BRIEFER MENTION
99
The Old Drama and the New, by William Archer (12mo, 396 pages; Small, Maynard: $3) is a bold championship of modern English drama at the expense of Elizabethan and Restoration drama. The approach is patently anaesthetic. It does not recognize a great difference between literature, including drama, as a representative art, and literature as an exercise merely in verisimilitude. Judged solely by the criteria of surface verisimilitude, Webster is unreal and improbable, but that begs the aesthetic question. What Mr Archer is really an apostle of is art-to-conceal art—a clever persuasion of an audience that a play is not a play. The Elizabethans, however, knew that a play was a play, and permitted a framework which offered a maximum of opportunities to display internal functional relationships. From that standpoint, it may be asserted that modern drama has laboured to obscure the elements of drama, and Mr Eliot's Sacred Wood stands untouched by Mr Archer's opposing theories as well as unapproached in style by the flat and pale language of his lectures.
An Attic Dreamer, by Michael Monahan (12mo, 333 pages; Kennerley: $2.50) carries the memory back a dozen years to the era of tiny magazines giving unbridled self-expression to literary tasters, the day of Elbert Hubbard and hammered copper, of O. S. Marden and hand-tooled ethics. Inevitably, here is a paper on Robert Ingersoll and a monograph on Poe. Inevitably, also, a rhapsody on Love and a handful of aphorisms. A book in which everything appears slightly dated except the title page.
Barnum, by M. R. Werner (illus; 8vo, 381 pages, Harcourt, Brace: $3.50). Eighty years old, Barnum tripped one day over a rope in Madison Square Garden, and was slightly scratched. "Where's the press agent?" he yelled, as he got to his feet. "Tell him I've been injured in an accident." Truly says his biographer, "Barnum still retained the use of all his faculties." This voluminous and incredibly fascinating account of a life which was itself voluminous and incredible is one of the most entertaining books of the year; a detailed and colourful reflection of an amusing life amid an environment which can never be duplicated. The circus man was an apostle of publicity; his life is a veritable source book in hokum, and Mr Werner has given it an impartial, intelligent projection. Gamaliel Bradford has included Barnum in his recently published Damaged Souls, but there is little in this biography to indicate that this jovial old faker possessed anything so tragic.
Life of Christ, by Giovanni Papini, translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (8vo, 416 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $3.50) is a bombastic, sententious, inflated restatement of the New Testament stories. Signor Papini is obviously more interested in turning out well rounded periods than in shedding any new light on his Master. Not without significance, either, is the fact that the author found it necessary to introduce himself in characteristic fashion in a long introductory dissertation before coming to the Saviour. Signor Papini is no true prodigal son. He has merely turned from the dogmatism of atheism to the still greater dogmatism of theology.
