SOME men, not otherwise given to paradox, have maintained that the invention of printing has done more to stultify the human mind than any other single event in its history. They argue that, as men have fallen more and more into the way of learning things at second hand, their powers of learning at first hand have steadily diminished. The more a man knows through books about the manners of Koreans, they say, the less he is likely to know about his own garden. The result of reading for fifteen minutes a day in books recommended as the great books of the world is the achieve ment, not of Culture, but of a false sense of intellectual security, and such readers are to be compared to ostriches rather than to owls.

The injurious results of reading might be less grave if the superstition were not so current that there is a clearly defined list of great books that every man can profitably read and ought to read. This is the heresy against which Dr. Georg Brandes sets himself in an article 'On Right Reading' in the Berliner Tageblatt. Those readers who, when asked what single book they would choose to take with them for a protracted sojourn on a desert island, automatically answer, "The Bible,' will be disturbed by Dr. Brandes's saying that not even the Bible as a whole can be urged upon all men as worth reading. The Old Testament especially, he points out, is made up of elements very unequal in their value, and many parts of it can be read

intelligently only by very learned men. If the Bible falls short of having a universal cultural value, how much truer must this be of every other book in the world!

It is all very well, he continues, for children to be introduced to a somewhat conventional what conventional group of great books, - Robinson Crusoe, the Odyssey, Walter Scott, Don Quixote, and so forth, but there is something defective in the cultivation of a grown man or woman who never reads anything out of the main current, never develops a special taste for some littleknown or disregarded author of his own. 'No one, for example, reads the English historian Gibbon any more. Yet I once knew a young German painter and poet who had read and reread his great book with the keenest pleasure. Gibbon's wide range of vision, his extraordinary intellectual independence, and his uncommon descriptive powers, make his history a book of permanent value, and my friend Arthur Fitger considered him. the historian who had taught him more than all others.'

Dr. Brandes's choicest scorn is reserved for those readers who are so eager to know all there is to be known that they have recourse, not to great books themselves, but to books about them, to 'Histories of Universal Literature' and the like. Such readers do find themselves in possession of all the names and facts, but, like the small boy who knew all the swear-words and never used them, they profit very little

of the French Revolution, and was produced in Berlin by Reinhardt during the stormy days of the German revolution. A fourth play in the seriesA Play of Love and Death was produced in Rolland's honor at the Czech National Theatre in Prague for the Frenchman is extremely popular throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This play, a kind of musical interlude in the stormy series of which it is a part, is written in one act, and takes about an hour and a half to perform; it has been compared in its effect to the Antoinette chapter of Jean Christophe. 'It is probably the best play of the year,' says a writer in the Observer. 'It possesses a moral beauty similar to that

found in Saint Joan.'

con

HAYDN and Weber, as composers who after all these yearstinue to have novelties in reserve, are now joined by Franz Schubert, four of whose hitherto unknown compositions have been turned up in Vienna by Otto Erich Deutsch. They consist of a very pretty song entitled 'Song in Absence,' a waltz, a minuet, and a rural slow dance. The most valuable of the four pieces, says a correspondent of the Morning Post, is the song, which was composed in April 1816, to a poem by Count Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, its central part in G-major having a very original and pleasant melody. The rural dance is an extremely simple and sketchy performance, and was no doubt composed by Schubert when he was a small boy.

A committee has been formed in Vienna to erect a monumental 'Schu

bert fountain' in the Alsergrund district, where Schubert lived and did much of his work. The cost of the fountain is estimated at more than fifteen thousand dollars, which is more than the committee can raise, but it is hoped that the municipality will make a grant.

SOCRATES IN ART

THE British Museum has recently come into possession of a statuette, eleven inches high, and in very good condition, that is considered by archæologists to be almost certainly a portrait of Socrates as he walked and talked in the streets of Athens. According to the Morning Post, it portrays the familiar coarse face, the rough beard, and the snub nose, but the result is not grotesque, and there can be no doubt as to the intelligence of the sculptured figure. The statuette is supposed to date from a period about a century later than Socrates. If so, it is the earliest portrait of him, for all the other busts in existence belong to the Roman period.

THE UNIVERSAL BARD

THE late king of Siam, Rama VI, was not only an enlightened monarch who had been trained in Western universities, but a man of marked literary tastes. He was an assiduous student of Shakespeare, and had translated into Siamese Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It, all of which were subsequently produced at his private theatre in Bangkok. Whether Shakespeare is as bad in Siamese as in French, or as good as in German, we are not prepared to say.

The Clio, by L. H. Myers. London: G. H. Putnam. 78. 6d.

[Edwin Muir in The Nation and the Athenæum]

A BOOK that makes one wonder on what principle reputations are apportioned is Mr. Myers's The Clio. The author's first novel, The Orissers, was given more enthusiastic reviews than any other volume that had appeared for years. To quote the critics, it had 'a conviction and an intensity of imagination that mark it off from other novels and link it with Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights.' It was 'a work conceived and executed on the grand scale.' It was 'a great book.' Yet Mr. Myers's name is certainly less well known, even to the better public, than those of Mr. Waugh and Mr. Arlen, for instance. This is quite incomprehensible. The Clio is a brilliant, enticing, witty, and profound work. Ostensibly it is a record of a cruise up the Amazon. Many things happen by the way, most of them fantastic; but the author succeeds brilliantly in his central task that of presenting a party of rich, civilized, and sophisticated people against the background of nature, primitive, indifferent, and inhuman.

