T

`HE inspiring life story of modern China's late liberator is graphically and authoritatively told in "Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic" by Paul Linebarger (Century), a biography whose subject has been for many years the paramount figure of his race. First president of the country which from early youth he had fought to free from Manchu oppression, exile, reformer, revolutionist, apostle of democracy-one follows the heroic narrative of his struggles with a quickening pulse and awed admiration. Judge Linebarger writes from years of intimate friendship with Dr. Sun, from a long and active participation in the cause of Chinese nationalism, and from a broad first hand knowledge of contemporary China. The resultant work is of inestimable historic interest, both as an accurate portrait of the dynamic Sun and as a revealing commentary on the life of China during the past fifty years.

Every critical or interpretative volume worth its salt has a theory or point of view ambitious or modest, right or wrong which is summoned up to explain the subject. One of the most interesting theories which has recently been applied to the short story is that of Frances Newman in "The Short Story's Mutations" (Huebsch). It is certainly ambitious, and right enough at least to be stimulating and to challenge refutation. Summoning biology to the exegesis of the arts, Miss Newman says that progress in creative fields has had nothing to do with chronology and all to do with the flaming

genius of great individuals who absorb the philosophy and practice of their inheritance, boldly break with it, and originate a new order of things. Miss Newman interrupts the thread of her exposition in each chapter to reprint a short story or "mutation" which in her opinion represents the origin of a new creative impulse and a new mode. Her reading has been encyclopædic. Petronius is there, the fabliau, the Gesta Romanorum, Boccaccio, Voltaire, Andersen, Musset, Mérimée, Maupassant, Laforgue, Henry James, Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Paul Morand. Miss Newman has a subtle and sinuous style, heavily weighted with allusions and modern instances. Like Philip Guedalla, she is brilliant and hard to catch. But she has organized a vast amount of material and thrown it into suggestive form, so that her book is interesting and valuable, no matter where her sophisticated quips may fall.

What William Johnston knows about "These Women" (Cosmopolitan) is contained in a number of familiar essays collected between the covers of a sizable, readable volume. These papers, however, are leveled as much at men as at their wives and sweethearts. They are an honest effort to untangle some of the knotty problems arising out of woman's new and powerful position in business, and the consequent upheaval in the home. Perhaps Mr. Johnston is too much a man to handle certain phases of these problems without masculine bias, for it would be wrong to say that

this book is entirely without male bigotry. Most of it is unconscious on the part of the author, for his very sincere desire to unscramble a mass of fallacious ideas about certain great social and economic crises of today is entirely constructive. We like what he says about wives and wages: "Any man who has a good wife, and doesn't pay her a salary, isn't a good business man." But what he says about parents and children in "What Has Happened to Home", we like less, because we have a feeling that his information is gathered with a view to enforcing a premise already pretty clearly shaped in his mind before he began to write. On the whole "These Women" is provocative and sane, and one could ask little more from a book that sets out, in a common sense way, to tackle problems that only time and painful experience on the part of the human race can solve.

D. H. Lawrence's eighty four page introduction to "Memoirs of the Foreign Legion" by M. M. (Knopf) easily earns a place as one of the literary curiosities of the season. M. M.'s account much expurgated

· of several months in the Legion is worthy of more than passing attention, but Mr. Lawrence's foreword demands, nay, screams aloud for all the reader's spare smiles or tears, as the case may be. It seems that M. M., a troublesome borrowing acquaintance of the novelist, committed suicide at Malta in 1920 to escape from certain financial difficulties of an illegal cast, and in spite of the borrowings Mr. Lawrence decided to bring out his book. In doing so he improves the occasion to call M. M. a 'common little bounder", "an impossible little pigeon", and many much worse things drawn from a rich vocabulary of insult and invective. That's about all there is to the volume, but it

66

is quite enough. Those who beli old that Mr. Lawrence can do no wroder call the introduction a strong piece We work. Those who believe the oppać. site may find crumbs of comfort for wounded sensibilities in a booklet entitled "D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus" published in Florence by Norman Douglas (the N. D. of the introduction), in which the author of "Sons and Lovers" is neatly, wittily, and withal in friendly fashion skinned alive by an expert.

