broad and kindly tolerance, his sympathy with all phases of human suffering and human effort and human hope. It is these things that make the essential charm of Silvestre Bonnard, of Jérôme Coignard, of Monsieur Bergeret. And again, there disappears in this record that indefinable, inexplicable grace which invests all France's work and makes him indisputably one of the greatest writers of his age. No doubt this quality must largely disappear in any translation; but then the question arises why translate? Mr. Pollock's work is well done; but its very excellence serves only to show the hopelessness of the attempt. The last fine touch of perfection, the charm in Quintilian's exquisite phrase apicibus verborum ligata, is lost by the medium

fill old Danaus's cask. And yet if there is some compensation to our hard labor, it is in the approval and sympathy of such readers as you seem to be, and in those friendly words coming from afar and which seem doubly precious coming from a stranger. I am unhappily very little acquainted with English and American literature safe Shakespeare whom I worshipp. I think him the greatest among the great. I shall be happy, dear sir, if ever you come to Paris, if you will call on me. Till then believe me

Very truly yours,

ANATOLE FRANCE.

Anatole France Himself, A Boswellian Record. By his secretary Jean Jacques Brousson. Translated by John Pollock. J. B. Lippincott Company.

TAKING SPORT SERIOUSLY

By T. R. Coward

your true sportsman why he is

reader wonders whether it ever existed. Therefore I say that these pages, entertaining and piquant as many of them are, do not give us the real Anatole France, or give us only a piece of him.

It is possible that readers of THE BOOKMAN and lovers of France may be interested in the following unpublished letter, written over thirty years ago, in response to an outpouring of youthful enthusiasm. The letter was written in English and shows France's admirable command of the language, in spite of little slips, like the pretty Gallicism "safe Shakspeare". The glimpse of France's methods of composition in connection with "Le Lys Rouge" and of his Shakespeare worship is of peculiar interest.

Dear Sir:

You have written to me so kindly that I will not leave your letter unanswered, though just now I have hardly time for anything. I am taken up by a novel which ought to have come out in today's "Revue de Paris" and which will be finished I know not when. We poor authors are condemned to a mysterious and somewhat bewildering task, and often we feel as though we had to

Charles

be? "I like it. I can't resist the competitive urge." And no matter what he says, if he be a true sportsman, it will boil down to this. Wright Gray has compiled an anthology of contemporary short stories, "The Sporting Spirit", which conveniently clinches the point. Seventeen stories make up the book, concerning sports which run alphabetically from automobile racing to track, including even one on mountaineering.

George D. Abraham, in his little book "First Steps to Climbing", proves his argument to us that mountain climbing "is the finest sport in the world and justifiable a thousand times over. Danger to life and limb is its only drawback." But then that is true, more or less, of almost every sport. The advantage of mountain climbing, over all others, apparently, is that nature, because so great an opponent, makes for precisely this reason so much more satisfying a victim of prowess.

A less terrifying manifestation of nature than an Alpine peak, yet one which offers a real satisfaction in the conquering, is the woodland. With the utmost determination we shall refrain from invidious comparisons with Horace Kephart, whose great Work (it simply must be capitalized) remains. standard in spite of many rival works on the subject. Nevertheless, Warren H. Miller, in "Camping Out", has written a book as valuable and stimulating as a good seed catalogue is to an amateur gardener; which is to say, it is full of expert and practicable counsel, except that this is leavened with bits of informal narrative.

"A Handbook of the Outdoors", by Earle Amos Brooks, is a manual for leaders of juvenile camping expeditions, with good ideas on play, instruction, and religious development. As to what constitutes the aristocracy of camperdom, there is some dispute. Semi-permanent group camps are admittedly middle class. But is the lone hiker of the aristocracy, or is it the inhabitant of a palatial lodge? F. E. Brimmer, in "Camps Log Cabins, Lodges and Clubhouses", gives one a chance to see how comfortable one can be during the period of retreat from the city to hunt or fish. He gives valuable chapters on rustic furniture construction and camp layout.

Those who are content to take their competition with nature in the form of an ocean voyage will find in "The Steamer Book" by Edward Valentine Mitchell an enlightening and amusing companion. It is a medley of nautical information conveyed simply and understandably, of sea verse, and of sea tales.

Fred G. Shaw, in "The Science of Fly Fishing for Trout", makes contagious his enthusiasm for the trout as

a personal opponent. This is a thoughtful and scholarly book, well written with the assurance which comes from long experience and certain knowledge. Edward Ringwood Hewitt differs from Mr. Shaw. His enthusiasm is for salmon; he calls his book "Secrets of the Salmon". Being an inventor, he brings his professional methods to bear moving pictures, mathematical formulæ, and statistical tables; with the result that, "I can safely say . . where there are salmon. . . . I can always raise a number each day."

