was destroyed; but the Revelation remained. Being expressed in the style of a poetical rebus, it could be taken to mean anything, and it was taken to mean that a Messiah must be near at hand. Upon such a meaning, so desperate was the need for some consoling hope, the distressed people fixed first their wish and then their belief. This "resulted in the collection of traditional anecdotes; mystic and mythical stories about the birth of Jesus and Herod's slaying of the children (in imitation of Pharaoh's attempt to slay the infant Moses, who probably never existed either); legends about the temptation of Jesus by the devil; numerous striking saws and parables uttered by the wise men of the age; stories about a nobleminded and highly superior man of the people; stories of miraculous cures and feats, symbols, visions, and so on. . . all of which was then boiled down into the strangely composed mess that is called the Gospel according to St. Mark." To this were added the further testimonies, some derivative and some contradictory, of Matthew and Luke, the theological system of Paul, and the symbolical allegory of John. During the century or so between the Revelation and the Gospel according to St. John, the myth, originated in the first book, had got such a hold on the popular mind that it could, in the last book of the series, be taken for granted and allegorized. "Jesus emerged from the fourth Gospel as European humanity's ideal of divine goodness." Ever since then, more and more elaborate institutions have been built up around the figure of Jesus, but he is no less a myth than Apollo, "the god of

The method by which the historical Jesus is disposed of is nearly as simple as the contention itself. Studying the Gospels, Mr. Brandes has decided that they deal not with an individual but with a synthetic folk-hero. The Messiah is furnished with a naïve genealogy proving the descent of his father Joseph from David; he is also said to have been begotten upon a virgin by the Holy Ghost. If the genealogy has any point the detail of the miraculous birth can have none. As the story stands, however, the hero could appeal both to those who had the sentiment of Jewish nationalism and to those who were accustomed to traditional fables in which women bore children to visiting gods. Around the hero Jesus clustered, as his cult increased, many scraps of legend. There was the slaughter of the innocents, concerning which history is otherwise silent, but which seems to have been invented upon the model of deeds ascribed in the Old Testament to Pharaoh and Joab. There was the spirit of God descending like a dove upon Jesus at his baptism, much as if he were Atys, and Cybele were sending down her chosen messenger. There were the forty days and forty nights spent in the wilderness, which neatly link Jesus with Moses and Elijah, each of whom had spent a like period fasting upon his mountain. And so throughout the New Testament Mr. Brandes finds episode after episode which appears in so many places that it can be suspected as legendary in any particular place. "Jesus: A Myth" may stimulate

debate among the learned, but it will hardly surprise anybody who has observed the ways of the world. And as it is not too surprising, neither is it very momentous. Mr. Brandes's guess that Jesus never existed at all is only one of the possible guesses. Equally reasonable is the guess that though he did exist, he could be explained by the worshipers who followed him only in the terms of the science and ethics and poetry with which they were already familiar. Whether some such "nobleminded and highly superior man of the people" lived or not really matters very little. But one thing that does matter is that an excuse was somehow furnished for the people of the eastern end of the Mediterranean to begin composing one of their greatest poems. In this sense, and in this sense only, the people do compose poems. Those Mediterranean peoples were in the midst of peril and desolation. Their desires cried out for a redeemer who could save them. They had begun to suspect that the old gods were deaf or drowsy. Had not Jehovah himself permitted his temple to be defiled and turned into a ruin? Nothing could so excite the people as the report that a young god had come into the world, had been rejected and put to a shameful death, but had risen from the dead, and would now, because of his temporary residence among men, be better able to present their cause to the harsher elder gods. No wonder the people were eager and curious. Because they knew less than they could bear to know, they created. But the creations of the people, in such a circumstance, are never strikingly original. They

If it had been left a legend, and Jesus had been allowed to stand with his peers, Ulysses, Hamlet, Faust, perhaps Mr. Brandes would not have felt called upon to write his book. Instead, however, theologians and metaphysicians and politicians laid their hands on the memory of Jesus, as similar men had done with his body, and cruelly harmed it. In his name they have justified the organization of stupendous power. In his name they have justified malignant persecution. In his name they have set up standards of a ruthless absolutism. Because they have done these things baldly, prosaically, they now baldly and prosaically insist that they do them because Jesus did exist and was a god and must be worshiped. Mr. Brandes, cutting some of the ground under them, does a valuable deed. deed. He does no essential damage to the original poem, to the amazingly permanent myth which was produced by a tangle of races living together in a tumult of distresses.