It is obvious that the book might very easily have developed into a sermon against civilization, or against our illusions about nature, or about the transitoriness and triviality of existence. It never does so; we emerge from the story conscious that we have been given a remarkably just and complete, above all an undeviatingly intelligent, appraisement of human values. Civilization, and what must forever underlie it, are shown in their interaction; are shown not merely with justice, but with wit; and we are left not with anything so inadequate as a point of view, pessimistic or optimistic, but with the enigma itself, the enigma which, if it is not completely satisfying, is more satisfying than anything else.

Because he has a sense of values, because the intensity of his thought gives him objectivity, Mr. Myers has achieved in this story what Mr. Huxley has often attempted but never yet quite achieved a true evocation of the disillusioned and pessimistic spirit of the age. In wit he is Mr. Huxley's equal; in intellect he is immensely his superior. There are signs of immaturity still in his style, but even his faults are full of origi

nality; and his thought is so fascinating and profound, and has such resources behind it, that it is a continuous delight. The characters are never, perhaps, quite real, but in the world in which they move they are exquisitely characterized. They are creatures partly of the world and partly of Mr. Myers's speculation; they are figures, at any rate, in a philosophic comedy that is in the highest degree interesting.

Broken Ties, and Other Stories, by Rabindranath Tagore. London: Macmillan Company. 78. 6d.

[Manchester Guardian]

THERE are seven stories here, but one of them takes up a good half of the volume. 'Broken Ties' is a narrative that might be called simple, and yet there is a notable absence of the explicit. The spiritual history of Satish shows revolt in its most gracious forms. But the narrator says: 'I realized that the world into which Satish had been transported had no place for me, his particular friend.' You cannot be the friend of an ecstatic; at the most you are a part of humanity. The two young men become devotees of a 'master' who 'sought to keep Satish and myself content by repeatedly filling for us the cup of symbolism with the nectar of idea.' To the more worldly of the two there is plethora of mystic emotion, and reverence must withstand the assaults of reason. But Satish, a sincere renegade, beginning as a reasonable 'atheist,' travels through emotion and attains such simple peacefulness that no one could even guess what he believed or what he did not.' He does, on one occasion, claim to be a poet; he declines all bonds of reason and he departs into some kind of formlessness into which one cannot follow him. There is a devoted woman, but she can only attend to his material needs; she is a Mary condemned to the tasks of a Martha in a world remote from human appetites. There is some rally of humanity when the narrator marries the discarded woman.

It is difficult for the average Westerner to appreciate much of this; he dips into something that he cannot fathom. There should be a great future for Indian fiction; in a land of powerful conventions the conventions are being attacked. Mr. Tagore's story suggests rather the search for a philosophical basis than concern with

political or social events. He has his ironies: 'Sect-mongers rejoice more in capturing adherents than in comprehending truths.' The other stories are comparatively slight. They have the charm of a serenity of style even when this is under a burden of emotion. There is something of imaginative relation, something of disenchantment. The novel-reader may feel some lack of the positive, the specific.

George Westover, by Eden Phillpotts. London: Hutchinson. 73. 6d.

[Sunday Times]

-

Ir cannot often have happened in the entire history of literature that a veteran writer, whose style and method seemed so fixed and unalterable as those of Mr. Eden Phillpotts, has departed so completely — and so successfully from his original form as Mr. Phillpotts has done in his new novel. Certainly, if Mr. Phillpotts had chosen to publish this book anonymously or under an assumed name, nobody would have suspected its authorship; yet it is in no respect inferior to the best of those stories that have won for him the position he holds among living novelists. Indeed, it is not easy to recall, amid the many clear-cut human types he has given us, a character that stands out with a more arresting and memorable, a more convincing, personality than that of Sir George Westover. We meet him in the year 1871 - a distant date- at the age of seventy-six, a living epitome of all the qualities which made that — to us of the present generation - amazing person, the old 'English gentleman,' as impervious to the ideas of the generation he lives among as Portland cement to water. A really great figure, superbly drawn.

Fernande, by W. B. Maxwell. London: Thornton Butterworth; New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. $2.00.

[Morning Post]

MR. MAXWELL is a novelist with an ingratiating gift of inclining us to overlook his faults. He is reasonable, to a point that makes good a lacking humor. He is downright. So sincere is he that we forget he is not subtle. And for all his careful attention to business as a story-teller, he can always take time off for occupations that count for much more. Look at this Fernande. The lady who gives it a title is an unusual case. She is unhappy in her lot, she is unchaste in her life, she is even unsteady in her love for Eric, so much younger than herself, whom in the main, with a generous self-sacrifice, she protects from herself while denying him others. There are latencies in such a nature and sequestered moods,

surely, beyond those researched in Mr. Maxwell's study. And was ever anything more obviously a fiction job than the bringing off Eric's marriage with Miss Ruth Cornish? Old Cornish, though not a conventional puppet, is a puppet none the less. The whole happy ending is manifest mechanics. Yet Fernande herself is so solidly and moderately and so sympathetically set up by Mr. Maxwell that the mere artificer in him fails to knock her down. She survives, in spite of her creator.

