The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Briefer Mention (July 1923)

BRIEFER MENTION

Love and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett (12mo, 306 pages; Macmillan: $2). This, the thirteenth and final volume in Mrs Garnett's invaluable series of translations of Chekhov's work, contains twenty-four stories of far from even merit. As a part of Chekhov's output, they claim attention, but most of them are several cuts below his best work. They are, as Mrs Garnett says, "mainly pot-boilers"—vivid fragments, sardonic pictures, and somewhat sketchy stories.

 

The Enchanted April, by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden (12mo, 313 pages; Doubleday, Page: $1.90) creates its own enchantment, to which Italy and the calendar are but supplementary. It is compounded of deft psychology, gentle irony, and sheer joyousness—all welded in a narrative which twinkles with wit and poetry. The novelist sees her men eye to eye with Jane Austen, and her women eye to eye with Barrie; they emerge into the radiant Italian sunlight with just enough of the reality rubbed off them to make it highly probable that they would act and react precisely as they do. At any rate, one's scepticism is charmed into silence—and that, in itself, is achievement.

 

Prince Hempseed, by Stephen Hudson (12mo, 250 pages; Knopf: $2) sheds a definite antecedent illumination upon Richard Kurt, the dominant figure of Mr Hudson's two earlier novels. Here is a sympathetic and essentially poetic narrative of boyhood—a story of mingled aspiration and frustration, projected without sentimentality and without recourse to the befogging machinery of Freud. The author discloses an unerring sense of adolescent psychology, a fine grasp of values, and artistic economy in the use of mere plot. Altogether, an arresting novel in which form and content have been welded into a complete harmony.

 

Island of the Innocent, by Grant Overton (12mo, 332 pages; Doran: $2) is one of those successful novels that lead us to believe the novel must be destroyed. It possesses no single distinguishing characteristic that might lift it above the general run of pretty popular books unless, perhaps, it be a not too happy ending. It is all a dreary level of mediocrity smacking of the uninspired, if sincere, literary tradesman.

 

To Tell You the Truth, by Leonard Merrick (12mo, 311 pages; Dutton: $1.90) is uniform with the collected works which have gone before, save that "it contains no Introduction by a distinguished professional colleague of Mr Merrick"—an omission which is not exactly unbearable when one recalls the frail nature of some of those introductions. These short stories will neither add to nor detract from their author's standing, being competent and readable, but not distinguished, except in their uniform absence of distinction.

 

Gates of Life, by Edwin Björkman (12mo, 384 pages; Knopf: $2.50) reveals once more the fine perception, the artistic restraint, and the narrative skill which distinguished The Soul of a Child. This sequel carries the life story of Keith Wellander forward another decade, and becomes—as was almost inevitable—more emphatically a document of autobiographical fidelity, a circumstance which detracts in some measure from its charm, although it still remains a work of positive values. Mr Björkman sustains his theme without racing up bypaths in search of climax; he writes with a refreshing freedom from either sentimentality or swagger.

 

The Orissers, by L. H. Myers (12mo, §§5 pages; Scribner: $2) is over-burdened by ramifications of psychology and philosophy. The author has set himself a weighty task and defeated his accomplishment of it by too great thoroughness. He is insatiably explicit. Every detail of the story is heavily underscored, with the result that the interest of the whole is deadened. The book is one of slow maturation, gathering into itself the ideas and observations of many years. It has unusual scope, intermittent power, and sagacious penetration into human motives. But it does not quite conquer the reader; the remorselessness of its elaboration is too unremitting to permit his absorption.

 

The Middle of the Road, by Philip Gibbs (12mo, 428 pages; Doran: $2). Sir Philip Gibbs' new novel tells us nothing we do not know. The dissolution of European society as the aftermath of the war has been well established. We note some new phase of disintegration in the papers of each succeeding day. The strength of the book lies in the undoubted truth of the picture it paints. Its stark gloom is unrelieved by futile conventional optimisms. But its convincing description of the shipwreck of nations, faiths, and ideals will not appeal to those who wish to be amused. In that sense it is not a novel. As a record of ruin presented in fictional form, even with characters serving as pegs on which to hang opposing ideas and theories, it should hold the attention. In Janet's words: "Things happen like that. Perhaps they can't be helped. It's good if one gets a chance to patch things up. Life's mostly patchwork."

