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ideas: i.e., I wish he could make us understand his diagnosis as easily as he understands and diagnoses the problems that come before him at the Health Clinic of Mt. Sinai Hospital. In spite of his technical vocabulary, however, his book is thrilling reading. He has handled his material in the case method, giving each of his fifty cases a fictitious child's name and using each case to illustrate the points he has made in his five introductions one for the book, and one each for four divisions: physical, intellectual, emotional, and social problems.

Two little books, easy to read and chock full of common sense, are "Wholesome Childhood" by Ernest R. and Gladys H. Groves and "From Infancy to Childhood" by Dr. Richard M. Smith, all of Boston. The latter is as sensible a little book as was ever compressed within one hundred short pages. Its last chapter, "Training and Education", is alone worth the purchase price. Let us see what Dr. Smith has to say about spanking, obedience, and punishment:

Every child must be taught to obey. This is difficult to accomplish but the trouble is more often with the parents than with the child. Obedience is based on the confidence of a child in his parents. It is prompted by mutual affection and by a recognition of this by the child. The attitude of the parent toward a child should be reasonable and not arbitrary.

Punishment is one of the hardest subjects to discuss because it is such a personal matter. The object of punishment is not to inflict physical or mental pain but to impress upon a child the importance of obedience. Unless punishment accomplishes this object it fails in its purpose. If possible, the reason a child said or did the forbidden thing or failed to act in accordance with the parent's wish should be discovered. Then if punishment is necessary it is desirable to make it fit the crime: to make the punishment bear some evident relation to the misdeed. . Spanking is an admission that physical force is the only method of control: acknowledgment of failure.

One could quote at length from the Grove book, too. But this, valuable as its point of view and advice may be, suffers from a poor arrangement of material. If it is intended as a book for immediate consumption, like a novel, it should not hop from one subject to another as it frequently does, without transition or obvious connection; if it is intended as a textbook, it should have subdivisions or paragraph headings to guide the reader in its use.

Dr. Louis Fischer, medical director of the Infantorium and of the Heckscher Foundation and Nursery, New York City, has brought his book "The Health-Care of the Baby" completely up to date in the fifteenth edition. Its especial value, it seems to me, is for the mother, the physician, or the nurse who is dealing with delicate babies or those who present difficult problems of feeding. For the average mother of a normal, healthy baby there is a little too much of the air of the hospital about the book an air of apprehension and symptom hunting. Dr. Smith's book, on the other hand, has an air of wholesomeness, of freedom from worry, so long as we follow the rules. Its emphasis is laid upon the ounce of prevention, whereas Dr. Fischer appears to be concerned with the pound of cure. There is the difference in these two books, I think, that lies between the preventive and the curative aspects of medical practice.

Quite the most scholarly book in the present collection is "Child Hygiene" by Dr. S. Josephine Baker, whose pioneer work in this field is well known the world over. Although intended, with its charts, graphs, tables, and other statistical material, as a textbook for students of the subject, it makes absorbing reading for the lay person interested in child welfare, for

it is well written and never dull. Tracing the history and evolution of child hygiene from the earliest glimmerings in the days of Romulus and Lycurgus, Dr. Baker considers in turn the mother, the infant, the pre-school child and the school child, as well as the organization and administration of child hygiene departments of city, state, or federal government. She is obliged to limit her subject to the United States; nevertheless, she introduces sufficient comparative data to make us alternately ashamed and proud of our accomplishments in this direction if we agree with Mr. Hoover when he says: "The children are the army with which we march to progress."

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Though she lived nine years into the present century, and was witness to the rise of the journalistic short story, Miss Jewett steadfastly portrayed the order of life, the types of character, which she knew best, and which lay within the range of her own peculiarly personal point of view.

The order of life which Miss Jewett wrote about was that of rural New England or, more locally, Maine coastal village folk. Romantic as Wordsworth was romantic, Miss Jewett's stories were purposed, as Wordsworth's poems were, to show "incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature".

