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Some New Books We Have Read

Adventures in Criticism and Reporting

BY THE EDITORS

THE MATHEMATICIAN'S COMPLAINT Those Barren Leaves. By Aldous Huxley. George H. Doran Company.

The self-possession of Aldous Huxley must seem maddening to the ignorant, the sentimental, and the dogmatic. In "Those Barren Leaves" he describes the Italian setting of his story, and the varied creatures who have been assembled there in Mrs. Aldwinkle's villa, with a discouraging knowledge. He analyzes all the affectations and postures and tendernesses of his characters as if he had never himself been susceptible to any such frailty. And as to ideas, reactionary or advanced, he plays among them so lightly and devastatingly that he makes it appear absurd to hold to any solid opinion whatever. What shall the ignorant, the sentimental, or the dogmatic do? Most of them, of course, will never even hear of this book. But any who do may have their revenge if they look behind Mr. Huxley's immense scientific sophistication to see why, if he is so sophisticated, he is so distressed by the meaninglessness of life, and in particular is so touched by the horrid spectacle of death.

The fact of the matter is, he is something of a mathematician at

heart. The logical processes of his own mind have led him to expect in the universe an order, if not a purpose, which he does not find there. In another mind, faith might have supplied the peace which is necessary in such cases. Mr. Huxley is too rigorous a logician to be satisfied with faith. He knows that the stout questioner can muddle every argument regarding the origin or destiny of mankind, providence or immortality, the wisdom of human plans, the testimony of instincts, even the validity of logic. Moreover, biology and chemistry have opened expert eyes to avenues of doubt into which amateur skepticism has hitherto been unable to carry doubters.

The result is a welter which, instead of amusing Mr. Huxley by its comic chaos, sickens him. He demands something better. Lacking it, he mingles the berries of desperation in his brewing. Still, he is a man of this world, so he gathers his characters together and sets them dancing, preposterously, ironically. Though as a disappointed mathematician he complains, as a mathematician, nevertheless, he insists in his book upon preserving a kind of mad order. Bitterness and order make him the amazing novelist that he is. C. V. D.

A MIDDLE MASTER Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness. By George Inness, Jr. The Century

Co.

The hundred years which have elapsed since the birth of George Inness have seen many changes of fashion in painting, and have seen such changes that some of his earlier work now seems thin and remote, as, indeed, it seemed to the later Inness. But the pictures of his maturity do not age or fade. The substantial and lively volume by his son, George Inness, Jr., an artist of already unquestioned fame, throws a good deal of light fame, throws a good deal of light upon the difference between the two Inness periods. In the first, the young painter, for all his independence of opinion and method, had not yet freed himself from the smooth gen

eralizations of the Hudson River school; in the second, he had become so thoroughly the master of his own devices that he could reproduce his impression of a landscape without any alien admixture. Though born in a generation which often lost itself in details, Inness demanded more than details. Though permitted to live into a generation which often lost itself in total effects without much reference to reality, Inness demanded that his total effects be grounded in realities. He thus struck a golden mean which somehow lies beyond the shift of fashion. His landscapes are at once solid and alive. Having made his observations for a picture on the spot, he was then accustomed to paint within four walls, reworking his raw materials with the high hand of an artist who was both scientist and mystic. The result was that bold and faithful beauty which remains Inness's

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North America. By J. Russell Smith. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Mr. Smith expounds the economic resources of North America as Pausanias expounded the monuments and antiquities of Greece. Years of research have gone into this best of treatises upon the bases for human life on the continent from Canada to Panama. The author is enough of a sociologist to relate geography and food supply to the forms of society and government, but he is for the most part content to tell his story by presenting exhaustive materials objectively.

Mammonart. By Upton Sinclair. Published by the Author.

Mr. Sinclair argues as he narrates, with speed and force, and with a singlemindedness which never wavers, no matter how simple or how complicated his theme. In the present instance, he has a complicated theme, which he reduces to a bald simplicity. His thesis is that all art may be ruthlessly divided into that which serves the rich and that which serves the poor. Of course it may. But the distinction is not so important as he claims, because it is artificial. There have been as many kinds of artists, viewed economically, as there have been kinds of ordinary men. They have functioned in

the numerous ways which a great variety of conditions have suggested to them. Truth and beauty are endlessly diverse. When Mr. Sinclair sets his deep and moral gulf between what he considers the only two kinds of artists worth considering, he merely does violence to the facts. After this fashion do the Puritan Methodists divide sheep and goats.

