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BRIEFER MENTION
Mumbo Jumbo, by Henry Clews, Jr. (8vo, 276 pages; Boni & consists of sixty-one pages of introduction modelled closely upon Rabelais, sixty-five pages descriptive of the characters of the play, this in the manner of Shaw, and then four acts of a satirical comedy devoted to an exposé of the modern pursuit of the aesthetic and ultra in art. A book along these lines is undoubtedly in order, but in this instance, the remedy is worse than the disease."
Louise Imogen Guiney, by E. M. Tenison (8vo, 348 pages; Macmillan: $5) seems to have been composed with more material than equipment; it is earnest but unorganized—an unassimilated memoir filled with documents, divagations, and devotion. A reader with the leisure to do his own weeding will discover, among much extraneous and some quite valueless matter, an adequate summary of the life of the poet.
Modern Colour, by Carl Gordon Cutler and Stephen C. Pepper (12mo, 163 pages; Harvard University Press: $2) is a bustling little tome spun round a patent colour wheel. The authors have invented a magic disc which will enable painters to reproduce nature swiftly and with automatic perfection. The invention will be of incalculable service to belated Impressionists, photographic painters, postal card colourists, admirers of Russian realism, academic instructors, and undergraduates with a talent for copying.
Line, by Edmund J. Sullivan (8vo, 190 pages; Scribner: $3.75). A successful illustrator shows how it is done. The profounder problems of aesthetics are discussed and clarified: freehand drawing, reed pens, the legitimacy of cross hatching, formal perspective, gradation in line, shadows, local colour, setting up a figure, et cetera. Mr Sullivan has literary ability—if the book were not illustrated with his own drawings, we might wonder if he were not also an artist.
Motion Pictures in Education, by Don Carlos Ellis and Laura Thornborough (8vo, 284 pages; Crowell: $2.50). One does not quarrel with the statement that "the more senses utilized in conveying knowledge, the better the result" and one conceives through the presentation of certain subjects in this book of practical information for teachers, the possibility of supplementing what seems to be poverty in the average child and adult, of knowledge by association. Although in the case of "films purporting to be historical and literary," one mistrusts a conception of the deluge in which a lion cub is a tiny replica of the lion which carries it, and a Solomon's Court with mural decorations which appear to be stencilled representations of Alaskan tribal spirits, one perceives the value of films which portray scenic wonders, plant and animal life, civic and domestic thrift, industrial processes, progress in mechanics and the evolution of commerce. The chapter, moreover, How to Use Films in Teaching with its insistence upon repetition and supplementary reading, upon exact preparation on the part of the teacher—with its pedagogic genius in exposition and the recapitulating quiz—is an enthralling demonstration of the author's facile assertion that "seeing is believing."
