Search

This article focuses on the book "The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal," by F.L. Lucas. The book includes a not unpleasing account of a journey to Iceland, for most critics stick, Mr. Lucas think, too closely to libraries, and a long attack on Coleridge and a shorter one on surrealism and Ezra Pound. It is a little difficult to find one's way intellectually through all these riches, and the author is apparently aware of the fact. For he provides "an epilogue for reviewers and others who may find the book too long."

The article focuses on books "Not So Deep As a Well," by Dorothy Parker and "Rhyme and Punishment," by Leonard Bacon. At the risk of provoking one of those quiet murders by repartee for which Parker is notorious, the author must say that he judges, purely from the internal evidence in these poems, that her life has been terrible-terribly monotonous. Bacon's volume consists really of conversation pieces of a pleasant, cultivated mind which is tired of the admired and unadmired in current winds of doctrine. The indignations and enthusiasms are, many of them, such as many enlightened people share.

The plight of the humanities in the war has reached the consciousness of the general public in the form of news about the draft of eighteen-year-olds and its effect upon the liberal-arts colleges. There are reasons for the lack of concern over the abandonment of the liberal-arts studies for the duration of the war. One of the reason is that the humanities have always been regarded as a polite veneer in peace times they have not been granted much social or political consequence. The liberal arts have meant culture and culture has been connected with the genteel tradition.

The article gives information on the book "The Reform of Education," by Giovanni Gentile and translated by Dino Bigongiari. The volume of Gentile under review is ostensibly a book of somewhat chauvinistic addresses to teachers in the newly Italian city of Trieste. It is perhaps less important as an essay in education than as a concrete introduction to the idealistic position which lies behind it. Assuming the difficult dialectics by which they are arrived at, Gentile's conclusions may be summarized as the essence of reality is thought, by the activity of which all thinkable things have their being.

The article throws light on conditions of survival and productivity of a literary artist in an American environment. The question becomes more pointed and meaningful when one begins to examine the specific Americas in which writers with serious artistic intentions have tried and are trying to live. For many reasons, most of them economic, writers in the U.S. live usually in a professional environment and among professional groups whose interests are far from being those of the literary artist. Thus, few novelists and fewer poets can hope to make a living out of writing precisely and only the things they care as artists to write.

Writer Henri Bergson died in Paris, France on January 4, 1941, at the age of eighty-one. The general public, and that relatively private clique known as the philosophical public, had long ago fallen into the habit of thinking of Bergson as dead. Only on the publication of the dramatic news of Bergson's decision to renounce all posts and honors rather than to accept exemption from the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government was the world reminded that he was still alive. There had been an interval of more than twenty-five years between the publication of his phenomenally successful "Creative Evolution," in 1907 and the book rather blindly called "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion." Bergson was rebelling against the fixities and rigidities which both logicians and materialists had ascribed to reality.

The article focuses on the book "George Santayana," by George W. Howgate. This book does not provide the occasion to reassess the specifically "philosophical" accomplishment of George Santayana. It is itself frankly an attempt at estimating his place in the culture of our generation. Howgate is obviously a literary scholar rather than a philosopher and he studies Santayana primarily as a writer at once intellectual and imaginative, among whose themes have been moral philosophy, metaphysics and literary criticism. Mr. Howgate says justly that Santayana has made a unique contribution to our culture, that his writings-poetry, soliloquies, novels and treatises-illuminate one another.

This article focuses on the book "On the Contented Life," by Edgar A. Singer. This is not an easy book to read. Its title does something less than justice to the serious substance and, the disciplined and subtle manner of mind revealed in its pages. This book is free, on the whole, from technical terms, and consists of scattered essays, but each of these is dialectically closely knit, Professor Singer professes a preference for mathematical language, and though there, is unmistakable ardor in these pages, it is the heat of banked fires.

