lived by the clock and was rarely late for an appointment. From those that would waste his precious time he would "softly and silently vanish away" with a charming smile and wave of a cheerful hand. He was wont to shake his head and murmur, "So much to do, the undone vast", yet never thought with Hamlet:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!

His textbook, "The Principles and Practice of Medicine", published in 1892, saw eleven editions by 1912. Of the first edition 23,000 copies were sold. It was published in France, Germany, China, and in Spain.

Osler was a great physician, a greater educator, and a greater friend. He was fortunate in life to have known what he wanted, and to have got it. And he was fortunate, when life ended,

sometimes tactless to an unbelievable degree; he could not and would not suffer fools at all, and he exacted unqualified devotion and freedom to go his own way. He loved practical jokes but he was not at all happy when they were played on him. Yet one of the great charms of Osler was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is thus that he should always be remembered.

The Life of William Osler. By Harvey Cushing. Two volumes. Oxford University Press.

SOUL TRAVELS

By Winifred Katzin

his spirit alive and who has painted a portrait of him that will convey to posterity an adequate and appropriate idea of the kind of man he was.

Eventually there is bound to be another biography of him. I venture to say that it will dwell at far greater length on the first half of his life. Those who knew Osler intimately will be astonished to find scant reference to the interesting Francis family with whom he lived for so many years in Montreal; to Nancy Astor to whom he was legal guardian and who has often shown her capacity to do and say interesting, indeed even startling things; and finally to the playful side of his nature. To make a man into a saint, though he deserves it, does not always do him justice. William Osler had extraordinarily great qualities, his feet were less of clay than those of most men, but he was passionate in his likes and dislikes, he was often indiscreet,

Keyserling arrives back home at last, the happier, it is to be inferred, for a hoard of enriching experiences. He has had an illuminating, though perhaps not precisely a successful, time of it.

Much in the manner of the oriental psychics who can erase at will all consciousness from their own minds' surface in order to receive impressions from their consultants' unimpaired, this quasi-German philosopher has achieved a wholly un-European power of similar receptivity, which invests the chronicle of his adventures with immense authority and interest. The supernormal keenness and range of his vision have enabled him to discern, through her many veils, the features of the secret East. Hindu, Brahmin, Buddhist and Moslem have yielded up to his all-penetrating inspection their quintessential identities, which he has

understood as no Westerner has ever done before.

Unlike most other philosophers whose preoccupations are mainly metaphysical and scientific, Count Keyserling discloses a poet's sensitiveness to the beauties of places and people and other outward manifestations of the hidden beauty which is their source. His diary abounds in splendid descriptions of the jungle and its creatures, subordinate, it is true, to the philosophical meditations which crowd in upon them, but deeply felt and expressed.

Students of the ancient, and hitherto imperfectly interpreted religions of the East, will find here what they must long have sought in vain — a Western soul thoroughly attuned to the spirit and soul of the Orient, and capable of maintaining a perfect unity with both for as long as the purposes of realization and interpretation require. It is as though the very voice of the East were speaking through the medium of a European tongue. There is a passage toward the end of the book in which Count Keyserling sums up his final judgment in the matter of religion:

And now I recognize that the practical superiority of Christianity is the expression of an absolute metaphysical advantage: it embodies, as no other religion does, the spirit of freedom. Man, conditioned by nature, can show himself free only in two ways: by saying yes inwardly to all events, and by taking the initiative in directing them. If the Indians, the profoundest of all thinkers, fail in practical life, this is due to the fact that they do not know how to impress their free being upon appearance. Instead of taking up their cross, they think of its insubstantiality, which releases them just as little as the denial of an undesirable relationship removes the relation. . . . We know nothing like as much as they do; but the teaching of Christ induces us to live unconsciously accordingly to their knowledge. Thus we are more destined to action than they are. We are the hands of God. These hands, as hands, are blind, and their blindness has caused much mischief. But if one day they are guided by the spirit of recognition, it is they who will, in so far as it

is possible at all, succeed in founding the kingdom of heaven upon earth.

