Chapter 30

20–8648

“In the official history of the great war prepared by direction of the historical section of the British committee of imperial defense, this is the first volume devoted to naval operation, and concludes with the battle of the Falklands in December, 1914. It gives a detailed account of all the activities of the British navy during the first five months of the war, and this account is entirely based on official reports and other documents. Besides the maps, plans and diagrams inserted in this volume, there is a separate case containing eighteen maps and charts.”—R of Rs

“The pictures presented are consecutive and clear. The efforts of the author to produce a plain and interesting narrative are ably seconded by the publishers; for the make-up of the book is admirable in the highest degree, and presents a model that makes the work of most American publishers seem crude. In comparison with this book, any other book, even though it deal with mighty armies, seems modelled on microscopic lines.” B. A. Fiske

“Sir Julian Corbett had a moving tale to tell, and he has told it well. It is not altogether impossible to imagine it better written. But the story is at least clear and objective. His judgments err in being a little over-kind.”

“Scrupulous care in the presentation of facts and reticence in criticizing them characterize this very detailed, well documented history.”

Reviewed by Reginald Custance

“Sir Julian Corbett is a master of naval lore; he is deeply versed in the strategy and the tactics of the great captains of the old days. The maps are of the highest value and importance.”

“Sir Julian’s style is clear and concise, his treatment of the subject admirable in every way. A more thrillingly interesting book would be hard to find, or one more valuable.”

“The chief merit of Sir Julian Corbett’s volume consists in its exposition of the interplay of naval and military considerations.”

“The author’s lucid and dispassionate works on the past history of our navy had shown that he was specially qualified to record its greatest undertaking, and his new book is all that we had expected it to be as a narrative, even if some of his occasional remarks and deductions may provoke dissent.”

“Sir Julian S. Corbett reveals himself a student of detail, a scholarly narrator, and a man who is not impatient of research. These virtues, together with an ability to retain throughout a comprehensive view of the worldwide field of operations and the political or military necessity governing many moves that were unavailing, give this history an uncommon value.”

“In our judgment Sir Julian has accomplished his extremely difficult task with very great skill. The difficulty of the task is, indeed, in large measure concealed by the skill of its accomplishment. No naval historian has ever had to paint on so large a canvas. None has ever had such intricate and far-reaching operations to describe.”

CORIAT, ISADORE HENRY.[2]Repressed emotions. *$2 Brentano’s 130

20–19840

“Defining emotional repression as ‘the defense of conscious thinking from mental processes which are painful’ the author goes on to explain the nature of repression, its relation to the unconscious, the part it plays in mental disorders and the manner in which it may be treated through psychoanalysis. He gives a description of the unconscious, emphasizing its importance in the light of the new psychology, and states that it ‘originated not only in the childhood of man but in the childhood of the world,’ and that in it ‘is condensed and capitulated the cultural history of mankind.’ The process of psychoanalysis is outlined, and its value, not only in the treatment of neuroses, but also for the insight it furnishes into certain character defects, is pointed out. The author lays special stress on the fact that psychoanalysis is largely educational since it serves to further the development of character.”—Survey

“Dr Coriat has made good his promise of adding to the knowledge of the race. A simpler vocabulary would sublimate the complexities of his thought.”

“On the whole the book is very well written, avoiding terminology which might confuse the lay reader, and while it contains nothing especially new, it does help to clarify one’s ideas on the subject and is well worth reading.” J. J. Joslyn

CORNELL, FRED C.[2]Glamour of prospecting. il *$6 (6c) Stokes 916

The volume is a record of the “wanderings of a South African prospector in search of copper, gold, emeralds, and diamonds.” (Sub-title) The book was written before the outbreak of the war, and the country has since undergone many changes and many of the waste places, difficult of travel, can now be reached by rail. But this still leaves vast untapped spaces for the lover of adventure. It was the love of adventure more than the mineral riches that tempted the author and his book is, therefore, no handbook for the would-be prospector, neither is it intended to discourage him with discomforts and hardships, for these “were richly compensated for by the glorious freedom and adventure of the finest of outdoor lives, spent in one of the finest countries and climates of the world.” (Preface) The book is well illustrated from photographs and contains an insert map.

