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

BRIEFER MENTION

Annette and Bennett, by Gilbert Cannan (12 mo, 315 pages; Seltzer: $2) is the third of a series dealing with the Lawries and the Folyats. One is asked to listen to the same speeches from James Lawrie as he voiced in the earlier volumes, as he glories in his failure and clings doggedly to being treated as a leper in his own house. One can love Annette, and for her sake put up with the Lawries, but they are bitter pills. And one can hope that conditions in English towns will improve, and that Annette's children, when it is their turn to have a novel written about them, will display an inheritance of traits from their mother's rather than from their father's side.

 

The Desert Horizon, by E. L. Grant Watson (12 mo, 302 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a simply-told tale of the Australian desert and of a boy who prefers his sandy miles to any other place on earth. He is, so Mr Watson tells us, "the willing slave of life and the desert . . . hardly as yet aware of his captivity." There is in this book, as in the author's earlier works, a fitting of human life into an accepted pattern. Mr Watson is a trained ethnologist, and has satisfied himself that men must make as simple an adjustment to environment and to other men as animals make to their jungles and their mates. His people are, with few exceptions, elemental, animal-fibred, with their unhumorous minds focused on their sheep herding or their pursuit of a mate to share their incessant struggle to wring a living out of difficult mediums. One misses something, however, in so direct and unsubtle an account of life.

 

The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene (12 mo, 379 pages; Century: $2.25). All that is required of any reader of this thoroughly delightful book, is a liking for open country and animals. The story is of a winter spent on a Vermont mountain farm by a woman who is an artist, a writer, and an expert in the raising of Shetland ponies. She is a most truthful person, not rhapsodizing to the extent of concealing her occasional fits of depression over remoteness and lack of human society, nor her delight in the prospects of a visit from her boarding-school daughter, or from her curious, kindly friends in the village below.

 

Stories, Dreams, and Allegories, by Olive Schreiner (12mo, 153 pages; Stokes: $1.75) may add nothing to the reputation of their author, yet they contain much work in her happiest vein. They are characterized by the same butterfly beauty, the same imagination and simplicity as mark her previously published books; they range from the verge of realism to the rainbow clouds of fantasy; at times they reveal a deep but unaffected emotion, at times they are beautifully symbolical, and occasionally they are warm and vivid in their criticism of life.

 

The Hidden Road, by Elsie Singmaster (12 mo, 333 pages; Houghton, Mifflin: $2) led to mastery over the very impulses that had sent Phoebe Stanard along it. The book is a delicately handled, finished study of a girl whose mind was well above the average, but whose intellectual curiosity had always to be whipped into action through her desire to captivate a lover. There is no attempt to surround Phoebe with glamour. Her faults are insisted upon, and yet she is a very delightful heroine. The minor characters of the book are quite as artistically drawn as Phoebe; the backgrounds are the habitat of real people. Indeed the book ranks high as a well-written, genuine work of art, one of the best novels of the year.

 

Blindfold, by Orrick Johns (12mo, 259 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $2) sets out to be defiantly modern in theme and treatment, but gradually fades into a background not much more revolutionary than that of Way Down East. The ingredients are largely those of Newton Fuessle's recent Jessup—an illegitimate child who "makes good" in New York, and a painter father—although here the pattern is worked out to a tragic conclusion. Technically, the shift in the story from the father to the daughter weakens the interest; the connecting thread is not strong enough. Briefly, a novel which starts off realistically and ends melodramatically.