pher Wren's "Beau Sabreur" (Stokes). It may be you are a little skeptical regarding magnificent ardent sheiks of the desert who snatch up fairhaired English girls and ride away with them into the sunset. In that case, you can be amused with Maudie Atkinson, in this book, who, having read another book, longs for just such a fate. But on the other hand, Maudie meets precisely that fate, with all the thrill of being strenuously carried away, and with all the eventual comfortable surprise of finding out that her captor is not only a red-blooded American but also a "person of culture and refinement"— for which he has not had much use during his long years in, of course, the Foreign Legion. If you like to be a spectator of the ancient conflict of Love and Duty, here you have a chance. Henri de Beaujolais, a French major in, of course, the Secret Service, is on a diplomatic mission to a desert emir with whom he is to conclude a treaty very much to the advantage of France. Accidentally saddled with the burden of responsibility for a beguiling American girl, Mary Vanbrugh, Beaujolais naturally falls in love with her. Here is Love. The emir agrees to sign the treaty if the major will throw in the girl to boot. Here is Duty. Up to this moment Beaujolais has sacrificed everything and everybody to the success of his mission. It has all been very heroic. At this moment he does what he thinks is weak and what you think is noble: he sides with Love against Duty. But the wily emir suggests a scheme by which both treaty and girl may be saved, if Beaujolais will drink poison to wipe out the insults

which he has offered the Saharan aristocrat for wanting Mary. Beaujolais does not hesitate. A man of his mettle pays a good price for cake which may be eaten and also kept. Down goes the poison. In comes the girl. Tragic fade-out. But, on the other hand, the emir is merely Mary's brother, in whiskers and a kafiyeh, who has been merely testing Beaujolais with what was merely goat's milk. In no time at all the major is a well and happy man who had done his Duty and won his Love. What hero, what reader, ever asked for more and got it?

Major Wren makes a great deal of fun of the movies, but it looks like ingratitude. That he claims, in his preface, to have taken every detail of his romance from life makes no difference. He has taken his pattern from the movies. Only, he is one step ahead of most of them. You should not forget that, even when you discover that his villain is, of course, a German at heart, though technically Alsatian, and when you come to the chapter in which the native girl, poor little Leila Nakhla, is put out of the misery of her hopeless love for the great emir, as such native girls are born to be put out in these circumstances. You should not forget it even if you happen to realize that the high-born Beaujolais is a thorough snob and that his snow-white mission is part of a piratical effort to drag Africa into the French empire. You should not forget it, because it is the one step ahead of the movies which gives you so much for your money. From the first, Mary Vanbrugh is a bright girl who sees through everything. Long before the official disclosure,

you know that the emir and his vizier are Wild Westerners, talking racy American whenever there is no need for them to discourse in classic Arabic. You get all the thrill which your romantic heart will hold, and yet your realistic head lets you feel superior to the comic creatures who travel on their hearts. If you read "Beau Sabreur" you can have everything.

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LET THE PLAY SPEAK:-One of the best proofs that Eugene O'Neill is a dramatist and not a theatrical mechanic is that the meaning of his plays is so hard to turn into simple expository prose. He has himself more than once been forced to try such explanations, never with any remarkable success. The play may be difficult, but the commentary is sure to be. For Mr. O'Neill, apparently, drama is as much a native language as action is for some other men, and analysis as foreign as mathematics is to some. He sees the world as drama, he thinks in terms of drama, he knows no mode of selfexpression except that of putting characters to work in a dramatic fashion, and he has hitherto been too busy, even if the gift is in him, to master the art of reducing all this to the lower terms which criticism uses. Furthermore, he is, for all his variety of structure, so close-knit a dramatist that he is hard for anybody to expound in simple terms. His persons are tough-grained with verisimilitude; his situations are intricate with a passionate subtlety; his general plots are so wide in their bearing that they will not fit into deft summaries. Finally, it may be questioned wheth