The article presents the author's comments on the book "Education for Modern," by Sidney Hook. The author says that Hook has written a sensible little book and a much-needed one in which he rescues the discussion of education from the rarefied and somewhat snobbish atmosphere in which it has in certain quarters been carried on and from the unrealistic isolation from society in which the whole enterprise of learning and teaching has been conceived. Moreover, Hook loves a good controversy and so he cannot resist adding some sharp and documented thrusts against the theory and practice of Saint Johns College.

The article presents the author's comments on the Report of the Harvard Committee titled "General Education in a Free Society." The book is concerned with a far wider question of which the suggested revision the Harvard College program is one chapter. The report is occupied with the central issue of the general education of the great majority of each generation in the high schools of the U.S. This report turns out to be not only a discussion of education in the narrow sense but also a theory of human nature and civilization.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. Criticism on the poem; Response to the criticism; Emphasis on human dignity.

In this article the author presents his views on the obituary page. The author says that it was not morbidity that made him turn to the obituary page, heading for it directly after the front-page headlines and skipping past the columns about books, or beauty, or now even food. His curiosity in reading the accounts of the only just deceased is not about the dead but about the living. For these obituary accounts, much livelier than they used to be -- if one may so put it -- are excellent thumb-nail biographies of persons with whose virtues and qualities, as well as their names, one perhaps becomes acquainted for the first time only when they are dead. It is not the records of the most famous that are the most interesting, nor is it always the longest accounts that provoke the largest reflection.

What is a classic? The best that has been thought and said in the world. There is a criterion of the classic, more vulgar but none the less significant, persistence, in those pieces of prose and poetry, often fugitive, often widely misquoted and anonymous in the memories of a wide public. "A Treasury of the Familiar," edited by Ralph L. Woods, should include naturally passages of prose and poetry connected with both. The paradox remains why so much that is clearly cheap, limp in expression, flaccid in feeling, cliché in thought, should survive. There is Rudyard Kipling's poems "If" along with the "Ode to a Grecian Urn." Granted the purpose of the anthology, they belong here. For both are familiar and both have for generations brought tears to the eyes, sometimes to the same people, though at different stages in the history of their tastes.

This article presents information on books related to American history. Historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager retell with admirable succinctness and picturesqueness the history of America. Their very title defines their enterprise and their perspective. American history is to them the story of a free people, that is, the story of a people which, whatever its failure and divagations from the ideal, has been with surprising unanimity committed to the ideal of freedom and to the contriving of its realization. The Beards, writing a coda to their "Rise of American Civilization" under the title "The American Spirit," try to define the idea of civilization in the U.S. Far from unaware that our life in this country has its roots in a European past, they still make much of the idea that American civilization is a distinctive idea, a distinctive practice, and that it has a distinctive future.

According to the author, humor though it has not pervaded the works of philosophers, has haunted their consciences. They had not rested because they have not been able to define the secret of its mad and maddening logic, its absurd good seas, its ridiculous truthfulness. An anthology of humor, since it is an index to what a nation likes, is an index also to what it assumes as rational and what it defines as folly. It is an epitome of a culture-not a summary of it in formulas, but a synthesis of it in forms of feeling and its molds of judgment.

This article presents information on the book "Mythology: Western Imagination in the Making." The book provides the most delightful lesson for both the poets and scholars of criticism. It is a model, too, of what popularization can be in the hands of a writer both learned and imaginative. The first thing one is tempted to say about "Mythology" is that it is a Bullfinch for our time. But that is hardly a description, even a suggestion, of what the author has done. In a prose at once edged and colorful, the author has thrown the whole of even familiar Greek and Norse mythology into a fresh and luminous context.

The article focuses on the literary works of William James, a classic in American philosophy and American literature. "Pragmatism," which he termed "a new name for some old way of thinking," has become an established though ambiguous-part of the philosophical vocabulary. He as much as any man was responsible for liberating American thought, in so far as it has been liberated, from the heavy dialectical chains of German metaphysics. He is, moreover, a span from the classic tradition of American writing and thought to the present.

