Marching On, by James Boyd. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1927. 12mo. vii+ 424 pp. $2.50.

IT is no coincidence that up to the present there have been so few good novels written about the Civil War. Histories, memoirs, and military studies we have had a plenty, but few novels, and none, certainly, so good as Marching On by James Boyd. Clearly it took years for rancor to subside, for wounded memories to heal, and in the interval those of the immediate generations, in the words of General Lee, 'felt no desire to revive any recollections of those events.' But the sixty-six years since Sumter are, as it were, a telescope permitting us to see that far time with understanding and detachment. By focusing the glass on his home country, by his striking interpretation of history and reminiscence, Mr. Boyd, a Southerner, has brought to light a novel as free from animosity as it is full of character and movement.

It is the democratic fashion to-day to write histories of the peoples of selected epochs, distinguishing the rôle of the common man from that of the politicians, warriors, and merchants

the leaders who influenced his career. This perspective appeals to Mr. Boyd: he chose it for his first novel, Drums, and he employs it again to better effect in Marching On. The pictures of the Old South which occupy the first half of the book are seen through the eyes of a farmer boy; the campaigns of the war are those experienced by a buck private. This perspective, for all its colloquial humbleness, gives us a far livelier sense of participation than if we had been closeted with fictitious cabinets and commanders.

The story opens in the Cape Fear country of southern North Carolina, with young James Fraser, son of an impecunious Scotch farmer, working at his chores, striving against poverty (his family own no slaves), and watching with shy,, envious glances the glamorous life that flows about the big plantation of Colonel Prevost, with whose only daughter James has presumed to fall in love. The situation is too trying to be borne, and in a fit of pride James leaves home for Wilmington, the port, where in the railroad shops he serves an apprenticeship. As leisurely as a 'Local' the narrative runs on, pausing frequently to allow the entry of new characters whose refreshing qualities compensate the reader for his impatience. While this slow passage is disproportionate, it does succeed in making one aware of the growing James and of the complexity of his love affair, which without some extraordinary reversal of circumstance

must be hopeless. Fortunately for him the war breaks out, and he enlists, not to defend Slavery, not to aim a blow at the Union, but, like the rank and file of the South, 'because it seemed a fine thing to chase the Yankees.'

In the account of James's service with the Army of Northern Virginia the narrative reaches a level unsurpassed in our fiction. The dazed actuality of the fighting, the deaths, the insane entombment in the prison camp these flashlights are made memorable by the personalities involved, men whose characters appeal most strongly under duress. From this passage comes the title, Marching On, for James's regiment, a part of Stonewall Jackson's command, marched and fought and marched and fought through a tormenting eternity, familiar to those who took part in the Allied advance of 1918. Humor is not missing: wry as the army rations, it is revealed in a score of scenes the Frasers' visit to the rookies' camp; old Clubby Jordan, their Colonel, who took his horsehair chair to war; the talks of love when the men rolled up in their blankets. Even more searching is the observation of James's mental experience: how, as the war wears on, contempt for the Yankees changes slowly to respect, and thence to a loathing for 'the whole fool business,' until he is shed of all hatred.

In the later chapters one marks the symbolic dissolution of the Old South; the wreck of the plantations, the extinction of 'family,' the flight of the slaves, all traceable to the advancing Yankees, are final episodes in the passing tragedy. Here if anywhere recrimination might appear. But Mr. Boyd keeps to his irenic purpose. Thus James Fraser, a paroled prisoner, infuriated by the invaders' destruction, comes upon three Yankees who have escaped from Libby Prison, from the very hell he had suffered in the North. Rage gives way to pity and, sending them toward the Union lines with food from his own pocket, James goes home in peace. By virtue of such touches as these, the novel becomes a tribute not only to the South, not only to local, but to national, greatness.

EDWARD WEEKS

Mother India, by Katherine Mayo. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1927. 8vo. xvi+421 pp. Illus. $3.75.

MISS MAYO went to India 'to see what a volunteer, unsubsidized, uncommitted, and unattached, could observe of common things in daily life. Leaving untouched the realm of religion, of politics, and of the arts,' she confined her 'inquiry