T. E. Jones's "Track and Field" is an excellent handbook by an expert. Full details are given for training and performing in the recognized events, and past records are noted. An interesting item brought to light is that John Paul Jones, the great Cornell runner, ran the fastest final quarter ever run in the mile when he made his intercollegiate record, doing the distance in 582/5 seconds, a truly marvelous performance. It is our belief that if Jones had continued running after college he would have proved the finest miler of all time, not excepting the great Nurmi.

The Sporting Spirit. By Charles Wright Gray. Henry Holt and Company.

First Steps to Climbing. By George D. Abraham. Robert M. McBride and Company.

Camping Out. By Warren H. Miller. D. Appleton and Company.

A Handbook of the Outdoors. By Earle Amos Brooks. George H. Doran Company.

Camps Log Cabins, Lodges and Clubhouses. By F. E. Brimmer. D. Appleton and Company.

The Steamer Book. By Edwin Valentine Mitchell. Dodd, Mead and Company. The Science of Fly Fishing for Trout. By Fred G. Shaw, F.G.S. Charles Scribner's Sons.

Secrets of the Salmon. By Edward Ringwood Hewitt. Charles Scribner's Sons. Track and Field. By T. E. Jones. Charles Scribner's Sons.

T is, as Professor Richard Swann

ontologist write on evolution, because the strongest evidence for organic evolution and against direct creation consists in the fossils and other remains of earlier life that have been found in different strata of the earth. This evidence is prominent in "The Ways of Life" (Harper), which is, however, as complete as it is a lucid statement of what the scientist knows of the origin and history of living things.

When the poet approaches the territory of the medieval, there is apt to be a plenitude of rigorous phrases and pungent words, seldom used expressions and strange spellings. The love of the picturesque is only too often the misstepping stone of the unwary narrator. "The Drums of Yle" by J. U. Nicolson (Covici) is a point in case. It purports to be a story of old England when the not unlustful barons claimed their rights in matters of love. There is considerable movement in the narrative; the picture of the lovely heroine, born to be a queen yet reared as a peasant girl in an alien land, is not without charm. Unfortunately, neither the employment of backward-reading verses, in versimilitude to old English, nor the vigor of the poetic form in which the poet chooses to clothe his tale, makes what simpler treatment could effect-a truly fine poem.

A thick sprinkling of specific instances changes Leon Nelson Flint's "The Conscience of the Newspaper (Appleton) from an extended essay on journalistic ethics to something almost

as spicy as The Brass Check". Mr. Flint has applied the case system to his subject matter. As any reader of that splendid example of the case system, "Advice to the Lovelorn", knows, the problems presented are frequently more interesting than the solutions. The book offers no cure for journalistic evils. The codes of newspaper ethics, a long series of which forms the appendix, sound as impotent as official statements in the face of a crime wave. Mr. Flint merely touches on such important influences on newspaper policies as the dominance of syndicated features, the growth of newspaper chains, and the demand that newspapers be amusing which is making picture book dailies so successful. But the book does show clearly how the "human element" rather than deliberate skullduggery is responsible for many journalistic derelictions. Whether a contemplation of newspaper ethics such as this will help editors elevate their profession is doubtful, but it will help the average reader interpret the news he reads.

Jeanne Bordeux's intimate biography, "Eleonora Duse: The Story of Her Life" (Doran), although inclined to be over-eulogistic, gives none the less a comprehensive, detailed history of the celebrated tragédienne. The author succeeds in completely effacing from her pages all references to her own friendship with the subject of her work, thus achieving an effect of perfect detachment. But Madame Bordeux is unable, in estimating Duse's artistic genius, her high nobility of character, her exalted idealism and her poignant loneliness, to transcend her

own excessive admiration and enthusiasm. Apart from this tendency toward a worshipful and sentimental attitude, the book has authentic value.

When Boni and Liveright printed Alexander Berkman's "The Bolshevik Myth", they insisted that the final chapter be eliminated as a literary anti-climax. So Mr. Berkman proceeded to publish that chapter privately as "The Anti-Climax". It is easy to see why the publishers felt that so theoretical and analytical a chapter harmonized poorly with the matter that was to have preceded it. "The Bolshevik Myth" as now printed is the diary of Alexander Berkman from the time of his deportation from America until he broke with the Bolsheviks. The book is probably the most vivid description of Russia under Leninism we have yet had. It is more objective than Emma Goldman's "Disillusionment" and not so tragically despondent. But without "The AntiClimax" the book would be more significant than the run of anti-Soviet denunciation only from a literary point of view. That last chapter points out how the methods of a conspirators' steering committee, imposed on Soviet forms, have resulted in a new despotism, as yet untempered by assassination. It points out how terrorism, originally used as a weapon of liberty, develops and strengthens an oligarchy of those who wield it. Mr. Berkman's observations and conclusions hold as true of the French Revolutions of '89 and '70 as they do of the Russian revolt.

