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The Outlook for

heart is through his stomach, then no pats on the shoulder will satisfy "an undernourished, underpaid, mistreated worker." Better wages, better housing better living conditions, and a squarer economic deal are his panaceas. The Greeks and Lithuanians have faith in education. The former would have more classes in English, history, and civics, the last "a whole chain of lectures about this country in the immigrant's tongue! These gentlemen differ from the "quack ish" Americanizers only in that they would exclude from this work all those "who do not know my people" or "are ignorant of our 'colonies."" M. S. Dunin speaks the mind of the majority when he pleads for "equality of race, color, and religion as the very foundation of any true program of Americaniza tion." Given that, he adds, "natural evolution" will do the rest.

September 21, 1927

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Good Talk

A Review by R. D. TOWNSEND

T

HE more formidable the title of a book, the more does the reader rejoice if he finds in it wit, plain speaking, and the touch of a common humanity. An "essay" in the dictionary definition is something of a short and discursive disquisition. Mr. Leonard Woolf's essays' are certainly short; they may be discursive in that they are not set and formal; disquisitions they positively are not. For straight-away enjoyment these essays, one may perhaps venture to remark, are more profitable than Mrs. Leonard Woolf's extremely able and subtle but not particularly easy-reading novel "To the Lighthouse."

These twoscore papers have not appeared singly in this country but have been printed in the London "Nation and Athenaeum" (of which Mr. Woolf is literary editor) and in the "New Statesman." That again, like the book's title, is a guarantee of eminent literary respectability, but not of vivacity and humor. But here is an essayist who is not afraid to be familiar in tone, to put to the front little personal touches as to men discussed, to forget that he is writing an "essay," in short to write as he might talk in good company. Take, for instance, this little picture of old Ben Jonson.

"If I had found myself walking with Mr. Pope in his garden across the river at Twickenham, or sitting with Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell and Mr. Gibbon at the Club, or drinking wine with Mr. Hickey after dinner, I should have felt thoroughly ill at ease. The conversation, no doubt, would have been amusing and delightful, and I should have known that I had fallen into a civilized society, but I am quite sure that I should not have known what in the world to say to Mr. Pope, Dr. Johnson, or even to Mr. Gibbon; and Mr. Hickey in the flesh would have been unbearable. But Ben Jonson-if Ben Jonson strolled into my room to-night and sprawled his enormous body in my easy chair, and talked, as he did at Hawthornden, of men and books, and told his stories and

'Essays on Literature, History, Politics, etc. By Leonard Woolf. Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York. $2.50.

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his scandal about Queen Elizabeth, we
should have an extraordinarily comfort-
able and amusing evening together, for
we should be looking at the world and at
life from the same angle.”

Jumping a couple of centuries and
more, Mr. Woolf pays his respects to
Robert Louis Stevenson as an essayist,
and while there may be dissent with
what he says not so much now as there
would have been twenty years ago-it
will be admitted that he speaks point-
edly as well as boldly. He asserts that
the worst thing about Stevenson is his
literary style, and in reply to one who
declared that "it is as an essayist that
Stevenson will probable live," Mr. Woolf
calmly remarks. “As an essayist Steven-
son is already dead, and I do not believe
that any one will ever be able to resur-
rect him in the essay. The reason is
that in that form of writing a false liter-
ary style tells most fatally against a
writer, particularly when,
as with
Stevenson, he has nothing original to
say." Mr. Woolf readily admits that
"Treasure Island," "Kidnapped," and
"The Master of Ballantrae" are good
stories but only because Stevenson for-
gets his style and becomes absorbed in
the tale. Just how he would place
"Markheim" and "Prince Otto," he
doesn't say. If Stevenson had a style,
it is certainly in evidence in those stories
-and in "The Master of Ballantrae"
also.

We may turn for a third example of The Pratt Teachers Agency

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Mr. Woolf's off-hand, pointed treatment
of men from literature to international
politics. He entitles his discussion of
the denial by all nations of any guilt
"Please, Sir; it was the other Fellow,"
and asserts that "From 1900 to 1914 the
policy of all European statesmen may
be summed up, not in the phrase 'Give
us peace in our time, O Lord,' but 'Give
us peace on our terms, O Lord.'"
There is plenty in this paper to provoke
dissent, but at least no one will go to
sleep over it.

The fact is that wherever one opens
this collection of essays and reads a few
pages at a venture he is almost sure to
find something lively in expression, or
picturesque in setting, or rich in knowl-
edge of human nature.

