BRIEFER MENTION
401
Raw Material, by Dorothy Canfield (12mo, 302 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is a score of instances out of human life, more trivial, surely, than true. The author states with smooth coyness her rather smug hope that these episodes will provoke original thought; but the conclusion of each is implicitly obvious in its beginning, and the desired meditations are suggested all the energetic and unequivocal innuendo of a sermon. The author's manner, which seeks effusively to enlarge the importance of her subjects, completely neutralizes it. The sketches have neither the spareness and elasticity of an outline nor the elaborated warmth of a fully developed short story.
Windows, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 91 pages; Scribners: $1). In this play Galsworthy is to be seen at his best. Something of the social appeal that vitalizes Justice stands forth in this drama, yet underlying and overspreading all is a subtle and skilfully woven strand of comedy that dominates the action. The author's technical expertness is nowhere better exemplified than in Windows, and only in a few instances have his characters been etched with more originality and reality.
The Machine Wreckers, by Ernst Toller, translated from the German by Ashley Dukes (12mo, 113 pages; Knopf: $2) is a drama centring around the Luddite rebellion in England in the early part of the nineteenth century. The author, a communist poet and dramatist at present serving sentence in a Bavarian prison for taking part in the Munich uprisings, is not, like Hauptman, interested so much in the spectacle of the workers' rebellion against the machines, as in the blind groping of the workers to establish a brotherhood of man, the painful awakening of class consciousness in the birth throes of the modern industrial era. Borrowing freely from the dramas of Shakespeare, of Hauptman, of Gorki, Toller has re-created the bitter tragedy of the abortive English revolution killed so effectively by the Reform Bill of 1830.
The Law of City Planning and Zoning, by Frank Backus Williams (8vo, 738 pages; Macmillan: $5) is an exhaustive examination of the legal basis for city planning in the United States, or rather, of the legal hindrances to a more complete development of civic utilities. Mr Williams' citation of foreign precedent, as well as our own more timid and tentative experiments in America, gives breadth to a discussion which is, alas! a little too technical for any one but the administrator or the practising city planner; but on the use of Mr Williams' data the orderly growth of our cities—to say nothing of their beauty—will not a little depend.
Psychoanalysis and Morality, by John Cowper Powys (12mo, 48 pages; Colbert: $2.50). Mr Powys has the knowledge and the temperament for speculation. He concludes that the findings of psychoanalysis will lead to a relaxation of the sex-taboo and the god- or universe-taboo, and he discusses the
"identity-lust" and a morality which disassociates sex-sensation from sin, declares that evil implies "either cruelty or malice," and retains "the imaginative sympathy of Christianity and the loyal tenderness of Christianity." His exposition is the more persuasive for being cotched in varied rhythms, lively accents, and surprising images.