to such workaday ground as public health and its contributing factors.' Many journeys she made up and down and across' India; visited sittings of all-India and provincial legislatures, municipal boards and village councils, also agricultural stations, cattle farms, animal asylums, schools of all sorts, common bazaars, rich homes, poor homes, and many hospitals; talked with Indian and English officials, doctors, nurses, health officers, educators, peasants, untouchables, princes, politicians, religious leaders. "The frankness of their talk'-'this excellent Indian frankness' enormously helped her investigations, and her facts are facts. The incubus of the caste system Brahmin domination and the reduction of sixty million Indians to a subhuman status and literal 'untouchability'; the political disunity and narrow communal rivalry and selfishness which continually obstruct the attainment of Swaraj - home rule; the almost universal illiteracy and ignorance of hygiene, the often barbarous therapeutics, the appalling insanitation, the regularity of seasonal epidemics, the prevalence of venereal disease, the heavy mortality; the subjugation of women, and the atrocities of child marriage, which requires girls to be married before they are twelve, even though the bridegroom be seventy, and ends not uncommonly in the intra-marital ravishing of little girls of seven and eight, in cripplings, paralysis, insanity, and agonized deaths; the almost incredible infant mortality, and all too credible death rate of child mothers and purdah women; the suffering and vice commonly following on enforced widowhood in the higher castes; the shocking temple prostitution of devadasis and muralis; the sexual extravagance, premature impotence and old age; the sickening cruelty to animals, not only in the passive cruelty of neglect and starvation, but in the active torture of the phuka practised upon cows, the prodding of the testicles of draft animals, the brutal disjointing of the tails of draft bullocks, their merciless beating and overloading, the skinning alive of goats, the savage harrying and killing of sacrificial buffaloes; the resistance of the masses to change, the indifference of many of the intelligentsia and their complete satisfaction with talk in the place of constructive, corrective work all, all these things to anyone who has lived long in India and in close contact with Indian life are an old story, and of none of them except of sexual extravagance has Miss Mayo said as harsh things as have Indian reformers themselves, from Raja Ram Mohan Roy down to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The late Pandita Ramabai once wrote a book on the sufferings and wrongs of Indian women and girls, so awful that it could not even be published.

Yes, an old story, a true story, and increasingly disturbing. The night after I had read Mother India I could scarcely sleep for remembering sufferings I had seen in India. And yet this Mother India is not the mother her children love. To us she is more than her sins: we know

her sweetness. America-visiting swamis will not love Miss Mayo, but she has nothing to fear from those who, all over India, are working to free their great mother from her bondage. Truth cannot hurt greatness, and Katherine Mayo hath wrought a good work.'

MARY L. B. FULLER

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1927. 12mo. viii+302 pp. $2.50.

To the Lighthouse will naturally, being the work of Mrs. Woolf, bitterly exasperate readers who desire that a novel should 'get somewhere,' and proportionately please those who enjoy looking at temperaments skillfully and wittily portrayed in their attractions and recoils, their unsatisfied wonderings and their moments of insight. Mrs. Woolf's style is as seriously marred as in her earlier work by constructions incredibly slipshod; yet it conveys the sense of beauty with a power that cannot be analyzed.

The scene of the action - and 'action' must of course be interpreted in the most liberal sense is laid in the Hebrides. The Lighthouse, which can be seen from the home of the Ramsay family, may seem at first merely a peg on which the psychological subtleties and the wit of the novel are hung; later it is perceived to be something more -a symbol, if one likes, or merely one of those occasional inanimate things that lay so potent a touch on the spirit. Take it as one will, it dominates the book pictorially as the personality of Mrs. Ramsay dominates it spiritually for Mrs. Ramsay, living and dead, is the heart of all the varied moods and emotions so sharply drawn.

With the exception of Jacob's Room (and Jacob, after all, was a very young man), Mrs. Woolf's novels suggest that she thinks rather better of women than of men. Prodigiously modern as she is in manner, she likes to draw a type of woman by no means hackneyed in current fiction the woman of temperament who nevertheless is essentially steadfast, reticent, and self-controlled. Such a woman is Mrs. Ramsay. She lacks the gay, spirited charm of Clarissa Dalloway, and her physical beauty, though much insisted upon, somehow is not made particularly real; but she is a remarkable study in perceptiveness and sympathy, and moreover her effect upon the reader is in proportion to her effect upon the persons in the novel.

From this curiously constructed book — curiously even for Mrs. Woolf - two things stand out preeminent: the originality and beauty of the section called 'Time Passes,' and the admirable skill with which moods, and shadowswift changes of mood, are depicted. In Time Passes' the author has caught and held the intangible, and clothed it in rhythmical beauty. In the empty house, left untenanted for years after Mrs. Ramsay's death, nothing stirs but

BEFORE

A perfectly good he-man with red blood and everything owned a perfectly good book, but set out to buy another book. The first thing he did was to read all the literary reviews. Poor, dear man. So many critics. So many advertisements. So many "biggest books of the year." So many great works of art. Whom to believe? He gave up.

But he got ashamed at the next party. He must be up on the new things. So he hied (sic) himself to a bookstore, and looked up at the mountains of books, and he looked down the long line of books, and he felt very, very small.

But suddenly our hero sees the light. He is rescued-and by whom? By whom but the Knight in Modern Clothesthe Literary Guild of America.

The Literary Guild has a modern saw, which the comic strips would label "Coöperation" and "Large Editions." It has frightened many people by sawing the price of books almost in halffor such brave people as swear allegiance for a year. Progress always does seem to shock a lot of nice people. But with tears in our eyes and with firmness in our hearts we saw away

LITERARY
GUILD

OF

AMERICA

until the price is almost half what it would be to the uninitiated. Subscribers with difficulty restrain their tears at saving so much money.