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Fiction

The

THEY ALSO SERVE. By Peter B. Kyne. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York.

$2.

In the impressive new war memorial which crowns the crest of the Castle rock in Edinburgh, not only men and women are commemorated in sculpture and inscription, but the "humble beasts" that also served, from war horses and white mice to camels and canaries. "They Also Serve," Peter B. Kyne's new novel, has for its leading character Professor. a wise and gallant artillery horse of the Great War; moreover, and less happily, the tale is supposedly related by its equine hero. It is not done badly; the adventures and experiences of Professor, his friend Tip, the army mule, and the other animals concerned are interesting, though sometimes harrowing; there is sufficient human interest, even love interest besides; and Mr. Kyne was himself a battery commander in the A. E. F., and knows whereof he speaks. But he is not one of those rare authors-rare in spite of the increasing number who try and do not wholly fail-who is able seemingly to view life from an animal's standpoint and talk about it as an animal would if it could. Professor and his share in the war game interest us; but compared with the story, so infinitely less thrilling in its subject, of a certain game of polo and a pony called The Maltese Cat the interest aroused is pale indeed. There is psychology andwell, of course, genius--in the Kipling tale; Mr. Kyne's "They Also Serve" is a straight and spirited war story, but we should like it better told in his own person. It is fair to add that the short story offers a more manageable medium than a full-length novel for a dumb beast to talk in, at least for adults. By children the conversation of any creature, mouse or mastodon, at any length is accepted quite naturally; for grown folk it remains a literary tour-deforce and tends to become wearisome if prolonged.

GOD GOT ONE VOTE. By Frederick Hazlitt Brennan. Simon & Schuster, New York. $2.50.

We wish we could believe that ignorant and coarse political bosses, if we must have them, were oftener like Mr. Brennan's Patrick Van Hoos, who to balance his deficiencies in education and delicacy possessed not only the virtues usually conceded to a "square" boss in real life-kindliness toward neighbors and followers, loyalty to political pals, and observance of pledgesbut developed a finer ambition to make the power he delighted in tell finally for good, even if he must forfeit it as a consequence. Patrick's relations with his family and friends, enemies and henchmen, the Klan and prohibition, are intricate and interesting; he wins our sympathies as we read, but we more than suspect afterwards that his creator has bamboozled us into condoning a career essentially one of civic menace on the ground of general good intentions and a fine gesture at the close.

VANISHING MEN. By G. McLeod Winsor. William Morrow & Co., New York. $2. First-rate mystery story of a series of strange disappearances and other unexplainable events. The author shows that in capable hands the hackneyed puzzle as to the identity of the criminal is not the first or most interesting theme in such a novel. The story is told by a pompous country gentleman, Sir Henry Fordyce, with occasional diversions as to the activities of Scotland Yard. The chapters about the detectives, their work, and the legal aspects of the case are especially well done. The explanation of the mystery hinges on an idea which was used many years ago in a story by Frank R. Stockton. He used it lightly, for humorous effect; Mr. Winsor uses it seriously and, in some

places, a little heavily. Yet throughout the novel there is the growing sense of danger, of helplessness in the presence of a malicious criminal mind, which is the oftensought but seldom achieved atmosphere in this kind of tale. We cordially recommend "Vanishing Men."

ANNABEL AT SEA. By Samuel

Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. "Annabel in Search of a Husband" this might be called. With hardly any money, but lots of clothes she starts on one of the round-the-world tourist trips, resolved to grab a husband at all costs. Of course she finds her husband only after she gets back to New York, but at that she did once see him in the course of her travels. Mr. Merwin produces a fine list of possible mates for Annabel, including a Japanese who commits suicide and a genuine hall-marked ex-Emperor of China. As each comes upon the scene an exciting episode develops. Light as air, but amusing!

COASTER-CAPTAIN. By James B. Connolly. Macy-Masius, New York. $2. Perhaps it is worth while to stand the moral stench of the sailors' boarding-house kept by a villainous dope-fiend, murderer, and wife-torturer in order to get the contrast afforded by the true-hearted captain and his stanch barkeeper friend. Mr. Connolly has written some of the best short sea stories in literature. This novel will not stand comparison with those tales, but it has an original kind of wreck experience at the end.

Merwin. $2.

GOD AND THE GROCERYMAN.

By Harold Bell Wright. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $2.