With chameleon-like rapidity, and with far greater than chameleon-like success, Count Keyserling changes himself to fit in with his ever shifting background. Once quit of the East, he instantly recovers a Western equilibrium and establishes anew within his soul and mind the Western attitude he relinquished upon setting foot on Indian soil. He arrives in America and proceeds to analyze the nature of this amazing country and the amazing people who have made it. Perhaps it is because his field of observation is now less remote that we begin to detect a certain parti pris in his judgments, as when, in an early chapter of his Diary, he uttered rather foolish commonplaces about the Englishman. Or it may be that he really does see the Orient more truthfully and more profoundly, on account of some spiritual affinity with it of which he is himself but faintly aware. At any rate, the interest of his book takes a sharp decline after the sixtieth chapter.

He is home for some days before he asks himself the question which to answer is to resolve the greatest problem of his life: Has his long journey brought him closer to a knowledge of himself, or is he as far away from that as ever? He believes he is nearer, but not yet near enough. And it is Bach who answers the question for him, as his soul, a little weary of its protracted explorations, finds solace in a fugue. "If only I could think as this man composed", he sighs; "if my recognition could mirror such depth as his music does, then I would have reached my goal."

Browning, did Count Keyserling but remember, could have told him long ago that one act of creation can be interpreted only in terms of another,

that, in fact, you can't get at the heart of mystery with a pick ax, however skilfully you may wield it

The rest may reason and welcome,
'Tis we musicians Know.

The literary quality of the book is ruined in this pseudo-English version, owing to the restrictions placed upon the translator by the author himself. His incredible letter, directing how the work should be done, is quoted in the preface, and is very necessary justification for the grotesque construction of the sentences and the purely German character of the language throughout. It is unforgivable.

The publishers are to be congratulated upon an admirable piece of bookmaking.

The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. By Count Hermann Keyserling. Translated by J. Holroyd Reece. Two volumes. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

HERE AND THERE

By Louis Untermeyer

HE title is not intended as a reviewer's shrug at being confronted with six wholly unrelated volumes, but to indicate the geographical even more than the technical disparity in their authors. Mrs. Tietjens is the only local representative, and patriotism as well as place aux dames leads me to turn first to her. But it is a dubious courtesy. All the gallantry in the world. cannot keep me from feeling that "Profiles from Home" is an exceedingly inept offering. It is poor enough on its own account; coming from Mrs. Tietjens it is disheartening. Mrs. Tietjens's poetry, it appears, has come down a steady series of descending levels. "Profiles from China" (1917), her first

book, remains her best. "Body and Raiment", published two years later, is far less interesting, the bright moments being the very early ones. In "Profiles from Home" the poet strikes a plane so low as to seem incredible. She attempts, by sketches in free verse, to do for these States what her first volume did for China. But the results are the very opposite; the conceptions are feeble, the execution less than inadequate. This "etching" from Chicago is typical:

Once in a while there is a gleam of poetic color, once in a while a sardonic incision. But for the greater part, the commentary is as flat as the satire is superficial. "Now at last", trumpets the jacket, "Mrs. Tietjens gives us the book for which her admirers have long been waiting." Out of respect for the author of "Profiles from China", I murmur "God forbid!"

Of the remaining five volumes, four hail from England. The least pretentious is Laurence Binyon's booklet: a charming two colored limited edition. of nine poems from the Japanese. Mr. Binyon commits the error of adding rhymes to his "adaptations", and the

result is less Japanese than Georgian. For example, a fragment supposed to be by "Gotokudaiji no Sadaijin" is rendered thus:

Thrilled, I turned my gaze,
Where a sharp, sweet tone
Quivered in the cuckoo's earliest cry
Lo, the morning moon alone

Beams her silence from the empty sky.

It needs no Amy Lowell or Arthur Waley to tell us that this is as far from the land of the chrysanthemum as Piccadilly. If Mr. Binyon's other work did not convince me he was incapable of anything so low, I would say that here the white haired singer was pulling both of the reader's legs.