A Casual Commentary, by Rose Macaulay. London: Methuen. 68.

[The Nation and the Athenæum]

MISS MACAULAY is frankly a journalist, and her articles keep time with the tramp of daily citygoers. She can be read in the Tube, and even enjoyed there; for she says many amusing things, and a few true things, in her brisk, Aristotelian sentences. And she has retained her fastidious precision of thought, and her sense of the meaning of words. She has no patience, for instance, with generalities about women, protesting that 'Mr. George is not fair in effect, though accurate, when he complains that, in the early part of last century, poor women could be hanged, publicly whipped, or stood in the pillory. They could; but so could poor men.' Again, she scorns the prevalent use of the word 'suggestive' as synonymous with 'indecent' - a use apparently based on the belief that 'it is notoriously a bad thing to suggest thoughts or ideas.' And over and over again she neatly expresses our own unspoken, perhaps undetected, wonderment at the silliness of men and women.

NEW TRANSLATIONS

GIDE, ANDRÉ. The Vatican Swindle. Translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. $2.50.

HEDIN, SVEN. My Life As an Explorer. Translated by Alfhild Huebsch. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. $5.00.

HERRIOT, ÉDOUARD. Madame Récamier. Translated by Alys Hallard. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. 2 vols. $7.50.

STENDHAL (Henri Beyle). The Charterhouse of

Parma. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. 2 vols. $5.00.

ZWEIG, STEFAN. Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925. $4.00.

The Earl Bishop: The Life of Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry, Earl of Bristol, by William S. Childe-Pemberton. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1925. 2 vols. $12.00.

To do justice to this voluminous work in a single paragraph is out of the question. It is the record of a great eighteenth-century figure, told chiefly in letters, and delightfully in illustrations. Frederick Hervey had nearly all the qualifications for greatness. He was inconsistent, versatile, and energetic. Holding a Church of England bishopric in Ireland, he spent most of his life on the Continent, indulging his love of art and of international intrigue. Yet in typifying his time he left a fainter mark on it than many less magnificent contemporaries. It was not through want of assiduity that he failed. He met most of the great men of the day, and made a strong impression on them all. Goethe was favorably impressed; Horace Walpole called him 'that mitred Proteus whose crimes cannot be palliated by his profligate folly'; while John Wesley found him 'plenteous in good works.' The hasty modern reader may complain that the task of writing up the Bishop should have been assigned to a Lytton Strachey, who would distill the essence of the man in fifty or a hundred pages. But Mr. Childe-Pemberton is not working with such people in mind. He has brought literary and selective skill to bear on a full-sized portrait, not a miniature.

Boswell's Life of Johnson. Edited with notes by Arnold Glover. Introduction by Austin Dobson. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1925. 3 vols. $10.00.

If you have been waiting for a good Boswell to buy, this is it. Its clear type, white paper, and substantial binding may grate on the tender susceptibilities of those A. Edward Newtons who prefer dingy tattered tomes in which the s's and the f's look exactly alike. Not, however, that this set is undistinguished or inadequate. The

three volumes contain twenty rotogravure portraits and nearly a hundred line-drawings quite in tune with the period.

The Heart of London, by H. V. Morton. New York: Brentano's, 1925. $1.50.

THE sketches and stories that go to make up this little volume originally appeared in the London Daily Express, and they are for the most part rather sentimental bits of thumb-nail impressionism. Mr. Morton has come to the picturesque conclusion that London is a miniature world, and that in the life of its eight million inhabitants the figures are his own all the poetry, color, tragedy, and comedy of human existence from all parts of the earth are to be found. His writing abounds in such felicities as the following: 'So you see wonderful things happen to some people when tall ships come out of the Seven Seas and find their way to London Town.' If this kind of writing appeals to you, the book will be a delight from cover to cover, and, as far as local color is concerned, a great improvement over Baedeker's treatment of the same subject.

Margaret Bondfield, by Iconoclast (Mary Agnes Hamilton). New York: Thomas Seltzer, Inc., 1925. $2.00.

It is a pity that this sketch was written by a Socialist and feminist who admires Miss Bondfield devoutly; yet even her prejudices have been unable to conceal the high character and achievements of a remarkable woman. A pioneer in her field, Miss Bondfield has done more than any living woman, not only for her sex, but for the whole Labor movement in England. Her views on international affairs and domestic policy may conflict with those of other well-informed persons; her judgment of Russia may have been mistaken; yet she represents the highest ideals of organized labor, and this appreciation, in spite of its bias toward hero-worship, serves a very purpose.