The chosen book is selected from manuscripts by the august Board of Editors (if you must know, they are Carl Van Doren - Editor-in-Chief, Zona Gale, Glenn Frank, Elinor Wylie, Joseph Wood Krutch, Hendrik Willem van Loon). And then the book is petted and pampered with margins and a specially nice binding-and is delivered to you on the day of publication. Not a month late, you understand. But on the day of publication.

The second picture is you all spread abroad in your easy chair, lazily unwrapping a new package. And then you drink in culture and joy and everything-all without moving from that easy chair. Later you ring for your butler and tell him to lay the Right Book where all the guests will see that you are of the elect and belong to the Literary Guild. And you repeat the drama once a month.

The next book of the Literary Guild is perfectly thrilling. You will buy it anyway-see the coupon.

light and darkness and faint sound, and the soft nose of the clammy sea-air, rubbing, snuffling, iterating and reiterating their questions "Will you fade? Will you perish?"

As for illustrations of the masterly depicting of mood, choice can be made at random. Perhaps two of the best are Lily Briscoe's frozen inability to proffer to the widowed Mr. Ramsay the sympathy which he so imperiously though tacitly demands, with her subsequent gush of pity, called out, too late, by his infantile pleasure in her praise of his boots; and the discord, the constraint, and the rebellion in the hearts of Mr. Ramsay's adolescent children when the long-dreamed-of, long-delayed expedition to the Lighthouse is made at last.

ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS

The Rise of American Civilization, by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1927. 8vo. viii+824 +828 pp. Illus. 2 vols. $12.50.

HISTORY has differentiated into monographs and panoramas. The former supply the studio properties for the latter, and are susceptible of an indefinite number of combinations. The monograph writer is supposed to be first of all a seeker after truth, a researcher, though he may succumb at times to the superior attraction of novelty and sensation. The panoramist seeks effects, which may owe their force to a plausibility akin to truth, or may be true in a general and relative way, but are primarily intended to impress a social or political lesson upon the beholder. The present volumes are of the latter type. What H. G. Wells has tried to do for the history of mankind, Doctor and Mrs. Beard have tried to do for the history of the American nation.

Broadly the authors have interpreted their subject well. They have painted a panorama with lights and shades, and coloring and perspectives, sufficiently different from those with which we are familiar to stimulate interest and hold attention. When we isolate the novel elements in their composition the two that stand out most prominently are the determination of our history by minorities and the determination of minorities by property motives. The Communist minority ruling Russia and the Fascist minority ruling Italy are infringing a Yankee patent. A minority fomented and fought the American Revolution, drafted and adopted the Federal Constitution, made abolition and secession vital national issues, elected Lincoln, committed the country to civil war, and so on down to the World War, which, to say the least, was never expressly authorized by the electorate. Apparently government of the people, by the people, and for the people, like Christian perfection, is an ideal we honor by passive rather than active

assent.

Although the New Englanders, according to a contemporary Tory, were the ones who 'per

suaded the rest of the colonies that the (British) Government is going to make absolute slaves of them,' only about one sixth of the qualified voters of Boston, the very centre of this agitation, took the trouble to cast their ballots at the elections held during the critical decade that ended with the Battle of Lexington. Again, when the war with the mother country, fought by a minority, was over, and a federal constitution, drafted by a convention that was technically acting ultra vires, was submitted to the people, 'according to a cautious reckoning probably one sixth (of the voting population) — namely, one hundred thousand-favored the ratification of the new form of government.' Passing on seventy years, when Lincoln was chosen president 'the two Democratic factions alone, to say nothing of Bell's six hundred thousand followers, outnumbered the Republicans.' In other words, proportional representation might have prevented the Rebellion - and have left us with an unsolved slavery question.

Turning to the other thesis, that the aggressive or alert minorities that have determined the course of our national history were motivated by property interests, we come to a theme that is interwoven with the whole argument of the book. Fourteen years ago Professor Beard initiated the studies in American history that have led up to the present volumes with an analysis of the economic influences responsible for the adoption of the Constitution. He has now extended his survey, from the same observation point, to embrace our entire national evolution. It is less inspiring to conceive the acquisition and defense of wealth as the primum mobile of that evolution than to think of our development as a nation as a flowering the authors would say 'foliation' of our inherent virtue under the smile of a benignant Providence; but such is the fashion of our sophisticated age.

We must not leave the reader with the impres sion, however, that the more sordid polarizations of society are the only topics touched upon in these volumes. The authors make excursions into the fields of culture, education, art, literature, religion, social reform, the labor movement. Indeed, this comprehensiveness invites occasional lapses, excusable in any but the omniscient. as when we are told: "The novelist, Irving, wrote a substantial biography of George Washington and then, turning aside from ponderous tradi tion, composed a humorous history of the New York Knickerbockers.'

Mechanically the work is an attractive piece of bookmaking. Its story is borne along, perhaps, upon an almost too fluent flow of words, but the style is agreeable. If we may be par doned the repetition, it is a panorama, which will not always bear the microscopic scrutiny that may be safely bestowed upon an easel painting; but it has creative features that make it more than mere portrayal of accepted data and opinions.

VICTOR S. CLARK