Book Reviews
“Be always drunken!” said Charles Baudelaire. “Be always and forever drunken—with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose.” Our best of all possible worlds has, indeed, run aground on evil days since then. To become drunken by any of the means which Baudelaire suggests, is to arouse comment, if not suspicion, in the year nineteen twenty-two.
Only one last refuge is left to those who would be always and forever drunken—the tales of Lord Dunsany. And, in his latest book, this literary Bacchus has not failed us. For “The Chronicles of Rodriguez” are apt to make all lovers of beauty in words very drunken—as drunken as men used to grow in Merry England who drank too deeply of the magic rymes of Spenser.
His real name was Rodriguez Trinidad Fernandez Concepcion Henrique Maria—and, before the tale is done, even that stupendous name has grown in stature by the breadth of a title or two, such is the magic warmth of Golden Spain. His father, the old Lord of the Valleys of Arguento Harez, from whose heights Angelico swore he saw Valladolid once; his father was grieved, as he lay dying, to see that Rodriguez’s younger brother had grown to manhood dull and clever, one on whom those traits that women love had not been bestowed by God. And so, knowing that the poor fellow could gain nothing for himself, since women are the arbiters of all things here on earth, and for aught he knew hereafter, the old Lord gave him all his lands and goods, except only his ancient Castilian sword. This he gave to Rodriguez, his eldest son, in the grand manner that they had at that time in Spain, saying, “I leave you, my son, well content that you have the two accomplishments that are most needful in a Christian man, skill with the sword and a way with the mandolin.” Then he gathered up his strength for the last time and looked at his son. “Thesword to the wars,” he said. “The mandolin to the balconies.”
And now, since no one can hear of such a tale and rest content until they know what further magic is in store, I leave you all, like the old Lord, content that you will go to seek the wars and the balconies—which is the business of a book reviewer.
L. S. G.
Readers of “Poems by a Little Girl” who were surprised at the extraordinarily beautiful poetry such a little girl could produce, will be even more surprised and pleased by the contents of this second volume. Hilda Conkling, with her childhood simplicity of ideas, seems to have discovered unconsciously the most satisfactory content for poems inverse libre. Naïveté is stilted in metrical form, but seems to run truly like “shoes of the wind” along the irregularities of free verse, whereas the vulgar aphorisms of some contemporaries would be more likeable if they were better clothed with the conventionalities of metre and rhyme.
Wordsworth would have loved Hilda Conkling. She would have been ample proof for him that children come, “trailing clouds of glory”. Here is her own expression of it:
I was thinkingThe tenderness children needIs in soft shadow-things;Is a kind of magic ...Petals of a dark pansy ...Cloudy wings....
I was thinkingThe tenderness children needIs in soft shadow-things;Is a kind of magic ...Petals of a dark pansy ...Cloudy wings....
I was thinkingThe tenderness children needIs in soft shadow-things;Is a kind of magic ...Petals of a dark pansy ...Cloudy wings....
I was thinking
The tenderness children need
Is in soft shadow-things;
Is a kind of magic ...
Petals of a dark pansy ...
Cloudy wings....
“Shoes of the Wind” will delight anyone who likes lyrical poetry of the most beautiful sort.
D. C. C.
At the moment of writing this review, Mrs. Wharton’s publishers announce that the public continues to inconsiderately overtax and distress them, by calling for “Glimpses of the Moon”at the rate of three thousand copies a day. This, of course, is quite as it should be. But we still venture to hope that at least one hundred persons per day will join us in a courageous effort to forget all about it, and await Mrs. Wharton’s next book, just as if nothing had happened. It is evidently too much to hope for another “Age of Innocence” at once—but one is only too glad to wait for it.
As for the immensely more important two thousand nine hundred, they will find that they have purchased three hundred and sixty-four pages of what looks like good solid reading matter, only to find it so adroitly written that it slips away at almost a single sitting, and forces one to decide what to read next.
Should they decide to turn out the light and pull up the covers, however, they may do so secure in the knowledge that Susy and her Nick at last realize that “this is love! This must be love!”, and determined to call off the divorce that has been threatening all through the book. It is all very splendid, for Nick could have married the Hicks millions, and Susy might have been Lady Altringham five minutes after the decree was issued. Lest anyone should be unduly stampeded by this outline of the plot, we might mention that Mrs. Wharton has carefully avoided “the tiny garments”, and that it is while mothering the children of a stray acquaintance that she, together with Nick, finally glimpses the moon, which has been decidedly under a cloud during most of the book.
L. S. G.
We learn from the jacket (that most entertaining part of so many books; for there pure imagination soars into the literary empyrian—) that Mr Tuckerman is “a new American writer of twenty-five”. Warned by that designation to expect one of the precocious works of cynical sophistication of the terrible “younger school”, we cannot be anything but agreeably surprised when that turns out to be an erroneous supposition. In its early chapters “Breath of Life” does not treat of the collegiate youthwho sits out dances with worldly-wise and unsurpriseable débutantes, and gets drunk in fashionable cafés; but that sort of thing has been done so much in “first novels” of late that the aspect is negligible. The main part of the story is frankly given over to that type which calls for gallant action, and gay, not too-analytically-treated romance; as such it makes for easy, delightful reading.
Everett Gail has left college—“New Haven”—after two lazy, profitless years, to see whether business cannot end his restlessness and give purpose to his existence. He soon finds that office work makes him an automaton, and the incidental round of parties bores him. He disgraces himself before the one girl he cares at all about by getting drunk, and it is while in this condition that he climbs aboard a ship bound for the Caribbean. The harsh realities of the work on shipboard end when he dives overboard in the harbor of Santa Palina, and there he finds the life of excitement which he craves. Days of adventurous intrigue and revolutionary plots follow, with the necessary love-element in the person of an insurgent leader’s charming daughter. In the end he saves an astonishing number of American Marines’ lives, receives the thanks of his government,—and sails back home.
“Breath of Life” is not a profound book; it propounds no unsolvable problems; and there are certain banalities and traces of a still immature style evident. These are the natural signs of a new author’s development. But it is the sort of book that you will enjoy reading. Mr. Tuckerman’s characterizations are rather good; his sense of scene is excellent. For those of us who desire an occasional respite from the rigors of Yale’s iron-clad curriculum, “Breath of Life” offers pleasant relaxation.
C. G. P.