Book Discussion
The Enchantment of Art, by Duncan Phillips. [John Lane Company, New York.]
ToMr. Phillips life is aFête Galantein Watteau’s style. He sees nothing but the elegant, the poetic, the joyous, the enchanting. I picture him in a powdered wig, clad in a gorgeous costume of the Louis XV. period, playfully lorgnetting life and art, and raving ecstatically over everybody and everything. I confess, an all-loving person looks suspicious to me; but Mr. Phillips’ book is so sincere, he adores things so pathetically, that I cannot help enjoying him. He becomes irritating only at such moments when he tries to be very much in earnest and breaks into absurd generalization. His credo is Impressionism—in life and in art—but what an elastic term is Impressionism to our dear enthusiast. Giotto, Titian, Da Vinci, Velasquez, Corot, and Dégas were impressionists, and so were Shakespeare, and Browning, and Keats, and Yeats, and Robert Bridges and who not! He loves them all, loves beautifully, touchingly, but he fails pitifully to define his beliefs. Why should he define? Why not be happy in enjoying good things without giving reasons, without strained endeavors to form classifications and definitions? Oh, those definitions! But we easily forgive the author his absurd statements, we can even sympathize with the pain he gets when contemplating the Futurists, whom he terms “lawless.†We forgive a lover everything, for we feel grateful to him for the moments of bliss that he generously shares with us. Truly, it is a book of religious joy.
K.
The Age of Mother-Power, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]
One is compelled to take Mrs. Gallichan seriously in her visioning of the future social status of men and of women in the world of sex; for the results of close observation, research, and computation strengthen the most reasonable prophecies. She is modest enough to state her big idea in simple terms. She points out that, since society had in its primitive days a long and up-tending period of mother-power, or female dominance; and, following that, a protracted season of masculine rule, which is only now awakening to feminine rebellion; it is clearly apparent that a new era is commencing, in which all the old virtues of mother-right will be re-established in newforms, with the distinctly modern addition of that solitary virtue of male despotism—father-protection. This is a theory—only a theory, if one wishes to preen one’s own prejudice—which the writer approaches and develops from various angles. She has fruitfully studied history, legend, folk-lore, savages, and other departments of human life. Her deductions are carefully and lucidly thought out, strongly original, and entirely worthy of attention.
Herman Schuchert.
The Great War, by Frank H. Simonds. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
The European war threatens to become a prolonged phenomenon. To the Trans-Atlantic public it is a keenly-felt tragedy; to us here it is an interesting spectacle, the audience being requested to remain neutral, to refrain from applause and disapproval. Even so, we are in need of a libretto. Frank H. Simonds supplies us with a comprehensive account of the first act of the drama. The lay reader is getting acquainted with the complexities of the pre-war events and with the further developments of the conflict down to the fall of Antwerp. The simple maps and the lucid comments make the book not only instructive, but also readable. You must read the book if you do not want to play the ignoramus in present-day floating, cinematographic history.
Insurgent Mexico, by John Reed. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]
“Who is John Reed?â€, asked the newspapers when, forgetting for the moment their name-worshipping arrogance, they discovered that the best reports from Mexico were coming, not from the veteran correspondents, but from an unknown. The answer is that John Reed is the only “correspondent†that the Mexican mix-up or the present European struggle has yet brought to light, who has a really new and individual method of reporting. These are not dogmatic, cock-sure, crisis-solving “articles†from the front, but simple, vivid reporting of scenes and actions that have some reason for being reported. And John Reed is about the only reporter who has shown us that the Mexican people have visions of a future. The newspapers andthose whose duty it seemsto be to uphold the old idea are now crying that Reed’s simple realism is too slight to be of value as history, and that he does not “get beneath the surfaceâ€â€”but these people have still to see which kind of reporting can endure as history.
Life and Law, by Maude Glasgow. [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.]
A secondary title—“The Development of the Exercise of the Sex Function Together with a Study of the Effect of Certain Natural and Human Laws and a Consideration of the Hygiene of Sexâ€â€”is evidenceper sethat the book is inadequate and superficial. In less than two hundred pages no writer can more than hint at all these topics, and in trying to cover so much ground the author really covers nothing. She tells over old facts and frequently gives them what are now accepted as incorrect values. Her statements are as sweeping as the scare heads of the old quack medicine almanacs. She describes men as ignorant, intolerable, immoral monsters; and women as being universally down-trodden and the sexual victims of man’s unbridled appetite. The book is as full of “musts†and “shoulds†as the rules of an old-fashioned school master. The author tells nothing new; veers from science to sentimentality in a most disconcerting way; and adds nothing to the constantly-increasing library of valuable sex books.
Mary Adams Stearns.