Gone is the last vestige of excuse for the mother who mismanages her children "because she didn't know any better". For now two different publishers have issued sets of books giving her all the information she needs, and each is small enough to fit into a vanity case and sold at a price at which a lipstick would not be procurable! Each is written by an authority in his field, is scientifically correct, and full of common sense and practicality. The smaller of the two sets constitutes the "Child Health Library" in ten volumes, published by Robert K. Haas in the format of the "Little Leather Library" and edited by John C. Gebhart, director of Social Welfare of the New York A. I. C. P. With it come the bookends to hold the three inch bookshelf, and an invaluable chart devised by the Division of Communicable Diseases of the New York State Department of Health which tells not only what are the symptoms of each disease but the method of infection, the possible after effects, and what should be done with the other members of the family when the dread germ has invaded the house. No doubt this little series contains all the information which social workers wish all mothers knew and acted upon. The other series of little handbooks is almost double the

size in page and volume and, also, in scope of interest. This is sponsored by the National Health Council and published for them by Funk and Wagnalls. With such an origin it seems superfluous to say that each volume is authentic. Not only is each one written by a person whose scientific standing is unquestioned but it is further edited or prefaced by another who acts, as it were, as a check upon the first. Truly the battle against the ignorance of parents is in full force!

Of "Things I Shouldn't Tell" (Lippincott), by the author of "Uncensored Recollections", there is little to say and a great deal to quote. For it reveals the private life of public persons, the life based on the actual physical and emotional nature of man which even one whose business it is to uphold morality must live after the day's work of upholding morality is done.

The essay, even more than poetry, is the dragon of every high school teacher's life. It is not that essays are difficult for the adolescent mind; it is that they are so often dull. To combat the apathy that greets the essay, educators have invented various schemes, and perhaps the most promising is the selection, when the student is ripe for it, of essays from the writings of our own contemporaries. John Avent's "Book of Modern Essays", in Boni and Liveright's Modern Library for High Schools, is admirably compiled from such writers as E. V. Lucas, Henry Seidel Canby, Richard Le Gallienne, and Hendrik Van Loon, as well as tried and tested standbys like William James, Agnes Repplier, Samuel Crothers, and Woodrow Wilson. The selections are informal, brief, and each is introduced by a terse biographical note about the author. There are appended the usual

questions and discussion, as well as a valuable list of modern essays and books of essays. On the whole the book represents a good job of editing. It does what it sets out to do, namely, to incite the student's curiosity to a broader mental outlook and to give him some idea of the range of thought and fancy that an essay may encompass.

To the ranks of famous fugitives who have written the story of their escapes we must now add the name of Leon Trotzky. When he wrote the diary entitled "My Flight from Siberia" (American Library Service) it probably never occurred to him that he might evoke comparison with such genial rogues as Cellini and Casanova. That was probably because Trotzky had no great difficulty in eluding his captors. His real adventure consisted in a wild journey across the Urals, by reindeer sleigh, in the dead of winter. This crazy trip behind a drunken driver reminded him of Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days". It brought him through a desolate country, sparsely populated by tribes to whom Russian civilization had brought only vodka and some foul language. All in all, there are more bloodcurdling adventures to be found every Sunday in the magazine section of the New York "American", despite which Leon Trotzky's tale is more diverting.

After Napoleon the Little passed from the European scene and with him, apparently, all hope of his dynasty, his good repute what there was left of it

went too. "The Secret of the Coup d'Etat" (Putnam) does nothing to brighten the dingy escutcheon. The founder of the second empire is still a strange combination of wilfulness and vacillation, of great charm sometimes and again of moral ugliness. This

collection of letters passed between M. de Morny, M. de Flahault, his father, and the prince president himself during the years preceding and following the coup d'état. With them Philip Guedalla presents an introduction, and another study follows by Lord Kerry, Flahault's greatgrandson, from whose family archives they come. They be gin when tremendous events were in embryo and end with the prince president as Napoleon III, emperor of the French. And what a picture it is! Assemblies in London's west end, political salons in Paris, the gossip of ministerial conferences, and the endless intriguing of Orleanist, Bonapartist, and Republican. Mr. Guedalla remarks that these letters have a high technical value. Be that as it may, the reader who likes the romance of reality can read this record of imperial ambitions as history, certainly, but also as a part of the great human comedy.

Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, has collected twenty two of his recent addresses into a volume entitled "The Faith of a Liberal" (Scribner). Looking back to an age of Liberalism that is wellnigh past in America, he holds the year 1890 "to have marked the turning point for the worse" in national life as well as in morals and in education, and adds that "at the moment Liberalism is in eclipse". The kind of Liberal whose faith is here stated is a sort of Jeffersonian Democrat, favoring individual initiative, states' rights, private property, capitalism, a laissez faire policy of government, and no prohibition one who will die for liberty but believes that equality is death. His antithesis is not the Conservative but the Radical, whether this Radical be an extreme Communist or a fanatical Puritan. short, Dr. Butler stands for "traditional

In

Americanism", and, because America is working away from tradition, there is here felt a note of anxiety that disturbs the otherwise tranquil dignity of the orator's rolling generalizations.

There can be no doubt that modern physics has opened up a new and extraordinary universe to our gaze. There can be no doubt, likewise, that the marvels of that universe have not on the whole been made sufficiently clear to the general reader. It is in realization of this fact that Sir Oliver Lodge has written his lucid and informative volume on "Atoms and Rays" (Doran). While an understanding of the latter part of the book presupposes a moderate knowledge of mathematics, the first half of the volume may be intelligible to one entirely without mathematical training. The author treats simply and interestingly of the nature of atoms and electrons, energy and matter, electricity and the ether; and the book is to be recommended to the student who desires an accurate, authentic, comprehensive, and comprehensible account of the revelations of modern physics.

The ordinary thinking housewife and homewoman, as well as the student of social science, will welcome a new edition of Anna Garlin Spencer's "Woman's Share in Social Culture" (Lippincott). Many women, even in this age of feminine enfranchisement, have remained in the dark- women filled with energy and a burning desire to contribute their share to the proper progress of their own country and the world at large, yet not knowing what is their niche, and fearful of taking any step lest it be a false one. To them and to the students Mrs. Spencer is a benefactor, for, having set forth in her original work the history, the potentialities,

James S. Van Teslaar is the editor of "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" (Boni, Liveright). Mr. Van Teslaar tells us that "in multiplicity of counsel there is confusion". Upon this occasion he is surprisingly accurate. The book is a compilation of articles and lectures by Freud, Stekel, Jung, Brill, and others. The counsel is confusing. If Mr. Van Teslaar has endeavored to present, clearly, the findings of these men, we regret his choice of material. It does not do them justice. If he desires to present the subject of psychoanalysis as a whole, we object. The book is not difficult reading after one has mastered the terminology, but it suffers from "poriomania" (circular wandering). Is it a suppressed desire for literary effusion which prompts the editor to write, "Primordial cravings that persist are racial vestiges of the mind", or, "When painful experiences are pushed out of memory they are really only pushed further in; they disappear from con

scious memory only to lie dormant and to influence the subject unconsciously throwing up emotional bubbles in most unexpected places", or, "Sleep is a state during which it is possible for the unconscious within us to find a sort of vicarious expression"? Charitably, we shall assume that it is, and that's that.

After reading "The Letters of Olive Schreiner" (Little, Brown) one turns instinctively to "The Life of Olive Schreiner", written by her husband, S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, and then to "The Story of an African Farm", her first book and that which brought her recognition in English literary circles late in the last century. The sequence, however, should be reversed: to read the "Letters" first is like going to an opera and hurrying home to read the libretto. Olive Schreiner was dominated by an imperative impulse to express herself to others, and found the letter the most convenient and satisfactory medium for so doing. Letter writing constituted for her a mild form of physical exercise and provided the mental and spiritual relief which her strong nature demanded. It is not strange then that between the years 1876 and 1920 she acquitted herself of more than six thousand letters, and that this judicious selection made by her husband should give a picture of the woman far truer than anything which she herself wrote for publication. Miss Schreiner met her husband in 1892, eight years after her extraordinary friendship with Havelock Ellis had begun. Although she was supremely happy in her marriage, this friendship endured until the time of her death, and the majority of the letters contained in the volume are those which were written to Ellis. For long periods she wrote to him daily, some days two or three times, discussing politics, love,