er he is at bottom clear enough ever to be summed up in anything shorter than his collected works, or anything different from them. Perhaps his meaning is not in his plays, but is his plays. Certain men of action can be explained, if explained at all, only by a recital of their deeds. A recital of deeds is virtually all that Barrett H. Clark has undertaken in his "Eugene O'Neill" (McBride), the fifth title to be added to the Modern American Writers series. The monograph gives the fullest account of Mr. O'Neill's life which has yet been written, a careful chronology of first productions, and an admirable body of comments from the dramatist himself. At best, however, it is only a prolegomenon to the plays.

CONFESSION OF A CRITIC:-I hereby make belated acknowledgment and public confession of a grave and inexcusable offense. It has to do with E. H. Young's "William" (Harcourt Brace), an English novel imported last year. I somehow overlooked it then, and discovered it only day before yesterday, in the new American edition. No other novel by an English writer has so delighted me since I first read "Of Human Bondage." If "William" is not a masterpiece, no work of fiction can be without the lightning of great passions and the thunder of great actions. These are the only elements not to be found in "William," which is intelligent, beautiful, charming, "as fine as lace and as swift as water." I shall write further on this amazing novel later. Meantime, I shall give no other book for Christmas to anybody.

Selected

Poems of Carl Sandburg. Edited by Rebecca West. Harcourt, Brace & Co.

"Just as Robert Burns expresses the whole national life of Lowland Scotland of his time," says Miss West in her preface, "so Carl Sandburg expresses the whole life of the Middle West of to-day." This is her text. Her argument is that the Middle West is less like England than like Russia.

Evolution and Religion in Education. By Henry Fairfield Osborn. Charles Scribner's Sons.

A collection of miscellaneous essays called forth by the Fundamentalist controversy. The author suavely puts the lion and the lamb into one bed, declaring that the future lies in the hands of "a simplified religion and a reverent science." He takes his stand essentially with Calvin Coolidge.

A History of English Literature. By Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. Volume I: The Middle Ages and the Renascence. By Emile Legouis. Macmillan Co.

An admirable compendium, erudite, precise, and well composed. Without the flair of Taine, it no less usefully views its theme through the eyes of men who "have not inherited nor been nurtured on this literature, but have approached it consciously and of deliberate choice, as men rather than as children." The Time of Man. By Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Viking Press.

This story of poor-white Kentucky is apparently a truthful document. It is certainly, with its deep atmosphere and finished idiom, a beautiful work of art. O Genteel Lady! By Esther Forbes. Houghton Mifflin Co.

A portrait of Victorian Massachusetts founded upon the daguerreotypes of the period. It recalls "The Perennial Bachelor," but is less amusing and more angular.

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Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love. By John Thomas. George H. Doran Co.

A smart comedy of the Cocktail School. The scene is Paris, the characters are most of them Americans, the story will prove edifying to prohibitionists.

Dark Dawn. By Martha Ostenso. Dodd, Mead & Co.

Further evidence that "Wild Geese" was not the masterpiece which many thought it.

East Wind. By Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Narrative poems of New England life, mostly in the back country. Though the actions are intense, the language is sharp and cool.

The Fight of a Book for the World. By William Sloane Kennedy. Stonecroft Press. A bulky, useful companion volume to "Leaves of Grass," about one half of it devoted to a learned but random account of Whitman's reception by his American and European public, and the other half to bibliographies and annotations.

Candaules' Wife and Other Old Stories. By Emily James Putnam. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Five tales attractively and ironically retold from Herodotus.

Havelock Ellis. By Isaac Goldberg. Simon & Schuster.

The facts about Havelock Ellis, with little of his ripeness or his charm. The Spokesman's Secretary. By Upton Sinclair. The Author.

A fairly funny skit on the White House Spokesman, in the form of imaginary letters from a manicurist who plays the part of the Plain People to the secretary who tells the Spokesman what to say. Adventures in Editing. By Charles Hanson Towne. D. Appleton & Co.

Much editing. Mild adventure.