 

Plays: Third Series, by Jacinto Benavente, translated with an introduction by John Garrett Underhill (12mo, 219 pages; Scribner: $2.50) contains, to use the phrase of jh, nothing for adult education. Benavente has a fluent pen and a shallow intelligence; he can write a play in any genre without enriching it. Thus, in the present series, The Prince Who Learned Everything Out of Books is far inferior in freshness and invention to the dramatized versions of Wilde's fairy tales; In the Clouds is simply another realistic study of the middle class far less intense than those of Strindberg; while The Truth is a clever skit of the type Schnitzler perfected. The fourth play, Saturday Night, is an elaborate cheat. We puzzle through a slack labyrinth of noise, colour, epigram, and violence to arrive at the sub-structure—which turns out to be a stale allegory of Ambition, Youth, and Imagination. Indubitably, a very properly gilded brick for Drama Leaguers.

 

Maine Coast, by Wilbert Snow (16mo, 114 pages; Harcourt, Brace $1.75). The poetry inherent in the sea and the dwellers next to it saturates this book, the author's first. Verse forms are sometimes rather crudely handled, and occasionally the poetry remains a little outside the net cast for it, but there is vision in this verse and some fine interpretation of character. It has much the quality of Sarah Orne Jewett's tales, though it gives a more intimate presentation of the foibles and philosophy of an isolated community of fishermen and sailors.

 

Skeeter Kirby, by Edgar Lee Masters (12mo, 394 pages; Macmillan: $2). In this sequel to Mitch Miller, Mr Masters tries his hand at the portrait of an artist as young man. It is a garrulous, uneven piece of work giving evidence, however, of unusual sensitiveness to the material on hand and, in portions, of able execution.

 

Sulamith, by Alexandre Kuprin, translated by B. Guilbert Guerney (12mo, 159 pages; Brown: $2) is a far departure from Russian themes and Russian literary manners. It attempts to create a prose poem out of the splendours of Solomon's court, the frenzies of Isis-worship, and the passion of Solomon and the Shulamite. The chief aesthetic difficulty is one of texture: to harmonize one's own prose with the frequent magnificent inserts from the Song of Songs. This requires a sensitive limitation of vocabulary and a gift for rhythm and unstrained but fresh imagery, for both of which either Kuprin or his translator fail to qualify in the measure that Edgar Saltus and Oscar Wilde did in similar situations.

 

The Genius of America, by Stuart P. Sherman (8vo, 269 pages, Scribner: $2). The spirit and content of the book are delightful. There is great wisdom—not merely knowledge—tolerance without sentimentalism, and keen satire where satire is due. Snobbery and arrogance come in for their share of it in no ambiguous terms. Stuart Sherman is always alert to fend off scintillating and artificially-heated attacks on the genuine achievements of American writers he is quite as ready to slash at sand-built, and unwarranted American pretensions and reputations. His demands are sincerity, sense, and ideals, qualities which he himself possesses in high degree. He is good reading whether you are on his side or at the other end of his lance.

 

Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century, by Georg Brandes, translated by Rasmus B. Anderson (12mo, 478 pages; Crowell: $3). "Criticism is an art" is the sound postulate planted in the author's preface and equally sound and taken for granted are most of his conclusions. The thoroughness of Brandes is extraordinary: he marches around and around his subject, viewing it from all angles—technical, biographical, historical, and philosophical. One is wearied, however, by the slowness of his step and the lack of style in his gait, both accentuated by his clumsy translator. Granted that criticism is an art, it should be shaped, energized, and crystallized as one, so that structure and style satisfy as completely as do its penetrations, information, and judgements.

 

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.