The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1926. Large 12mo. x+273 pp. $2.50.

LEWIS MUMFORD's three books reveal a striking growth in their author. The Story of Utopias was what the name implies: a collection of the dreams of a perfected society which men have made from time to time. Sticks and Stones sketched the record of American civilization as it has been reflected in our architecture. Now, in The Golden Day, he has attempted the difficult task of tracing the history of culture in the United States as mirrored in imaginative and philosophical writing.

The 'Golden Day' for him is the period before the Civil War, the age of Emerson and Thoreau and the best work of Walt Whitman. Mr. Mumford is to some extent a believer in environment as determining culture. The Golden Day, he thinks, was largely the result of circumstance: industrialism had not yet closed down upon American life; it was 'the period of an Elizabethan daring on the sea, of a well-balanced adjustment of farm and factory in the East, of a thriving regional culture operating through the lecturelyceum and the provincial college.' Yet he seems to abandon his thesis, at least in part, when he finally invites his contemporaries to 'reformulate a more vital tissue of ideas and symbols to supplant those which have led us into the stereotyped interests and actions which we endeavor in vain to identify with a full human existence,' and assumes that this can be done by taking thought.

He begins his historical analysis with the Protestant Reformation, which, he thinks, with its concomitant series of mechanical inventions, turned the current of men's minds and brought to an end the full, free culture of mediæval times. The first settlers of America brought with them only the relics of an expiring system; its disintegration was followed by the unsuccessful attempt of the pioneer to synthesize out of the sterile environment in which he lived a background and a meaning for his life. Then came the Golden Day; since when industrialism's crushing yoke has lain upon us. We have made business the end of human activity; pragmatism was soon debased into a justification of whatever is, which lost sight of the ends of life in a consideration of the means. Surrounded by the proliferation of mechanical devices, artists and philosophers have alike surrendered to 'positive knowledge and practical action' and we have 'moved within an ever-narrower circle of experience, living mean and illiberal lives.'

It was inevitable that Mr. Mumford, seeking to cover so much ground briefly, should have somewhat oversimplified the theme which I have here butchered in order to fit it into a few sentences. At the same time, he manages, despite the limitation of brevity, to pack his book with an extraordinary amount of suggestive comment. His philosophic outlook is, no doubt, colored by his temperament; there is a danger in idealizing medieval culture, or Emerson's period, like the danger into which Rousseau fell when he idealized the natural man. Yet I do not see how any thoughtful student of America can fail to agree with most of Mr. Mumford's analysis of the inadequacies of the industrial age. Despite his brave invitation, quoted above, I feel that he is perhaps too gloomy about the future; things are moving so rapidly in our machine civilization that there is no saying what may lie around the corner. In any case, this book, written in a style of notable lucidity and beauty, remains both indispensable to, and a source of great pleasure for, everyone who cares to know whether there is an American mind and, if so, what is happening to it.

BRUCE BLIVEN

Tomorrow Morning, by Anne Parrish. New York: Harper & Bros. 1927. 12mo. viii+305 pp. $2.00.

Tomorrow Morning has been called a novel of hope. This it assuredly is not. But it is a novel of hopefulness, of the elasticity of the heart its power to pick up the pieces, to accept the second-best, to look steadfastly away from the truth when this is essential to happiness, to say, when to-morrow morning dawns much like yesterday, "The day after to-morrow, perhaps.'

This novel has the same sharp reality as The Perennial Bachelor, the same moments of beauty. Emotionally, it is pitched in a lower key; its tragedy is that of misconception, maladjustment, disillusion. As in the earlier novel, over the grave depths of the story humor dances perpetually now satire, now pure farce. The reader will not forget the children playing statues on the lawn - the tubby, stolid Charlotte and her small friends interpreting 'Furious Rage' and 'Beautifulness'; nor the returned travelers benevolently showing their vast collection of photographs to their mutely but passionately rebellious hostess. Least of all will he forget the cruel and soul-assuaging portrait of J. Hartley Harrison, that intolerable quintessence of fatuous smugness.