Mr. Wright revives that Dan Matthews who in one of his earlier books was turned out of the ministry for heresy, and with his help appeals to the grocerymen and other laymen to get together and make a living religion outside the formal lines. Bruce Barton treats the same theme much less emotionally in "The Church Nobody Knows," a chapter of his new book "What Can a Man Believe?" (BobbsMerrill.)

Biography

JOHN SARGENT. Charles

By the Hon. Evan Charteris, Scribner's Sons, New York.

K.C.

$6. To write the life of an author is often a severe task, and it is no less difficult to write about an artist. Sargent had his many friends, who warmly loved him; his acquaintances with famous folk whom he painted; and there were his travels. But his life was almost without episodes for the biographer. He was intensely preoccupied with his art; except with his brush he said but little to reveal himself; and he never married. The author has done as well as anybody could have done. There are many excellent illustrations of Sargent's portraits, and others of his landscape paintings. But not, we regret, the group of Dr. Osler and the professors at Johns Hopkins.

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The Outlook for Archeology, History and Scenery," should fairly warn off the two types of travelreaders to whom his book might prove a disappointment: the kind, that is, who care only for light chit-chat about trifling incidents and indiscriminately lively descriptions of anything from a cathedral to a cowyard, and that other and more worthy sort whose interest lies chiefly in character and personality-the author's and that of the people he encounters, aliens or fellowtravelers. Mr. Williams writes agreeably. from fresh experience and abundant knowledge, but he is concerned with neither graces of style, studies of character, nor calculated anecdotic enlivenment. His book is not heavy, but his task has been to set forth faithfully and directly the beauty, interest, and association of some of the less-known towns, castles, bridges, peaks, gorges, and valleys of a country he loves and appreciates to the full; it is indeed ancestrally his own. This task he has performed thoroughly and well. The volume he has produced is a mine of riches, of reference and reminder for those fortunate enough to have visited already the provinces of which it treats, of allurement. information, and pleasure to those who have not. By "Undiscovered France," he does not refer only to picturesque, quain' forgotten places; many of those included are historically, artistically, or scenically famous, but situated off the usual tourist routes. A cause for gratefulness is the providing of a good index, bibliography, and map, and there are two hundred excellently chosen illustrations from photographs.

Art

FLORENCE. By Camile Manclair.

Translated

by Cicely Bingor. Houghton Mifflin Com pany, Boston. $5.

The author is well known among French students of art. He gives us here a clear account of the marvelous expansion of Florence as a center of Italian art, and incidentally a sketch of its political and social development, which was a large integral part of that of Italy. This is one of those volumes, now happily multiplying, which every visitor to Europe will later thor oughly enjoy having in his home library t recall and explain what he has seen. photographs used for illustration wholly admirable.

The art

Miscellaneous

GRAVEYARD HUMOUR AND ET
H.
Compiled by W.
Beable. TI
New York

Y. Crowell Company,

EPITAPHS.
LOGY.
Thomas
$1.75.

These epitaphs are serious, pathetic meritorious, quaint, or absurd. Nearly al of the hundreds included are from English graveyards, and the town or village church is usually mentioned, which give authenticity. There is no index-it wou be hard to index them-and it is therefor hard to find any particular epitaph. Th book, however, is for casual reading an enjoyment, not for any serious purpose. attributes to the churchyard at Pewse Wilts, this famous one:

Here lies the Body of
Lady O'Looney.

Great niece of Burke commonly Called the Sublime. She was Bland, Passionate, and deeply Religious also she painted in water colours and sent several pictures

to the exhibition. She was first cousin

to Lady Jones

and of such

is the Kingdom of Heaven.

This epitaph and some others are of type of humor which occurs, or is said occur, in various places. In Sparta, Ca fornia, according to this book, was th

September 21, 1927

gravestone of a man, who had been shot by a "pistill" of the old-fashioned kind, "with a brass barrel and of such is the kingdom of Heaven." How did that jest travel so far? Or is one of the epitaphs fanciful? One of the best of them all does not seem to appear in Mr. Beable's collection, although its type is represented therein. We will quote (from Edward Lear's "Nonsense Book," where it is given in quotation marks, as if Lear had not written it himself) this:

Beneath these high Cathedral stairs
Lie the remains of Susan Pares.

Her name was Wiggs, it was not Pares,
But Pares was put to rhyme with stairs.

Notes on New Books

A GUIDE TO THINKING. By Olin Temple, Professor of Logic, University of Kansas, and Anna McCracken, Instructor in Logic, University of Kansas. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.

A book for beginners in the study of logic. The chapter on the pathology of thinking is especially good..