It is with the utmost modesty that the sensitive critic of "Attitudes" makes his début as a poet. Even the paper jacket (or dust cover, as Mr. Muir's compatriots call it) is an appropriate dove grey. At first one is disapAt first one is disappointed. One looks and looks in vain for that mixture of audacious gaiety and volatile illumination which makes Muir's essays so brilliant and distinctive. But it is not long before the reader discovers other qualities which amply compensate for the lack of the familiar ones. There is an unusual if unobtrusive power of vision in these "First Poems". The author is particularly successful in summoning and holding the dream atmosphere: the "Ballad of Eternal Life", in spite of its faint overtones of Hofmannsthal, is an almost freezing evocation of that nebulous state between consciousness and nightmare. Almost as arresting is the Scotch paraphrase, the "Ballad of a Flood", a lively pendant to Irwin Russell's Negro variation on the same theme. And, among the shorter poems, "Childhood", "Grass", and "The Enchanted Prince" attain something of the clarity which philosophic poetry strives for but so seldom attains.

Whatever Mr. Muir chooses to be in future, such performances, and particularly the "Ballad of Eternal Life", prove him now no mere poetic personality but succinctly a poet.

Two Sitwells next. Neither of them is The Sitwell. That title must be reserved for Edith Sitwell, the originator of one of the most piquant idioms in contemporary poetry. Of the two brothers, Osbert (author of "Triple Fugue") is the more lavish, Sacheverell is the more particular. Osbert is concerned with the ironies of life; Sacheverell is rooted in the subtleties of art. One likes Osbert better for what he feels; one cares more for the way Sacheverell expresses his slighter but finer grained æstheticisms. Together, they furnish not so much a contrast as a complement; against Osbert's savage analyses of Mrs. Freudenthal and her auction bridge world (modeled after T. S. Eliot) Sacheverell pits the cool elegance of the Venus of Bolsover Castle; to the angry denunciations in the section entitled "Sing Praises" (from "Out of the Flame") the youngest Sitwell adds the metaphysical delicacies of "Doctor Donne and Gargantua". To get the full flavor of either volume the reader should have both.

The last of this group, in spite of the American production of one of his plays, is even more foreign to these states. I hope I shall not be accused of a plot to destroy the National Security League when I state that the best of these six poets is both a German and a Communist. "The Swallow-Book" is a translation of Ernst Toller's most recent work "Das Schwalbenbuch", a sequence of free verse soliloquies occasioned by the nesting of two swallows in his cell, during the young poet's five year incarceration in the fortress of Niederschoenenfeld. As a creative

work the little book is alternately poignant, vindictive, lyrical, strepitant, resigned, and altogether moving. As a translation, it is only fair. Ashley Dukes is a sympathetic but not an inspired adapter. His English is full of inversions not present in the original; he seems to prefer the worn literary word to the living one. For example, Mr. Dukes translates "dressiert" as "entamed", whereas "trained" is not only a simpler but a more exact rendering; "Verlassenheit" might, as Mr. Dukes puts it, be translated as "forsakenness", but the more direct as well as the more fluent equivalent would be "abandonment"; nor is there any reason for making the natural sentence "Nirgends blueht das Wunder" into so stilted a phrase as "Nowhere blossoms Miracle". For the rich quality of Toller's emotion not less than his language, the reader will have to forsake a few of his prejudices and read the author of "Masse Mensch" in his own tongue.

his quick surprises of wit, his sudden and astonishing candor, his persistent sensuality, but he is not all there. It reminds one of the Goncourts' portrayal of Sainte-Beuve in their Journal, a distasteful though indispensable record of a side of the man, but wofully inadequate and incomplete. And, as Jules Lemaître said of this record of the Goncourts, one is forced to the conclusion that the recorder did not understand.

The sexual side of France's diversified life, the side which undoubtedly makes much of the attraction of his books, is amply developed in these pages, even though the translator is forced to dispense with some of the more highly colored chapters of the original. Again one thinks of the sordid old age of Sainte-Beuve; and his remark about the "burden of sadness that afflicts those who have abused the sources of life" finds its striking parallel in the cry of France when Brousson holds him up as the model of a happy life: "Enough, enough! Ah, if you could read in my soul, you would be terrified.' He takes my hands in his, and his are trembling and feverish. He looks me in the eyes. His are full of tears. His face is haggard. He sighs: "There is not in all the universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me happy. I have never been happy for one day, not for a single hour.""

Again, we see fully France's skepticism, his utter disbelief in any God, in any future, in a spiritual ideal of any kind whatsoever. Or, in another field, we get most interesting glimpses of his methods of composition and literary work.

What we do not get, or get most meagrely, is what some of us have loved most in all France's books. We do not get his infinite tenderness, his