Idealized motherhood is out of fashion in current fiction. Warm-hearted Kate Greene does not repel like the fanatical mother of The Kays or the hard, self-righteous one of Her Son's Wife. But she is vain, and a trifle silly; 'the ancient depths of self' persist in her under her maternal unselfishness; she is jealous with the jealousy that brings its own penalty of spiritual separation. When she boasts that her adolescent son has no interest whatever in girls, at the very time when, up in his room, he is reading Swinburne in ecstasy, and timidly trying over the phrases of love under his breath, she is only under the commonest of maternal delusions. But the reader's sympathy for her is alienated when she persists in believing that her son is contented with her companionship during the aching eternity of the summer that separates him by the width of the sea from the girl who has promised to marry him; and the mother's one heroic decision dwindles when weighed against the deep selfishness of her attitude after all rivalry has been swept away by the catastrophe that has ravaged Joe's life. 'Perhaps Joe is blessed among men, because there is bitter grief in his heart. Perhaps only those who know grief are truly blessed, are truly alive, kept quick by their pain. He is mine again, for me to comfort, for me to take care of.'

...

The appealing little boy who, after telling his mother his first lie, broke into howls of remorse at the dead hour of nine at night, who yearned so deeply to buy her the silk glove-case at the church fair and relinquished the purple treasure so philosophically when, after repeated inquiries, its princely price was still the same, who watched heartsick at the window on the lonely snowy evening until he saw the dear figure flying home to him, has grown to a manly manhood with the growth, by rapture and pain, of the part of him that his mother has refused to acknowledge; and now that he has come to grief by chasing the shadow for the substance, his mother, gloating blindly over her undisputed possession of him, is the last person in the world who can help him.

Tomorrow Morning is a lively vehicle for some sober thoughts concerning the love that will not abdicate.

ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS

Lord Raingo, by Arnold Bennett. New York: George H. Doran Co. 1926. 12mo. x+383 pp. $2.00.

WISE in the world's ways, Arnold Bennett's wisdom has its fountainhead in human sympathy. He never liked the upper dog. His heart, or whatever may be the novelist's substitute for that friendly organ, is always responsive to the suffering and difficulties of Little People; and when the Grand and Great have their own troubles with a grander and greater Providence, then Bennett, enlisted for the war, is all for human

nature and all against the blundering justice of blindfold fate.

Until he began his own unequal battle with Providence, Lord Raingo was a very great man indeed. He had fought a poor boy's fight for money and won. And the novelist, finding him rich and cynical, and with time on his hands, makes a politician of him, a cabinet minister and a lord; backs him to win against the shrewdest and sharpest in politics, gives him the mistress he covets and the popularity he craves, and finally fights an Homeric battle over his body against the damnedest that double pneumonia can do. If death could be balked, Bennett would balk it. He brings to his hero's bedside every trick that science knows, and through a hundred pages fights over the prostrate Raingo as manfully as ever Achilles battled over the body of Patroclus. But death is strong.

As a man, Lord Raingo leaves much, no doubt, to be desired. Cynical, furtive, selfish, his door, pulled to, is not bolted against the generous fervor of patriotism, or even proof against the intensity of political loyalty. In the language of his age, he is a cool proposition. His real and adequate excuse for being is that he serves his creator as a perfect laboratory specimen of human nature. Bennett gets at the heart of him and into his marrowbones. Nothing of him that the reader does not perfectly understand. With him, as with the rest of us, to understand all is first to pardon and then almost to like.

Ten years ago, when the Great War turned even novelists out of their profession, Bennett served as a confidential secretary in the anteroom of the War Cabinet. Never document so secret he did not see it. Never debate in the lowest registers whose whisperings did not reach his intelligent ear. Always a connoisseur of human nature, there and then political human nature yielded up to him its last secret. You have but to talk with him to-day to meet as lucid a political intelligence as England holds. And how perfectly the political portraits in the book bear this out. We have known the originals in Punch these ten years past. Andy Clyth, the Prime Minister, with his business grip on the present and his mystical forecast of the future; his benevolent gray head as familiar to us as his eloquence, his energy, and the gross realism of his political creed. The book is a gallery of portraits, sometimes composite, sometimes almost individual. No wonder that it roused a temporary ruction! But behind, there is much about it that is enduring.

'I had a silly idea,' remarked His Lordship, 'that war would change human nature. For all human nature cares, a world war is just like company promoting.'

It was a big business which that war promoted, and the men who ran it were magnified diameters enough for us to see them very clearly indeed. And Bennett's microscope tells the whole human story.

ELLERY SEDGWICK

Napoleon, the Man of Destiny, by Emil Ludwig.

Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1926. 8vo. xii+680 pp. Illustrated. $3.00.