In the country, character is more sharply individualized. American men and women who win their bread by farming or fishing or working otherwise in partnership with the inscrutable and quixotic forces of nature have always had a turn for both philosophy and common sense, and a rich, eccentric, colloquial idiom in which to express their sense and sentiment. This was true of the California of Bret Harte, of the Missouri of Mark Twain, as it was also true of the Maine of Sarah Orne Jewett. The fact that the homely speech of a generation which has passed is being forced out by the exigencies of a changing civilization (many expressions such as "summer kitchen" or "smokehouse" are obsolescent because the things themselves

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It is unfair to refer to these stories as dialogue stories; the word smacks too much of literary convention. What Miss Jewett did was to transcribe speech with only the slightest loss in fidelity and reality, playing obliquely the while all the wealth of her own arch humor and ready understanding upon the characters she had created.

The first volume contains Miss Cather's preface and twenty four

makes bold to classify "The Country of the Pointed Firs" with "The Scarlet Letter" and "Huckleberry Finn" as "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life".

The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. Selected by Willa Cather. Houghton Mifflin Company.

E. A. ROBINSON AND SOME OTHERS

By Herbert S. Gorman

DWIN ARLINGTON ROBIN

stories known collectively as "The SON (who must not be blamed at

Country of the Pointed Firs", which first appeared in 1896. The second volume contains eleven notable stories of which the best are perhaps "The Hiltons' Holiday", "The Dulham Ladies", and "A White Heron".

Sarah Orne Jewett occupies a position midway between Rose Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her art and technique, just as her New England - a sunny New England well into its silver age, looking back upon more spacious days-falls between the New England of youthful prime and of economic desuetude. Today, the tradition in which she worked is really more closely approximated by the poetry of Robert Frost than by the fiction of Mrs. Wharton or W. D. Steele. Simple folk ways, and folk themselves, the genre drama of spare, closely girt lives, these were the preoccupation of the delicate lady from South Berwick.

The art of Sarah Orne Jewett is not false because it is so limited. All art is selective, and each artist is free to govern his own selectivity by his own tastes and talents. Miss Jewett's success in the narrow field she cultivated was such that Miss Cather, who shows herself a fine and generous appreciator,

all for this departure from his usual routine) has won another prize. This time it is the Pulitzer award, and the book that induced the judges to their decision was "The Man Who Died Twice". The Pulitzer award would seem to be unlike lightning in that it strikes twice in the same place. This is the second of these prizes that Mr. Robinson has received, winning for him so signal an honor as a place in the same news column with Edna Ferber. And now Mr. Robinson, unabashed by the honors heaped upon him, has produced another book, this time a volume of shorter pieces. "Dionysus in Doubt", it is to be suspected, will grieve some of his readers and delight others. For lovers of poetry it will prove one of those rare treats which Mr. Robinson prepares so quietly and so well. Here are included eighteen sonnets, all of them distinguished and the cream of them. to be placed among the poet's best work. Here, too, is that keen and effective short narrative, "Mortmain", which originally appeared in "Poetry" under the title of "Avenel Grey". Also to be found is the dramatic dialogue, "Genevieve and Alexandra".

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is the voice of an old and noble freedom speaking. It is not the explosion of a hasty and intemperate desire for license but a calm and deeply reasoned sociological examination. Unlike any of Mr. Robinson's other poems, both "Dionysus in Doubt" and "Demos and Dionysus" are grave and semidynamic descents into the crowded marketplace of our turbulent era. Because of this the reasoning in these two poems will find both adherents and opponents. One must turn to the sonnets to leave the vexed battlefield, for in those perfectly constituted, fourteen line structures of magic the unmistakable accents of a great poet are speaking. "The Sheaves", with its impressive ending, an ending that grows on the reader the oftener he peruses this poem, is a fair example of these sonnets that star "Dionysus in Doubt" like unflawed jewels:

Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go
away.