This article critically appraises the book "Darwin Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," by Jacques Barzun. In this book, the author examines, with no less remarkable scope and detail than animation, three nineteenth-century figures. These three are, in his erudite and documented judgment, central as symptoms and as symbols, and decisive as influences in the patterns of both actions and ideal in own day. Darwin, Marx, and Wagner are important, not because they were original or because any single work of theirs was a masterpiece.

The article focuses on the book "Anatomy of Criticism," by Henry Hazlitt. Hazlitt brings to bear on his craft three capacities which account in no small measure for the particular quality and impact of his work. His training in economics and finance saves him from literary dandyism, his love of literature for its own sake insures him against facile sociology, and his disciplined concern with philosophy leads him to the discovery and the examination of first principles in criticism. Hazlitt is too experienced a critic and too well-informed a reader not to know just what he is doing, nor is he ignorant of the difficulties and dangers of the philosophical dialogue presented in the book.

The article discusses books and authors. The new naturalism is as old at least as Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, which is to say, as old as Greek philosopher Democritus, or even older. Since labels are in order and to become a public possession, an idea must first attach to itself an ism, a suffix, it is hereby proposed that naturalism be the name given to a point of view which, though it had its inception in the lucid and direct intelligence of the Greeks, has been forgotten enough in contemporary times to have its mere revival regarded as a novelty.

The article critically appraises the book "Science and the Unseen World," by A.S. Eddington. A careful examination of this small but revealing book indicates not the nature of the physical world, but the nature of the mind of Eddington when it touches religious matters. Liberal theologians have taken him up because they think here is the latest scientific support for the belief in the existence of God. Eddington himself expressly denies that it is his intention to produce such proof or that he thinks science can do it.

The article focuses on two books by W.H.R. Rivers, namely, "Psychology and Politics" and "Conflict and Dream. Every age has its pet credulities and if people's favored miracles have passed off as psychological science it is not the first time that a changeling has found its way into the history of thought. There has been in the last decade an unprecedented flood of books that have pretentiously anatomized human nature and offered social psychology as social salvation. The war did something to cure people of their naive beliefs that new terms could cure old evils; people are ceasing to be gullible idolators of hasty science.

The article focuses on the book "The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art" by the author Rhys Carpenter. The book will help those who have already seen the temples at Paestum or Girgenti, or the marbles in the British Museum, to understand what they have seen, and perhaps to see some things more clearly in this enlightened retrospect than they did on the spot. To those who still look forward to beholding Greek vases and temples and sarcophagi, this book may be recommended as an indispensable propaedeutic. Besides which, Carpenter's book goes subtly and suggestively to the general principles more or less consciously controlling Greek artistic production.

The Polish question has a special and a double, significance for the U.S. In the first place, the freedom of Poland has become, since its official espousal by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, one of the specific issues for which the fight is still on. It is, next to Belgium, the most poignant provocation to the insistence on self-determination for all nations. In the second place, the Polish question is made distinctively American in its import by the presence of four million Poles in the U.S., a population as large as that of either Austrian or German Poland.

Presents several letters to the editor. Discussion of formation of the Civic Theatre Committee by a reader; Opinion of a reader on the Brotherhood Week celebrated from February 19-26; Feedback of a reader on the article "Congressman at Large."

This article discusses the book "Education of a Humanist," by Albert Guérard. The word humanities has come into vogue again, in academic circles chiefly, to identify those courses in the great books and the great traditions of art and music which are presumably to keep alive, in translations and in reproductions, the accrued humane values of the Western world. The word humanist pops up, too, though in various contexts, sometimes meaning a secular "religion of humanity," sometimes a worldly philosophy.