THIS promises to be an outstanding book in Napoleonic literature, but it is fortunate that it did not appear until the factual content of that literature was well established. Not that it departs from accepted lines of historical veracity, but it is a product of that school of creative biography a more exalted version of the commonplace 'Mr. X as I knew him' - which Thomas Carlyle founded, as a hero worshiper, and Emil Ludwig-not unworthy to be compared with the testy but sentimental Scotchman - has brought down to date in the less reverential spirit of our age. The author paints a portrait, not a caricature; but it is a Sargent portrait wherein secrets, or conjectured secrets, that ordinarily lie hidden in the heart are written on the countenance for all the world to read. Yet such secrets are more or less debatable, however thoroughly we may document them. They are vastly more interesting, and within limits more vital and potent, than the impersonal facts that make the carapace of history, but if we dwell too much upon them we are tempted to subordinate epochal and universal developments to the volition of the individual, and to chart the progress of mankind upon the diagrams of the psychoanalyst.

Were this a less fascinating and compelling book it would hardly be necessary to introduce it to the reader with such a caveat. Its author professes to deal only with Napoleon the man, and not with the history of his times except as the background of his personal drama. Not a plan of a battle field adorns the volume, and dates are relegated to a prefatory table following the list of illustrations. The latter, twenty-one in number, are exclusively pictures of Napoleon himself. The author's theme is 'the tragedy man,' not the Europe of the French Revolution. He fitly faces the title-page with Goethe's searching remark: 'Napoleon went forth to seek virtue, but, since she was not to be found, he got power.' Only a German - certainly no Frenchman - could so completely efface France herself from his record of that Odyssey to power. It is a man with very human frailties, and not a classic hero, whom the biographer depicts, and the latter's Teutonic ethos makes him pass an alien's judgment upon this histrionic-souled Italian. He emphasizes the Corsican heritage of the Buonapartes, whose blood strain runs like a red clue through his narrative. Is it also because he is a German that he draws so harrowing a picture of the Saint Helena exile - possibly with unconscious shadowings of another political exile hovering in the background of his mind? We recognize with more assurance the promptings of the Zeitgeist, when the author discovers in Napoleon a Pan-Europa pioneer with adopt the current patter · a suppressed pacifist

to

complex. He quotes striking passages from the Emperor's sayings to support this thesis: We need a European legal code, a European court of appeal, a unified coinage, a common system of weights and measures. The same law must run throughout Europe.' And again: 'Sooner or later this union will be brought about by the force of events. . . . It seems to me that the only way in which an equilibrium can be achieved in Europe is through a league of nations.' To be sure this would have been a par Napoleonica, not a democratic federation of the Continent, and one that Britain could not tolerate; but as the Saint Helena exile exclaimed almost on his deathbed, 'There would have been but one people throughout Europe.'

In a work of this character, where the author wields the pen of an artist and not of a mere draftsman, the task of the translator calls for a high order of ability. On the whole we imagine, without having had an opportunity to compare the English version with the original, that in the present instance this task has been well performed. Yet minor slips occasionally confuse the reader. Some of these may be no more than typographical inaccuracies, but such a sentence as 'The brio of the young man's life was in keeping with his own tempo' would be more intelligible on the Rio Grande than in Boston. Now and then, also, a lack of sequence in Napoleon's recorded utterances, verging once or twice on incoherence, tempts one to seek the original French authority for verification.

Such a book does not supplant in the field of biography as history, or even compete with, a work like Professor Sloane's; but it occupies a place of its own as an absorbing character study, with all the fascination of a drama, and it may prove to be an abiding contribution to the world's creative literature.

VICTOR S. CLARK

My Early Life, by William II, ex-Emperor of Germany. Translated from the German. New York: George H. Doran Co. 1926. 8vo. xiv+336 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.

THE most striking trait of the Kaiser's second volume of memoirs is the sharp contrast it offers to the first. In this quiet and prosaic record of days long before the war there is none of the tone of snorting defiance and none of the flamboyant extravagances of the characteristic Wilhelm manner. No one would suppose that the present writer was the author of those marginal notes of 1914 which showered volleys of hysterical abuse upon the King and the Foreign Secretary of England: 'Swine! Scoundrel! Liar! Common cheat! Low cur! Double-tongued liar!' It is natural enough that the peculiar organ which the author himself terms 'the Imperial mouth' should be trained to speak in many voices; but in this case the effect of novelty is almost challenging; one listens, surprised and alert, as if to a sustained feat of ventriloquism. The pains