 

The attempt in Conquistador, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (12mo, 20§ pages; Scribner: $1.50) at a drama of conflicting bloods, Scotch and Spanish, succeeds in adding a thin narrative to the already sizeable literature of Puritan domination. For though the Spanish strain in Wharton Cameron, engineer-caballero, ties him by pledge to the hacienda in Mexico, the Puritan in him simply uses this setting for contrast and exploitation, and is in every main instance the psychological determinant. At the first genuine approach of passion, Cameron "threw back his head and stared at the dim rafters," saying to the charmer, Dona Flora, "You don't tempt me." And, even at the end, rejected by a one-time Boston sweetheart, forced to accept a Mexican girl because of this, Wharton loves her, Manuelita, chastely, only for one thing: a son and heir, and through him the perpetuation of Santa Eulalia, the hacienda. One is tempted, however, to overlook this failure of intention, for the book's banalities: "Men are men. And women are women"—"A caballero is a caballero still; cattle are cattle," et cetera, are not often to be found in contemporary writing.

 

Balloons, by Elizabeth Bibesco (12mo, 168 pages; Doran: $2) is the reverse of literary. Its author has the faculty, capitalized in newspaper serials and stories of the smart set and by all writers of ability, of getting down to business at once, touching the patient where he lives. She goes in for being frightfully subtle. In one breath she is perceptive, subtle, ingenious, glittering, tinny, thin, and complacent. Her cleverness betrays her. When she stops using people as mouthpieces for her dazzling little phrases and turns her shrewd eye on them, putting her cleverness to the laborious task of learning to project them dramatically, her books will be worth waiting for.

 

The House of the Enemy, by Camille Mallarmé (12mo, 256 pages; McBride: $2) is a highly-seasoned Spanish dish, served steaming hot with passion and with a dash of Benavente sauce. What there is about these La Mancha amours which renders them such family affairs is still more or less of a mystery; marriage seems to be an avenue of intrigue dotted with in-laws. Aside from its violent story, which doesn't quite compel credence, this novel has colourful moments and a quick-paced narrative style.

 

The Puppet Show, by Martin Armstrong (12 mo, 153 pages; Brentano: $2) zigzags between fine, full-bodied descriptive prose and somewhat frail excursions into the fantastic. When Mr Armstrong looks at life realistically, he writes in vivid and incisive style, but when he interposes the rose-tinted spectacles of allegory, things seem a little out of focus and not half so much worth looking upon. One would suggest more work in the mood of his admirable Old Alan and The Emigrants, and—if he insists upon being intermittently fanciful—fewer fables and better ones.

 

Loyalties, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 110 pages; Scribner: $1). There is less of thought and of meaning, less of dramatic vigour and power about this play than about some of its predecessors. The author has nothing cither new or significant to say regarding loyalties; he tends toward the commonplace both in plot and in theme; and one misses the energy and the vitality of Strife, Justice, and The Mob.

 

Oxford Poetry—1921 (12mo, 64 pages; Appleton: $1) and Oxford Poetry—1922 (12mo, 48 pages; Appleton: $1) are collections of poems written by Oxford undergraduates during the last two years. Although these "poets of promise" can boast of such men as Robert Graves, Louis Golding, and Edmund Blynden in their host, there is not one unusual poem in either volume. And their fulfilment has been like their promise—conventional, dull, servile boot-licking of a hackneyed muse gone in the mouth.

 

In The Roving Critic, by Carl Van Doren (12mo, 262 pages; Knopf: $2.50) "the sense of the vividness of life" is proclaimed as the all-inclusive standard by which criticism should judge other forms of literature. The author does not realize that vitality and verisimilitude are the easiest of qualities to simulate. He has the habit, at once wasteful and penurious, of stating a thought without either working it out or provoking the reader to do so. His ideas, expressed in ungainly and distorted prose, are sufficient to enliven the briefer papers, but they lack the durability, logic, and subtlety that differentiates criticism from the more evanescent book reviewing. He seems the victim of time, space, and "aliveness."

 

Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague (12mo, 280 pages; Brentano: $2) tries to do for the conduct of the Great War what Gibbon did for the Church, with much the same manner and a fraction of the brilliance. The fact that the author's allusive, elaborate, highly polished weapons are turned against the conduct rather than the cause definitely places him.

 

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."