In turning from Mr. Robinson's book to the seven other volumes that wait patiently in their brand new little dusters for consideration, the reviewer is haunted by a dim line from Verlaine

"et tout le reste est littérature". But is it? Of John Drinkwater's "New Poems" one may say with some degree of assurance that it is finely written, that it is impressive, that it is mature, and yet, and yet. It is cold, cold. Mr. Drinkwater writes in a freezing temperature. His precision of technique and logical thought but emphasizes this fact. The hot untempered blood of inspiration is not to be found in his poetry, although one may read that poetry with some degree of pleas

ure.

It would be classical if the beat of life were in it. If Mr. Drinkwater could rise just a bit above that plane that limits him from unquestionably fine poetry, he would be one of the major figures in an England that is less starred with such phoenixes than the casual reader imagines. But Mr. Drinkwater cannot get so far. With perfected technique, with a balanced maturity and an assiduous application, he lacks that one little gift of the gods that might have established him for all time. Not even the lucky accident of "Abraham Lincoln" can save Mr. Drinkwater.

The jump to "The Venture" by Jean Kenyon Mackenzie is made with some relief, for there is a rippling lyrical note about her work that is unforced and charming in itself. "The Venture" is a book of distinct limitations, an unimportant offering, but it is both musical and pleasing. One likes Miss Mackenzie for what she is the much misused words "minor poet" fit her - and because she pretends to offer no more than a series of personal moods and observations. When she writes:

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She was the little wind that falls Before the falling of the rain; She was the one and early star We lose and see and lose again.

She was the pang of the caress That is too brief for our delight; She was the torch another bore And passed us in the night,

we are satisfied because we have expected no more. It is such spontaneous and unlabored poetry as this that creeps into anthologies and achieves an endurance that is not the good fortune of more ambitious labors.

Three more women remain to be considered before the two men who have published books of verse are ventured upon. There is no similarity between these three women. Margaret Tod Ritter, in "Mirrors", shows a precise touch, a melodic sense, and an adequate grasp of the sonnet form. She makes her mistake in writing pseudo-Irish poems about leprecauns, may, and witchcraft. For all the writer knows, Miss Ritter may be Irish, but that does not change the bogus quality of her attempts at Celtic expression. When she is at her best and simplest, however, she catches an authentic atmosphere and is well worth reading. Take "Sonata Appassionata", for instance:

Thou art my silver lyre, my lute of jade,
I touch thee reverently; thy wrist, thy brow,
While from so brief an ecstasy is made
A song of worship. Harp and cello, thou,
O'er which my bow-hand passes with a

sweep

Of minor chords. Beloved, close thine eyes

That I may find what semi-tones of sleep Weigh down the moth-white lids. Thou art the rise

Appassionata of a golden reed

Singing the songs of Pan, thou art the fall
Of drum and organ throbbing out the need
Of human love. Beloved, thou art all
The melody of life. Thou art the string
I shall have broken when I cease to sing.

In spite of all the irritating "thou arts" in this sonnet, in spite of its certain echoing of a thousand and one vanished bards, there is something pleasing about it.

Dorothy Dow is of a different school. "Will-o'-the-Wisp" is almost solely concerned with what for want of a better phrase we may call "sophisticated love poetry". It doesn't bite very hard. Lacking both depth and impressiveness, its sole appeal is implicit in a certain passionate earnestness of expression and a fair lyrical quality. Here are the usual stanzas about love vanishing overnight. The titles are an index to the book. "For a Man", "For Another Man", "The Crillon, 1924", "The Rose Grows Old", "Lost Lady", "Cabaret", "Cabaret", "End of the Play", "Harlot", "Between Last Night and This", "End of Loveliness", "O, Let Death", "How Do I Love You", and so on to the last line where Beauty returns, as usual, on unreluctant feet, this is the measure of Miss Dow's book.

"The Wandering Eros" by Martha Dickinson Bianchi is another book that does not bite. It is archaic for the most part, repetitious in thought, and lacking in any fine elements of inspiration. The author is scholarly and evidently fully aware of the technical demands of verse, but she is far from

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