The article focuses on the book "The Innocent Eye," by Herbert Read. The author, Read has written poetry and critical prose. Following the advice of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he tells readers, he took regular employment in order to be a writer in his leisure hours. He is that phenomenon, more familiar in England than in this country, of the state functionary and man of letters in one. For many years he was an official in the British Treasury and for many years a curator of ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum. But he remained always, it is clear, primarily a man of letters, with a voracious interest in all the world's literature in all its genres. He remained throughout the littérateur who, partly as a result of his work in the museum, came to be a writer and to be known most widely as an effective critic of art and the arts.

The article presents information about the book "Why Religion?," by Horace M. Kallen. There is a lot of illusory information, scrambled into pretentious and irrelevant psychological jargon. The range is from sex orgies in primitive religion and matriarchy in primitive society to the organization of the church of Christian Science and the methods of deifying a president in a democratic society. There are the curiously complicated statements of any number of miscellaneous ideas, from the dismissal of the clergy as a guild whose craft is that of manipulating the supernatural to the familiar Jamesian idea that religious belief emerges and becomes important in times of personal and social crisis.

This article literally appraises the book "The Realm of Mind," by F.J.E. Woodbridge. Metaphysics, ostensibly an attempt to get at the ultimate principles which all experience involves, is frequently a recourse to notions which would be relevant to no experience whatsoever. The great merit of Mr. Woodbridge's book is its simplicity and its appropriateness to the world in which philosophy is one among many other occurrences. Its doctrine is almost absurdly simple and almost suspiciously sound. It will, therefore, beyond a doubt puzzle or astonish philosophers.

The article focuses on the book "Our Changing Morality: A Symposium," edited by Freda Kirchwey. The word "morals," which in its most generous use connotes the architecture of a clear and beautiful life, is for most imaginations inescapably connected with the urgencies and indecisions of sex. The reasons are not far to seek. Love may not be the whole of life, nor is it by love, as Dante and W.S. Gilbert both believe, that the world is made to go round. But it is natural enough that that impulse should absorb the minds which most electrically enlists the bodies of human animals.

The article focuses on the books "My Dear Cornelia," and "Points of View," by Stuart P. Sherman. Mr. Sherman has long been recognized for the sharpness and precision of his perceptions; even when one disagrees with his valuations one admires the accuracy with which he discloses the native essence of the writer or idea he loves or hates. In "My Dear Cornelia" Mr. Sherman seems to have added a new dimension to his reputation as a writer. "Points of View," in which Mr. Sherman dons his more familiar critical habit, is a miscellany of essays on current social and literary phenomena: American Style, Sinclair Lewis, Where There Are No Rotarians, Brander Matthews, and Gertrude Stein.

This article focuses on the book "Heliodora and Other Poems," written by H.D. Quarrels about free and formal verse seem singularly irrelevant in the presence of these magnificent poems. H.D. writes with indiscriminate perfection. She uses the freer rhythms with flawless art and the more formal meters with skilful and spontaneous rapture. It is futile, too, after reading these poems, to argue the distinction between poets whose hypnosis lies in music and those in whom images are the charm. Her lines sing always, and her phrases break constantly into images so vivid that they fairly hurt with beauty. It would be absurdest of all to talk of classicism and romanticism. Here is passion patterned to the serenity of form, and form so sinuous, sensitive, and fluent that it seems the native ungarlanded language of passion itself. H.D. is, in short, a poet of the first water, and it would be stupidity on the critic's part to try to classify her.

The article presents information on the book "Modern Thinkers and Present Problems," by E.A. Singer. The book contains essays in the best and modest sense of that much-abused word and literary form. They catch the mood and essence of systems of thought; they reveal the psychological and social soil out of which they grew and the permanent savor of them for one. A philosophy like a symphony has varied seductions for those who are charmed by its music, and no two readers would write the same program notes for a symphony of ideas which they in common love. Singer's book would be a healthy prescription to those who linger from ignorance or habit in the belief that ideas can be fruitfully studied apart from the time and temper of their propounders.

