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BRIEFER MENTION
Memories of a Hostess, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (illus., 12mo, 312 pages; Atlantic Monthly Press: $4) and Glimpses of Authors, by Caroline Ticknor (illus., 8vo, 335 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $3.50). The savour of New England's golden age in literature may be generously sampled in these two volumes of reminiscence—may be quite rolled beneath the tongue, in fact. One discovers it a pleasant, mild, slightly musty taste, compounded of serious thinking and what Emerson once characterized as "nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette." So far as Miss Ticknor's book is concerned, the title quite accurately supplies the label, for the contacts are rarely close; celebrities occupy a middle distance between intimacy and hearsay. The more important volume, drawn chiefly from the diaries of Mrs James T. Fields, contains many relishable details and should have a secure niche in the archives. It is a vivid picture of Boston in the days before the hub of the universe so much as dreamed of twentieth century demountable rim competition.
Kid Kartoons, by Gene Carr (4to, unnumbered; Century: $1.75) is a collection of one hundred drawings selected by the artist from his cartoons appearing each day on the back page of the New York World, wherein he depicts the manifold vagaries that fill the lives of our own cosmopolitan gutter-snipes. It is a pity that Mr Carr has no gift of dynamic suggestion. His keen insight into the thoughts and emotions of these little ragamuffins, his love for their brave humanity in the face of their cruelly drab environment, his unfailing freedom from sentimentality and the cheaply pathetic are really considerable talents. But his limitation makes for a curious stillness in his characters, a lack of vital energy where energy is so evidently "indicated." Were it not for this, Mr Carr could well ask for another Dickens to embellish his collection of drawings.
Spanish Folk Songs, translated by Salvador de Madariaga (16mo, 58 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $1) are unique in flavour and of some poetic moment. They are, as their translator says, disinterested, aiming at nothing. They "fall like ripe fruit from the tree of experience." The songs are slight, built on assonance, some of them almost nil, but more often they bring with them a picture of their habitat and a scene from some universal drama on a small scale.
World History, 1815-1920, by Eduard Fueter, translated by Sidney Bradshaw Fay (8vo, 490 pages, Harcourt, Brace: $3.75). As a trained historian and a Swiss, Dr Fueter was doubly equipped to write "a survey of the history of the last hundred years from a really universal point of view." He has divided his book into five sections, dealing with the point of departure from earlier systems, the rise and fall of the international alliance against revolutionary tendencies, the old and new colonial policies, the struggle against the fourth estate, and with it the formation of new national states in Europe, and, lastly, economic imperialism. The book is a narrative of consequences into which Dr Fueter has still managed to bring vivid details of movements and their guiding personalities. It is a study of the growth of group ideas illustrated by the conduct of the nations of Europe since 1813.