“The author has a keen sense of humor and an equally marked facility in description. And his experiences furnish him ample opportunity to give full play to both of these powers.”

“His story may be taken as a treasure hunt; but it is something more permanently satisfying than fiction, for it treats of real things.”

CORWIN, EDWARD SAMUEL.Constitution and what it means today. $1.50 Princeton univ. press 342.7

20–26748

“Within the compass of only one hundred fourteen pages, Professor Corwin has combined with the full text of the Constitution of the United States a series of concise explanations elucidating as far as necessary every paragraph of this document. In a brief introduction he states his purpose to be, not merely to explain the original intentions of the founders of our government, but to show what in the course of time the constitution has come to mean and does actually mean today.”—Review

“The task set for this volume has been performed skillfully, concisely, and unostentatiously. There is in this book no citation of cases or decisions, which would deflect its purpose, and no intrusion of private opinion.” D: J. Hill

“The idea of the book is excellent. A greater proportion of quotations from decisions of the supreme court would be welcome. And the comment on the question whether the president should pay an income tax savors of personal opinion.”

CORY, GEORGE EDWARD.Rise of South Africa. 4v v 3 il *$9 (*25s) Longmans 968

“Professor Cory in the new volume of his excellent history of South Africa, deals fully with the critical era that followed the abolition of slavery and that saw the great trek. The author states with much force the case of the colonists, and especially the Dutch farmers, against a most unsympathetic and tactless government.” (Spec) “What was said and written and done at this particular critical time shaped and coloured the whole subsequent history of South Africa; and the mischief then wrought never has been, and possibly never will be, wholly eliminated. As Professor Cory shows, the great trek did not take place because the Dutch did not like their British neighbors, but because they wanted to be quit of the British government, as that government was directed from England.” (The Times [London] Lit Sup) Descriptive note for volume 1 will be found in the Book Review Digest for 1910; for volume 2 in 1914.

“Allowing for the restricted scope of the treatment, both in time and area, the author has made a valuable contribution of far more general interest than the particular incidents he actually describes.” A. L. Cross

“The conclusions reached by Mr Cory are those already familiar; but, assuredly, they have never before been based on such a background of well-digested and well-marshalled authority. In more than one instance the author has been able to interview survivors of the events narrated; whilst, throughout, the best evidence available is dispassionately put forward. Undoubtedly the author’s extreme moderation renders more impressive the judgment at which he arrives.” H. E. Egerton

“It is a book of high merit, clearly written, attractively illustrated, bearing evidence of tireless research and of information derived from first-hand sources, so far as such sources still exist. For South African readers it provides a reasoned and whole-hearted defence of a past generation of colonists, both British and Dutch. From the point of view of a wider public it lends itself to some criticism, on the double ground that the author, as is natural from his surroundings, is over much an advocate, and that his book, from its minuteness and wealth of detail, is too much of a chronicle and too little of a history.”

CORY, HERBERT ELLSWORTH.Intellectuals and the wage workers. $2 Sunwise turn 304

20–1365

“Mr Herbert Ellsworth Cory’s ‘The Intellectuals and the wage workers’ is an attempt to present the terms upon which intellectuals and wage workers should unite in the task of social reconstruction. But Mr Cory sees modern society, the labor movement, and the purpose of revolution in psychoanalytic terms. He states his purpose thus: ‘I have been trying to make some forecast of the processes by which intellectuals and wage workers will unite to break down rationally those institutions which are but hysterical symptoms, compromises, bad habit-formations from competitive random activities, morbid complexes and inertia.’”—Nation

“His apparently easy references to the most diverse contributors in half a dozen fields of human knowledge, philosophy, psychology, education, the labor movement, economics, the physical sciences, are amazing. Yet a full integration seems to be lacking. The members of the proletariat, to whom, it is evident, he dedicates his volume, will be least likely to grasp Mr Cory’s message because it is so heavily weighted with scientific terms.”