ENGLISH SYNONYMS EXPLAINED IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER, WITH COPIOUS ILLUSTRATIONS AND EXAMPLES DRAWN FROM THE BEST WRITERS. By George Crabb, A.M. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. $2.50.

That useful and widely known book, "Crabb's Synonyms," in a new editionthe eleventh.

THE EVIL RELIGION DOES. By Morrison I. Swift. The Liberty Press, Boston. $2.

Mr. Swift believes that the Jews are a great menace to America. Also the Roman Catholics. Also the Protestant Christians. Also the Christian Scientists. From which It would appear that he plays no favorites.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. An Episodical History. By Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $6.

New edition of a book first published (as "Cambridge and Its Story") in 1912. Chapters on the earliest days; on Erasmus and his times; and on the later famous men of the University: Milton, Newton, Gray, Wordsworth, and Tennyson-their college friends and teachers and their influence. Handsomely illustrated in color and half

one.

THE JOY RIDE. By John G. Brandon. Lincoln MacVeagh. The Dial Press, New York. $2. A rollicking mystery story, modern in its setting and characters. No pictures, but plenty of conversations.

EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1789-1914). By A. J. Grant, Professor of History in the University of Leeds, and Harold Temperley, Reader in Modern History in the University of Cambridge. Longmans, Green & Co., New York. $4.

Another history of the last hundred years in Europe. This one is by two English college teachers, and it ends with the outbreak of the Great War. Index and naps.

CHE MAKING OF THE UNITED STATES. By R. O. Hughes. Allyn & Bacon, Boston. $2. An informal, lively, well illustrated school history. Many suggestions for readng and debates.

Books Received

By

THE HEALING OF RODOLPHE GRIVEL. Fabre d'Olivet. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

HE NEW PHYSICAL EDUCATION. By Thomas Denison Wood and Rosalind Frances Cassidy. The Macmillan Company, New York.

WHAT IS LEFT OF THE APOSTLES' CREED? By Loren M. Edwards. The Abingdon Press, New York. $1.

A TROISIEME REPUBLIQUE, By Raymond Reconly. Librairie Hachette, Paris.

HE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALISM. By Albert C. Knudson. The Abingdon Press, New York. $3.50.

EACHING THE SOCIAL STUDIES. By Edgar Dawson. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.40.

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Fascinating Africa, mysterious Egypt, the Holy Land, beautiful Madeira, gay Seville, Granada with its Alhambra, mighty Gibraltar, ancient Cadiz, Algiers, Biskra, Timgad, Tunis, Malta, Dardanelles, Constantinople, Bosphorus, Athens, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Messina, Taormina, Syracuse, Palermo, Monte Carlo, France, England-the glorious cruise of the palatial Cunarder "Scythia," will take you to all of these wonderful places, and many others. We have exclusively chartered this magnificent steamer, with membership limited to 390 guests-half capacity.

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T.

A. D. JONES, in his own words, was • born a high-grade papermaker, became a low-grade shipbuilder, and is now a wholesaler of coal in private life. He began playing football when a small boy and played at both Phillips Exeter and Yale where he was educated. He was an assistant coach at Yale in 1908, then coach at Syracuse University for two years, and then coach at Phillips Exeter, after which he returned to Yale as head coach for a year. The aforesaid shipbuilding then claimed his time for some years, but he came back to Yale once more as head coach in 1920 and has been there ever since.

98

During his eight seasons as head coach, Yale has won from both Princeton and Harvard three years, lost to both two years, and three years either beaten or tied one of the great rivals, and lost to the other.

Salesmen of the King

(Continued from page 87)

tions," declared Belgium's king in his welcoming address to the Rotarians, "can be fostered by friendliness in international trade." And that note ran all through the week-long sessions of these peace-preferring tradesmen from many parts of the world.

Stockholm and Ostend, this year, have re-affirmed the declaration for a warless world that made the closing session of the international advertising convention in London in 1924 a unanimous and impressive gesture of universal and permanent good will between civilized Powers.

TRADE has a long way to go before it

will to peace on the part of those who are expected to produce the sinews of war is tremendously significant.

Ambitious diplomacy and intrigue may thrive on hatred, but trade is imbued with the practical advantage of friendship. Why be in a sweat to quarrel with one's best customers?

Would it not be an intriguing development if it should fall to a business cycle to give to a war-weary world a consummation unrealized by religion, statecraft, art, or literature-perpetual peace on earth?

The stone which aristocracy once rejected becoming the very head of the corner of national recovery and international comity!

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