Presents the poem "Left and Right," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "First Principles," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "Different Invitation to a Rationed Dinner," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "Soliloquy," by Irwin Edman.

The article presents information on two books "Socrates," by A.E. Taylor, and "The Socratic Problem," by Arthur Kenyon Rogers. Socrates is at once a historical fact and a historical legend, the legend itself being possibly one of the most influential facts in the course of Western civilization. "The Socratic Problem" is perhaps unduly schematized treatment of Socrates the Moralist, Socrates the Mystic, and Socrates the Scientist few readers will quarrel. One has only to read Plato to see that his hero was all three.

Presents the poem "The Memory of Music," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "Suddenly in the Desert," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "After a Mozart Quartet," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "Memoir," by Irwin Edman.

Presents the poem "Dialogue, by Irwin Edman.

The article focuses on the book entitled, "Psychological Types." The book is written by C.G. Jung. The author remarks that in psychological works by Englishmen one is frequently impressed by the distillation into and elaborate scholarship. According to the author despite its pretentious jargon, its weird generalizations, its petulant bombast masquerading as science, the book is interesting. Jung has attempted the hopeless and tempting task of classifying human beings into psychological types. Jung's distinction has been made time and again under different names, the classic and romantic, the objective and the subjective, the rationalist and the sentimentalist, the tender minded and the tough minded.

The article presents information on the book "Scepticism and Animal Faith," by George Santayana. This book is particularly recommended to those-and they are many-who persist in regarding Santayana as a litterateur rather than as a philosopher. If by metaphysics we mean a sustained and consistent inquiry into the ultimate nature of Being, then, no more thoroughly metaphysical book has been written in this generation. Nor will this statement frighten off those who know from previous experience that it is impossible for Santayana to touch any subject, however abstruse, without transmuting it into poetry and music. In this, his latest volume, he attempts to clear up for himself and his readers those bases and presumptions of his thought which have lain half implied and half expressed in his "Life of Reason."

This article literally appraises the books "The Life of Reason," by George Santayana and "Selected Poems," by George Santayana. The publication of a second edition of "The Life of Reason" and the recent issuance of a selection of early poems offers a fit occasion for a summary and estimate of Santayana's position in American thought and letters. Lovers of literature have for nearly a generation known Santayana's sonnet sequences, the subject matter of which is, as he himself says, his philosophy in the making. But the poetry of his prose has only of late won due recognition.

The article focuses on the book "The Interpreters," by George William. George William is one of the few living writers who could accomplish the feat of writing such an excellent book. It is impossible offhand to think of any other literary man in this generation whose life has been at once that of a mystic philosopher and a revolutionary publicist, an intense poet and active politician. "The Interpreters" is that rare thing in philosophy, sustained and sensitive reflection upon a subject matter no less intimate and real than the author's own experience. This book is a sincere and passionate fusion of poetry, politics and philosophy.

This article focuses on "Essays in Common Sense Philosophy," by C.E.M. Joad. The book deals with some technical problems in philosophy from the standpoint of the New Realism. Briefly stated, Joad's main thesis is that people perceive reality directly and that reality exists apart from perception. Upon this simple sounding thesis, reached after a highly involved and sophisticated discussion, he gives a fairly succinct statement of the position of the philosophical group with which he happens to be associated on such questions as happen to interest them.

The article focuses on the book "The Sense of Humor," by Max Eastman. Eastman writes in his preface that he has tried to solve the problem of humorous laughter. And if he has taken one valid step toward that solution, it will please his purpose better than any amount of the success that might be called literary. To the mind of the present reviewer it is precisely for its literary quality, for its warmth of suggestion and appreciation, for its happy epithets and illustrations that the book is chiefly interesting. But since it is rather as a psychological monograph that the author wishes it to be taken, it is perhaps well to state the thesis of the volume at the very beginning.

Presents the poem "Lines From an Ungallant Lover," by Irwin Edman.