“He has revealed the tragedy of modern thought, but has lacked the force to bring it into touch with the tragedy of modern life, and has produced half a book instead of a whole one. The half book that he has written could hardly be done better.” Gilbert Cannan

“I hope that it will be widely read; for there is need for all to know what fantastic speculation is constantly issuing from the revolutionary fold. Among thinking persons the book will prove its own best antidote.” W. J. Ghent

“It is to be hoped that Professor Cory will work out his theory in more detail in its relation to the labor union movement. He sometimes gives the impression of a man seeing it through a golden haze. In avoiding the cocksure pedantry of the typical college professor he has now and then fallen into an uncritical acceptance of unprofessional things.” W: E. Bohn

COSTER, CHARLES THEODORE HENRI DE.Flemish legends. il *$3 Stokes 398.2

20–26992

These legends, translated from the French by Harold Taylor and supplied with eight woodcuts by Albert Delstanche, are taken from the folk-lore current in the middle ages in Brabant and Flanders. The translator’s note contains a brief survey of De Coster’s career as a writer. The first tale of “The brotherhood of the cheerful countenance,” tells how the inn-keeper Pieter Gans, of Uccle, was tempted by the devil to set up the image of Bacchus in his hall and form the above brotherhood, whereupon there were nightly carousings by the male population of Uccle; and how, therefore, it fell to the lot of the women of Uccle, to form themselves into an archery club, under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and save the city from brigands. The other tales are: The three sisters; Sir Halewyn; Smetse Smee.

“They are Rabelaisian in form but without the coarseness and rollicking humor of the great French satirist. There is much of somber beauty in the stories, but also much of the blood-lust of the period.”

“If, like Rabelais, and Balzac after Rabelais, he uses his mastery in that old French the richness and breadth of which were not yet shorn by the correct and academical, he is wholly Belgian, and comparable at most and best with Jordaens, or rather with Rubens, who to robust sensuousness could add the heroic, lavish the while of colour and exuberance.”

COTTER, WINIFRED.Sheila and others. *$2 Dutton

20–18386

“Subtitled ‘The simple annals of an unromantic household,’ this unpretentious little volume relates some of the experiences of a Canadian family, experiences principally concerned with dogs and servants. There are some fourteen sketches in the volume, several of them being concerned with the parrot and the dog who were the pets of the household. The succession of ‘wash ladies,’ the peculiar behavior of the seamstress, the ‘Suppression of a cuckoo clock,’ the point of view maintained by the vacuum cleaner agent ... these and others of the kind provide the author with themes.”—N Y Times

“Most of the papers are very mildly humorous, and all of them are pleasantly written.”

“Sketches of merit, but menaced as a collection by a certain excess of ‘brightness.’ On the whole the whimsies of housekeeping are relatively wearisome to the male; I suspect this volume will fare best as read aloud in purely feminine circles.” H. W. Boynton

COTTERILL, HENRY BERNARD.Italy from Dante to Tasso (1300–1600). il *$5 Stokes 945

20–2716

This volume follows “Medieval Italy during a thousand years,” published in 1915. It is a review of the political history of Italy from 1300–1600 “as viewed from the standpoint of the chief cities, with descriptions of important episodes and personalities and of the art and literature of the three centuries.” (Subtitle)

“We should be inclined to trust Mr Cotterill further in art than in literature. His style improves noticeably as he proceeds, and he lays aside to some extent his irritating habit of breaking into the historic present on the slightest provocation. As a whole the book is thoroughly sound and useful. The photographs are suitably chosen, and there are good chronological tables, lists of artists and genealogies of the chief reigning houses.” L. C.-M.

“The great mass of materials relating to a disorganized country and to the achievements in art are so interwoven as to form a scholarly, clear whole.”

“The author has adopted an excellent and satisfactory plan for compassing his enormous field and clarifying the immense detail that goes to make up the history of these perhaps most significant centuries in the world’s history. The book was evidently written during the war and the author is frequently rather amusingly, pleased to find German authorities in error.” B. B. Amram

“The author’s bias in favour of republicanism is unfortunate in its results upon his work.... It is useless, however, to discuss differences of opinion in a book the subject of which is so immense; we can only repeat our conviction that a reader who expects to find a general book on the art, literature and history of all the Italian states during their most important period will find Mr Cotterill’s book useful, though he will be well advised to supplement its judgments with other and more detailed works, and to make free use of the historical lists and tables provided at the end of the book, and of the useful index.”

