny it was. There seems to me some internal evidence to disprove this fact; but, however that may be, Harry F. Liscomb is almost as entertaining as Daisy Ashford. Through these pages stalk the "desperate bootblack bully", Percy the cake-eater, and the Prince himself, whom two flappers "were brazen enough to osculate on his rubicund jowls, much to his social contretemps". That particular passage somehow makes me wonder about the authenticity of the whole. On the other hand, the general tone of the following paragraph almost makes me a believer in the youth and innocence of the reputed author:

The flappers, in marked contrast to the cake-eaters, were such squeamish dressers that it would be a difficult task to describe accurately what kind of clothes they were actually wearing. How these flappers managed to dress so fastidious on the meagre wages their parents earned weekly

Pennsylvania, Asa Don Dickinson, has made a guidebook to reading and called it "One Thousand Best Books" (Doubleday, Page). There are many such volumes; no one of them, I think, with any more carefully adjusted lists than this latest one. The indexes are masterpieces. masterpieces. There is a plan for ten years of reading at one hundred books per year. There is a suggested library for women's clubs of three hundred volumes. Most useful of all are Mr. Dickinson's descriptions of specific books and their authors. These short pieces are informative and well written. Nor does the author neglect other lists; he discusses and tabulates them. Here is the result of a life of librarianism, and a fruitful one. It is well worth your attention if you are anxious to be directed in realms of literature. Catholic, informed, well made, this is a useful and pleasant volume.

J. F.

A SHELF OF RECENT BOOKS

ROMAIN ROLLAND

WH

AND OTHERS

By Ernest Boyd

HEN "Annette and Sylvie" appeared in France in 1922, it was understood to be the "prelude to a work in several volumes", entitled "The Enchanted Soul", which, if not so long as "Jean Christophe", would consist of some eight volumes. Of these two have been published so far in French, and now the first of them is available in English, the smooth English of Ben Ray Redman. If it does not reproduce the choppy style of the original, it is vastly more agreeable to read. To deliver judgment on a work after reading the prelude would be rash, so let it be said that "Annette and Sylvie" is very much more readable and entertaining than the second volume, "Summer", which is just about as dull and old fashioned a piece of French melodramatic fiction as I have ever tried to read. Annette and

Sylvie are half sisters, the former legitimate, the latter illegitimate. Annette has been brought up by rich middle class parents, and Sylvie has grown up in poverty and independence. They meet and are attracted to each other by their very differences, for Annette is intellectually bold but externally reserved and modest, whereas Sylvie is shrewd, unreflective, and free in her speech and manners. Nevertheless, in the end it is the respectable Annette who has a child by a man whom she despises and refuses to marry. The second volume is endlessly and drearily concerned with the history of this unmarried mother and her child, con

trasted with the position of Sylvie, who has got along very well without ideas or theories of life.

Whether Romain Rolland can recapture the popularity and prestige which were his before the war embroiled him with ninety per cent of his French public, will be determined by the ultimate success of "The Enchanted Soul", his most ambitious novel since "Jean Christophe". French criticism tends more and more to regard him as the author of that one work. Another one novel author is Louis Hémon, the vogue of whose "Maria Chapdelaine" both here and in France encouraged the publication of "My Pretty Lady" and his "Journal", neither of which has had very much success. "Blind Man's Buff" is better than either; but in spite of the author's familiarity with English and with London, this story of an Irishman's adventures in search of a clue to the riddle of his universe, first in Socialism and then in the Salvation Army, has the rigidity of a still life. Louis Hémon's work prior to "Maria Chapdelaine" had been offered to French readers in serial form without attracting much attention, even though he once won a fiction prize. The English influence on him was so strong that, after his death, stories by Kipling which he had translated for his own amusement were actually printed as his by a Paris review. It was not until he got to Canada and wrote "Maria Chapdelaine" that he found himself; then fate intervened, as usual, and he was killed.

Admirers of Zola will be glad to see an edition and a translation of "Germinal" that are worthy of each other.

This is not the bowdlerized Vizetelly version, but one made by Havelock Ellis, who has written a special preface for this reprint of what was originally a work issued only to subscribers. After the lapse of more than twenty years Ellis looks again at his work and finds it good, and he is proud to have been the means of making this great epic of industrialism available for readers of English. "Germinal" is one of the "Big Six" in the Rougon-Macquart series which survive the deadly method of Zola. It is so elemental in mood and so elementary in the details that once shocked our grandfathers, that I doubt if any healthy minded reader today will notice any perceptible outrage to his or her pruderies. It has none of that synthetic bawdiness out of which a new generation gets a "kick" comparable to that of synthetic gin.

Bernhard Kellermann is already represented in English by "The Sea" which, outside Germany, has been unaccountably regarded as a work of literature. Now comes "The Ninth of November", a German best seller, which did more than anything else to put this author on the map. The title has little significance, for it is not until toward the end of the book that "the sun of the 9th of November rose sparkling over Berlin", and the story is essentially a study of the German military type and of Berlin life during the year preceding the armistice. General von Hecht-Babenberg is the personification of all the vices of Prussian militarism, and his own household crashes into ruin symbolically and conveniently just as the German Empire is overthrown. His daughter Ruth emerges into the wicked world as a result of women's wartime activities and is converted to Socialism. His son mutilates himself to avoid going back to the front, and carries on a love affair with

the lady whom the father has selected for his second wife. In the modern German manner, corpses rise from the grave and symbolic figures haunt the guilty, but Kellermann is just putting some cheap expressionistic touches à la Toller to his conventional wartime melodrama whose best parts are the descriptions of the horrors of trench life and the pictures of the gradual fall of Berlin from a fine, clean, orderly city to a sink of vice, debauchery, poverty, and despair. Bernhard Kellermann will not, I fancy, put Messrs. Barbusse and Wassermann out of business, for they have surpassed him in those qualities which give any value to "The Ninth of November".

The two volumes of translations from the Russian are supplementary to each other, for in his introduction to "Tales of the Wilderness" Prince Mirsky is not so enthusiastic about Boris Pilniak, the author of that work, as about Aleksei Remizov, the author of "The Clock". Pilniak, Remizov, and the as yet untranslated Andrey Bely are the three outstanding figures in Russian literature since Chekhov, and it is these we should read, he says, rather than Andreyev and Artzybashev. Prince Mirsky is a sound and interesting critic of Russian, and his very lack of excessive praise for Pilniak is a proof of his good sense. Remizov embodies nearly all the characteristically Russian traditions, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and the folk tale, and in Mr. Cournos's versions he provokes the demand for more and better Remizov.

Annette and Sylvie. By Romain Rolland. Henry Holt and Company.

Blind Man's Buff. By Louis Hémon. Macmillan Company.

Germinal. By Emile Zola. Alfred A. Knopf.

The Ninth of November. By Bernhard Kellermann. Robert M. McBride and Company.

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