For the general reader who desires an insight into the difficulties of the immigration inspector, it would be hard to discover a more satisfactory volume than Victor E. Safford's "Im

migration Problems" (Dodd, Mead). Mr. Safford's book is the fruit of years of personal experience; it abounds in reminiscences and anecdotes that lend life and color to the exposition; it is entertaining at the same time as it is authentic, and informative at the same time as it is soberly critical. The author's conclusion will prove of particular interest, for Mr. Safford maintains, among other things, that we must have a Secretary of Immigration if there is ever to be an efficient immigration service; and he believes that such a Secretary can be effective only if we "get back to the unpopular idea of a Government of laws and not of men".

The "gusty music" of Ireland, ranging from Goldsmith to James Stephens, from Congreve to Padraic Colum, has been swept together into one little book

"A Golden Treasury of Irish Verse" (Macmillan). The compiler, Lennox Robinson, has succeeded in his effort to arrange the poems so that, "whereever the book is opened, some connection of thought or mood will be found to link poem to succeeding poem". By this method the reader is borne along on a swelling tide of song that seems, not the singing of many poets, but the voice of the eternal Gaelic heart. This impression is especially strong when we discover that much of the song in this book is preserved from the old Gaelic by the sympathetic modern Irish poet. The stream is thereby enriched by a fountainhead that will never go dry. Dierdre and Sidhe, the leprechauns and the fairy ring - all the deathless symbolism of a race comes alive again in their minstrelsy. Scarcely any poetry in the world is so passionately racial, so deeply rooted in the primal earth. Because Mr. Robinson's collection demonstrates this fact more strikingly

than any other we have seen, and because it comes nearest to our ideal of "pure poetry" in the largest sense, we have no hesitation in recommending the book to all poetry lovers.

The physical wreckage of the Great War has been cleaned up; the machinery of production has been rebuilt; populations ravaged by battle and hardship are again on the increase and yet the plight of the world now is worse than it was in 1914. It is the social fabric of mankind that has not been reconstituted; it is humanity itself that requires reconstruction. This is the well supported thesis which comprises the first part of J. D. Whelpley's "Reconstruction" (Funk and Wagnalls). The second part of the volume might have been called an appendix, did it not make up more than three quarters of the whole. It is full of aimless information on international trade, on emigration and on the nations of Europe page on page of dull reading, facts that are not new nor vital. It is unfortunate that a book which starts out so bravely should end so inconclusively.

Readers interested in the life and work of John Addington Symonds will find in "Out of the Past" (Scribner) by his daughter, Margaret Symonds (Mrs. W. W. Vaughan), an intimately revealing biography of the man told largely in the hitherto unpublished letters of his friends, his family, and himself. Mrs. Vaughan attempts no critical tribute to the well known essays and poetry of her father, the object of the book being to recall him rather in the light of her own memories, as he existed for herself and others, apart from his writing. In this she has been completely successful, if at times a trifle dull.

The verses of Arthur Guiterman are the candy of poetry, with the virtues and faults of sweetmeats. "A Poet's Proverbs" (Dutton) are delicious bits, but it is necessary to warn the unwary that he who essays to consume the entire contents at a sitting will spoil his stomach for them. These "mirthful, sober and fanciful epigrams on the universe" and "certain old Irish proverbs" are rendered in sparkling couplets frequently the heroic couplet that centuries of English poets have found handy when brilliancy of expression rather than depth of emotion was the requisite quality. The poems are arranged subjectively a device which makes the volume an excellent source for the person who has exhausted the pages of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations". Let these two couplets serve as representative examples of some two hundred odd:

The Past's a Book wherein some Truths are found,

But not a Chain by which Men's Feet are Bound.

I threw a Stone in the Turnip Field;
The Pig I hit was the Pig that Squealed.

In 1788 Andrew Kippis, D.D., F.R.S., and S.A., dedicated to the king his narrative of "Captain Cook's Voyages, with an Account of His Life, during the Previous and Intervening Periods". It is a definitive biography, detailing in full, as if it were an expanded log book, the course of Cook's three voyages, and setting forth his discoveries in New Zealand, Australia, the Society Islands, and many other strange lands and seas. Its style is classic, unruffled, stately, scholarly. Though the author omits nothing nor extenuates anything, he is at pains to justify every act of the explorer (as well as to laud the liberality of George III). He even includes a set "eulo