COUPERUS, LOUIS MARIE ANNE.Inevitable; tr. by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. *$2 (2c) Dodd

20–18761

The title of the story indicates its fatalism. At the age of twenty-three Cornélie de Retz van Loo was a divorced woman. She had passionately loved the handsome Baron Brox when she married him, but their temperaments had clashed from the beginning. He had gone so far in his masterful, brutal way, as to beat her and she had run away. She went to Italy to be alone and to reconstruct her life. She became a feminist and achieved some fame in the woman movement by her pamphlet on “The social position of divorced women.” Also she met Duco van der Staal, the painter and dreamer and formed a free union. They were a most harmonious couple, complementing and stimulating each other; helping each other to find their “line of life.” But Cornélie will not hear of marriage. She is through with marriage. Impecuniosity enjoins a temporary separation. Cornélie takes a position as companion. There she meets her former husband who at once exerts hypnotic power over her and commands her to return to him. Cornélie flees and returns to Duco, but even in his arms and knowing that she loves only him, her inexorable fate is upon her. She follows the call of him whom she does not love, but whose property and chattel she is because she was once his wife.

“Of the four other Couperus novels which have now been published in this country, ‘The inevitable’ is decidedly the best from the mere standpoint of novel writing.” D. L. M.

“Taken as a whole, it is rich in beauty, rich in passion, has much of gentle dreaming and superb awakening; yet it contains a certain sadness which oftimes borders close to melancholy—a splendid woof woven together with a warp of morbidity.” M. D. Walker

“There are many chapters in ‘The inevitable,’ aside from the concluding one, which mark the book as an exquisite example of the fictionist’s art. The author’s touch is always delicate and sure in handling the lights and shades of thought and emotion. The author’s powers of characterization are excellent.”

“‘Inevitable’ is decidedly well written and translated; it is extremely attractive in its pictures of Rome, of Italian society, and of the foreign colonists.” R. D. Townsend

“As in ‘The tour,’ the author’s interest in antiquity and in art finds very full expression in these pages, as well as his sense of racial contrasts and interplay among those who chance to meet on alien soil.” H. W. Boynton

COUPERUS, LOUIS MARIE ANNE.Tour; tr. by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. *$2 (2c) Dodd

20–10054

In this book Louis Couperus, the Dutch novelist, tells a story of ancient Egypt. Publius Lucius Sabinus, a young Roman lord, is touring the Nile seeking diversion and forgetfulness of his lost love, whom he believes drowned. This is the outward reason. Actually he has come to visit all the various oracles to learn what he can of her whereabouts. One after the other they reveal to him the thoughts that are in his own mind and bring him to admit what others have all the time known, that the girl has shamelessly deserted him and run off with a common sailor. At the end of the tour news meets him that the Emperor Tiberius has confiscated all his property, but Lucius, who has now found solace with the Greek slave Cora, is impervious to the stings of fortune and faces a life of poverty with gaiety. The story is told lightly and with humor.

“‘The tour’ adds much to the Dutch novelist’s laurels, for it achieves the unusual success of being totally unstrained by ‘melodrama,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘passion,’ ‘revenge,’ or any other of the common characteristics of a modern novel, and yet it is enthrallingly interesting.” G. M. H.

“Although passages of fictional interest reward the more frivolous-minded reader occasionally, and although there is a love scene toward the end, there is much Baedeker between. The work is unmistakably Couperus, delicate and suggestive, yet precise.” F. E. H.

“His style is exquisite, delicate, unusual, and beautifully translated.”

“This book, even more perhaps than the stories that deal with his Dutch contemporaries, exhibits his frugal ease and grace, the strength and delicacy of his execution, the conscious but always finely restrained melodic structure of his prose.” Ludwig Lewisohn

“A certain degree of relief is given to the otherwise sombre picture by the two figures of Uncle Catullus and of the Sabaean guide Caleb, the latter being a convincing presentment of a type which has changed but little with the passing of time. Those who are interested in the lives of the rich as they were some couple of thousands of years ago, and in the decay of the oldest and at one time the most powerful civilization upon earth, will find ‘The tour’ a fascinating book.”