The Loeb Classical Library: Aristophanes. Translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers. 3 vols.; Homer: The Iliad I. Translated by A. T. Murray; Strabo III. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones; Lucretius. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Of the new volumes now added to this impressive series, the Strabo alone represents a continuation of work already begun, and calls for no comment except that the English version is accurate and is at least as interesting as the Greek original. Mr. Murray's translation of the first twelve books of the "Iliad" is in prose. It follows the precise meaning of Homer more closely, doubtless, than any verse rendering could do, but it is not all that heroic prose might be expected to be; it is at times angular and gritty. Mr. Rouse's prose Lucretius is admirable; without all the fire of Munro's famous version, it is also without Munro's mannerisms. As to the Aristophanes, who was to have been translated for the Loeb Library by the late John Williams White, that flaming dramatist has had the good fortune instead to be presented to English readers once more in the brilliant verse of B. B. Rogers, the only Englishman who has ever done Aristophanes justice.

Our Debt to Greece and Rome: Mythology. By Jane Ellen Harrison; Sappho and Her Influence. By David M. Robinson; Platonism and Its Influence. By Albert Edward Taylor; Stoicism and Its Influence. By R. M. Wenley; Architecture. By Alfred Mansfield Brooks; Roman Private Life and Its Survivals. By Walton Brooks McDaniel. Marshall Jones Company.

Nineteen out of the fifty volumes planned for this series have now been published, and the present half dozen exhibit its range and variety. "Roman Private Life" is a systematic handbook; "Platonism" is a lucid exposition; "Stoicism" traces its theme somewhat sketchily down the ages; "Architecture" is a reflective analysis of the spirit back of Greek and Roman building; "Mythology" goes anthropologically back of the Greek gods, in the manner of Frazer and Murray, to the origins of religion in folk-fears and folk-hopes. The "Sappho" invites special attention, being decidedly longer and more abundantly illustrated than any other monograph in the series. Like the others, it has real merit as a bibliography; the tincture of Sappho in European literature is here studied as never before. But the critical portions of the book are often ecstatic and naïve. In a passage which may stand as a locus classicus of absurdity, occurs this unbelievable sentence: "A bad woman as well as a pure woman might love roses, but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field, the dainty anthryse and the clover, as Sappho did." Of all the possible ways to prove that Sappho has been maligned, as she very likely has been, this is the worst way.

The Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics. Selected and Arranged by Lawrence Binyon. The Macmillan Company. Aiming, in a sense, to supplement the famous anthology of Francis T. Palgrave, Mr. Binyon has nevertheless not hesitated to cut across Palgrave's boundaries by going back to the beginning of the Victorian era for his material. The first book of the new collection roughly coincides with Palgrave's Second Series; the second book presents the work of poets who have done their chief work since the death

of Tennyson. Though to this final book numerous objections will be raised by readers of different tastes, it is perhaps sufficient to point out, what Mr. Binyon knows, that any anthology of living writers must always be subject to revision as soon as those living writers have written other poems. In general Mr. Binyon's taste, if somewhat severe and unadventurous, is excellent.

prize-ring. Mr. Woollcott tells a fascinating story with plenty of information, with about the right amount of spirit, and with a great deal too much fatuousness.

The Carolinian. By Raphael Sabatini. Houghton Mifflin Company. The hero is American, the villain is British; they contend for the Carolinabred heroine, and of course the native hero wins her, after a struggle which might have been narrated twenty years ago by the author of "Alice of Old Vincennes" or of any other bestseller of the period. Is this another evidence of the Americanization of that Europe from which Mr. Sabatini springs? Or is it merely evidence that romance is growing international? The Isles of Fear. By Katherine Mayo. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

A first-hand study of the Philippines, by an admirer of American

Processional. By John Howard Law- constabularies. She sees the Philipson. Thomas Seltzer.

The published version of a Theatre Guild play which puts its author among the few rivals of Eugene O'Neill. The method is that of expressionism, and the rhythm is that of jazz; the subject matter and the theme are as native as Mark Twain or chewing-gum.

The Story of Irving Berlin. By Alexander Woollcott. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Irving Berlin is to American music what Shakspere is to the Elizabethan drama, Henry Ford to the automobile industry, and Jack Dempsey to the

pine problem as essentially a conflict between the moneyed class in the islands and the unprivileged class, with the governor-general as the upholder of the unprivileged. The weight of her argument is on the side of General Wood.

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