“It is, at all events, a gay little affair. It is a romantic comedy in the vein of ‘Twelfth night’—which, with its disconsolate young lord and the manner of his comforting, it vaguely resembles.”

“Told with light, ironic humor and exquisite artistry.”

COURNOS, JOHN.Mask. *$1.90 (2c) Doran

20–262

“This is the story of the making of a human mask.” (Overture) It is the story of John Gombarov’s childhood and youth, as he told it years afterward to a friend in London. Born in Russia, into a family of “emancipated Jews,” he spends his early childhood there and tells of the quaint customs and the kind of people he remembers. Then, the family fortune being hopelessly ruined by his stepfather, a man with the soul of a child and the mind of an inventor, they come to America, the land of promise. The process of Americanization that Vanya, now John, goes through in ‘The city of brotherly love’ is not a pretty picture to contemplate. There the “wretched little foreigner” is run “through a mangle” to “wring Europe out of his flesh and bones like dirt out of a garment.” Only a heroic soul of the type of John Gombarov’s could survive uncrushed. But it put the mask on his face.

“The charm and power of the book lie in its welding of substance and form,—its ‘style,’ in the only sense that matters. Its pictures are conveyed as if by indirection. Yet they are as clear-cut as the work of a lapidary.” H. W. Boynton

“The embarrassing predicament of ‘The mask’ is that it is a reasonably good book. Now a reasonably good book is peculiarly elusive. One cannot tumble all over himself with praise of it, nor can he object to it without a futile qualification of every statement. Mr Cournos, like so many of our present-day writers, goes about his work with intelligence, an impeccable keenness of vision, and some thoroughly arrived attitudes. Consequently, one cannot get at him. He is impregnably aware. Such people are skilled in the art of giving just as much as can be endured, and no more.” Kenneth Burke

“If ‘The mask’ does no more than picture the struggle of an immigrant family in ‘The city of brotherly love’ it is a rich contribution to American literature. But it certainly does much more than that.” Alvin Winston

“It is the poetry in this novel that makes its starkness endurable. Behind the welter of life that it presents is an irresistible impulse to live with mastery, with beauty, with meaning.”

Reviewed by H. W. Boynton

“‘The mask’ is a great book, curiously Elizabethan in spirit, a cry of joy and life that existence cannot quench.”

“There is a vein of poetry in the telling.”

“A book like this cannot be read lightly as an amusement. It is closely written, with an intensity of feeling (usually hatred, particularly of America) which will be a little startling to Englishmen. John Gombarov is a fine character; the book is created for him; he is the central interest which holds this discursive narrative together. If he is not precisely a lovable character, he is a real and living one.”

COURSAULT, JESSE HARLIAMAN.Principles of education. (Beverley educational ser.) *$2.50 Silver 370

20–20531

“The purpose of this book is to make simple, definite, and clear, a body of principles which should guide in educational thought and practice. Every student of education has certain fundamental beliefs, or principles, which he uses as standards in judging the truth or falsity of educational ideas and practices, upon which, as an explanatory basis, he organizes his knowledge of educational matters, and in the light of which he sees new difficulties to be overcome and new problems to be solved.... To deal intelligently with these educational problems, to deal intelligently with any educational problems, even where scientific measurement is made use of, one must have some fundamental ideas as to the nature of education and the part which education plays in the drama of life.” (Chapter I) The contents fall into three parts: The individual process; The social process; The educational process. There is a bibliography and an index.

“A preliminary statement of suggestions for using the book as a text, together with a graphic outline of the book itself, found in one chapter, add to the usefulness of the volume.”

“The book is excellently organized for teaching purposes. The reinterpretation of the contributions of the great educational philosophers is clear and concise, and is interwoven most appropriately with the unfolding of the theme.”

COURTNEY, MRS JANET ELIZABETH (HOGARTH).Freethinkers of the nineteenth century. il *$6 Dutton 274.2

(Eng ed 20–12144)

“A cross section of English intellectual life as it reflected the new tendencies is presented in a biographical study of seven outstanding personages of the period by Janet E. Courtney in ‘Freethinkers of the nineteenth century.’ The seven are Frederick Denison Maurice, Matthew Arnold, Charles Bradlaw, Thomas Henry Huxley, Leslie Stephen, Harriet Martineau and Charles Kingsley, the last included rather as an associate of free thinkers and a sympathizer with them than as one actually of their number. The author in a preface explains the selection as promoted by recollection of youthful impressions of the controversies in many fields of intellectual activity.”—Springf’d Republican

“Her book reads a little as if Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen and the others were files of old newspapers, from which she has been diligently and judiciously clipping. But the clippings, it is only fair to add, are connected by a well-informed and easy narrative, and each whole is a story told with tolerance and humor and a pleasant contagious gratitude.”

“Miss Courtney has done her work well; her brief biographies are intelligent, sympathetic, and discriminating, and are interesting reading.”

“Mrs Courtney’s book is well worth reading. We regret its omissions, and it does not go very deep; but as a record of facts and of sympathetic interpretation it is interesting.”

“Their stories are intelligently and interestingly told.”

COUSINS, FRANK, and RILEY, PHIL MADISON.Colonial architecture of Salem. *$8 Little 728

19–19769

“The chapter headings [of this book are:] The gable and peaked-roof house; The lean-to house; The gambrel-roof house; The square three-story wood house; The square three-story brick house; Doorways and porches; Windows and window frames; Interior wood finish; Halls and stairways; Mantels and chimney places; Public buildings; Salem architecture of today. The first five chapters trace a definite development in Salem architecture by periods in a more thorough manner than has before been attempted. The last chapter deals with modern houses designed and built with rare good taste along historic lines since the disastrous Salem fire of 1914.”—Bookm

“It is not a chatty book like Miss Henderson’s; it is rather a serious, analytical, descriptive, and semi-technical study.” W. A. Dyer

“The most valuable as well as the most complete study of the subject.”

COUTTS, FRANCIS BURDETT THOMAS MONEY-.Spacious times and others. *$1.25 Lane 821

20–7868

A book of poems by an English writer, author of a number of volumes of essays and verse. Part 1 consists of war poems with such titles as: The new Pisgah; To the Belgians; To America aloof; To America at war; To an anticompulsion demagogue; To the strikers; The conscientious shirker; To Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. The second part contains poems of other days. Notes on some of the war poems come at the close.

“For all their fourteen lines and their Petrarchan rhyme-system, they have the quality of newspaper articles.”

Reviewed by R. M. Weaver

“Much better than most of the lyrics of the war is a quiet poem about a woman, called ‘Her character.’” Marguerite Williams

“They have eloquence; but it is rather the stilted eloquence of a sententious publicist than poetry; and it is lost when the writer drops to political abuse. On the whole the inspiration runs thinly throughout.”

COX, HAROLD.Economic liberty. *$2.75 Longmans 330

20–12900

“Mr Harold Cox has collected and reprinted from the quarterlies a number of his recent articles on economic and political questions. Mr Cox rightly lays stress on the importance of economic liberty which is obtainable only under our existing system. There is much truth in Mr Cox’s chapter on socialist ethics. He devotes a chapter to the special fallacy of ‘Nationalisation,’ involving the state control under which enterprise withers and individual initiative ceases. There are some essays, too, on the question of free trade or protection, and an eloquent paper on ‘The two paths of empire’—the old protectionist methods which we abandoned deliberately last century, and the modern creed of freedom under which the dominions and the crown colonies and protectorates have developed very rapidly and successfully.”—Spec

“Will be appreciated by those who distrust state control and by radical thinkers who wish seriously to consider opposing points of view.”

“One would, in fact, like to see these essays expanded into a general political philosophy, and we believe there would be a welcome for such a book, and that it would have considerable influence.”

“Mr Cox’s general line of reasoning is sound.”

“In dealing with present day problems, Cox is academic and aloof from realities. Nevertheless, this is a good book for reformers of all schools who sincerely desire to consider their cause in the light of every genuine opposing argument.” B. L.

COXON, MURIEL (HINE) (MRS SYDNEY COXON).Breathless moment. *$2 (2½c) Lane

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