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Appreciating the national popularity of reading clubs and circulating libraries, the Editor of the Bookshelf has compiled a list of the most prominent books, fiction and non-fiction, that have appeared in the last twelvemonth. This list has been selected from the suggestions of the nine librarian advisers of the Atlantic; it will be sent with our compliments to committees and members of reading clubs and other interested persons. Requests should be addressed to the Editor of the Bookshelf, Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington Street, Boston (17), Mass.

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This letter, recently published by the present reviewer, reveals much of Darwin's simplicity of character, his diffidence regarding his work, his keen desire to secure Huxley's opinion as to the truth of his theory, his doubts as to the value of his own opinions, his utter unconsciousness that he had brought forth one of the most influential works of all time, the outcome of forty years of observation. This union of rare simplicity and transparency of thought with a high order of genius as an observer, thinker, and discoverer is the central thought of Gamaliel Bradford in the first three chapters and in the seventh chapter of the delightful volume before us.

The distinguished author, who has evidently devoted years of research, reading, and reflection to Darwin, is well qualified to interpret the char

acter and the soul of the naturalist, both by his previous psychological studies into many lives, small and great, and by his quiet detachment in his home at Wellesley Hills, far from our noisy civilization. Seldom before has there been such a keen and sympathetic synthesis of Darwin as a man, of Darwin as a naturalist and hence a passionate observer, of Darwin as a generalizer, of Darwin as the highest exemplar of the scientific spirit.

As set forth in Chapter VII, however, our author is betrayed into a very common error regarding this spirit - namely, that scientific qualities either are linked with or may develop into other virtues to some extent akin to the Christian ideal (p. 260). If our author had had to fight his way through a scientific career, as the present reviewer has been obliged to do, he would learn that the scientific genius, like the musical, artistic, or literary, is rarely linked with Christian or any other virtues. There are very few scientists who stand out like Darwin, Pasteur, and Fabre as embodiments of humility, tolerance, kindliness, patience, and charm, or who when smitten on one cheek meekly present the other. What a heaven on earth our scientific fraternity would be if it were full of saints like Darwin, Pasteur, and Fabre!

In this imagined scientific heaven of Gamaliel Bradford one could well dispense with the bygone heaven of which he writes in Chapter VI, depicting Darwin as a destroyer, as one 'who made hell a laughingstock and heaven a dream.' One could wish that this chapter, which is strongly stressed by the sales manager in advertising the volume, could have been omitted altogether, so far is it, not only from the even tenor of Darwin's own way, but from the actual modern conditions of a renewed fraternity among penetrable and demonstrable matters of the mind and the wholly unsubstantial and immeasurable things of the human spirit. One of the most Christianlike characteristics of Darwin and one of his finest traits as exemplar of our own age was his genial, good-natured, unresistant attitude under the greatest provocation a scientist has ever endured. Nor is it accurate in these days to speak of Darwin as the destroyer, because without any scientific or religious dissimulation we perceive through his almost errorless interpretation of nature that he was the upbuilder of the modern age.

With his distinguished cousin, Francis Galton, Darwin becomes one of the great moralists of the twentieth century. We trust that the five well-founded chapters of Gamaliel Bradford's most penetrating volume may be widely read,

By John Galsworthy

Verses Old and New

Mr. Galsworthy's eminence as novelist, dramatist and essayist is everywhere acclaimed. That he is also a poet of high distinction is not so well known because he has only once, and that some fifteen years ago, published any verse. This new volume is a careful selection from all that he has written, including those verses that appeared in "Moods, Songs and Doggerels"-in fact, perhaps a third of this volume was published in that collection. It is therefore a volume of verse which has not been hurried for publication, but has stood the test of time.

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Popularly Acclaimed in France

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A Short History of Art From the French of André S. Blum

EDITED AND ENLARGED BY R. R. TATLOCK

Art in all its branches, from prehistoric times to the present day, is attractively presented in a history invaluable to the general reader. These pages by an author of almost unrivalled scholarship, link the old with the new and afford a broad view of art through the ages, whether in the East, in Europe or America, with special attention to modern

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The Sun Also
Rises

By Ernest Hemingway
"No amount of analysis can
convey the quality of 'The Sun
Also Rises. It is a truly grip-
ping story, told in a lean, hard,
athletic narrative prose that
puts more literary English to
shame. . . . It is magnificent
writing."-New York Times.
Third printing $2.00

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

especially by those who through experience and training can never be led to think of Darwin in the light of a destroyer.

HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

Preface to a Life, by Zona Gale. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1926. 12mo. viii+346 pp. $2.00.

DAYS come upon all of us, especially in the relaxation which follows illness or other shock, when the world is unbelievably, almost unbearably, bright and moving; when the trees are so sharply green that they seem to tremble like flame, the sky so poignantly blue that it recedes in a constantly enlarging vault above, and myriad points quiver in each slanting sunbeam. In the light of such a day Miss Gale recounts the life of an important man in a small Wisconsin town a fantasia of the commonplace.

Bernard Mead is twenty-seven when the story opens. He is making a feeble attempt to escape from the impending weight of his heritage — his father's ambition, his mother's love, the town's expectation that he will take on the family's lumber business and marry his childhood sweetheart, rich, pretty, obviously suitable. In one sweep fate undermines his struggle. He is back in Pauquette for only a few days to propitiate his family. The soft spring lures him to declare a purely generic emotion for Laura, seen suddenly after many years in the transformation of womanhood and a 'finishing' trip abroad; and in an argument between father and son over the business the elder Mead suffers a stroke and dies, leaving Bernard with the conviction that he is a murderer, and a deathbed promise to devote his life to lumber. The next day the luminous figure of Alla Locksley crosses his path, but it is too late.

In a scene between Bernard and Alla which to my way of thinking is the high point of the book, he has vistas of life as it might be for him tenderness, humor, adventure, mystery, under. standing. But between him and this lie the rigid conventions - duty, honor, and financial independence. These he accepts, and, himself assisting, they form a crust over the flowing stream of his life. He marries Laura and they have three children. He settles solidly into the business and social life of Pauquette. He is the centre about whom revolves a household of women his mother, his aunts, his wife, his daughters. He is prosperous, busy, content.

But beneath the crust the stream of life flows on. The pressure above relaxes. Suddenly he sees his children, not as parts of him, but as separate people, encased in spheres which he can hardly touch, much less penetrate. Laura, infinitely familiar, is infinitely alien. Even the business moves along its own appointed path. He looks about him at the people of Pauquette - 'I saw you you had nothing in common with yourselves.' In the thin clear light sifting over his universe all is motion, color, dancing particles. He looks through.

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In the eyes of his family, of the alienists, even of Alla, whom he seeks once more in his desperate need of understanding, this is madness. Perhaps all mystic experience is madness. Yet in its white heat the stream of his life fused with its barriers.

'If he had made his choice differently, away from Pauquette, away from Laura and lumber, he might never have broken through, broken through. he considered this, felt a slow wash of satisfaction. For after that choice, events had seemed to form themselves and to function without his knowledge or will, as had the cells of his body. And now this new way of experiencing all. It was not a point but a process. . . . After all he was only fifty-two, there would be eight years before he was sixty, and there would be time. . . time enough to find out everything.'

Thus, against the quiet background she knows so well, Miss Gale tells a story of Babbitt from the inside out, envisaging in flashes of insight, in conversations which might have been if people could only talk as they are feeling, the fantastic beauty and pathos which swirl hidden through outwardly prosaic lives.

MARY ROSS

Translations and Tomfooleries, by Bernard Shaw. New York: Brentano's. 1926. 12mo. viii+275 pp. $2.25.

THIS volume contains 'Jitta's Atonement,' by Siegfried Trebitsch, translated by Mr. Shaw, and six short dramatic pieces from the translator's

own pen.

Mr. Shaw tells us that it was Trebitsch who translated the entire body of his own works into German and introduced him to the Germanspeaking public.

Whether as a work of pious gratitude or for some other reason, Mr. Shaw now places in this volume an English translation of a play by his German friend. This play constitutes a full third of the volume, and Mr. Shaw tells us that the author regards his translation as a wonderful success. Whatever the reader may think of the play itself, the translator's part has been well done, though there are flashes of ironic wit in it which obviously never adorned the pages of the original.

The main interest in the volume lies in the six dramatic bits which follow the longer translation. Their literary or dramatic significance is very slight they are interesting as revealing a brilliant and somewhat erratic mind at play. They constitute a bit of literary clowning which demands more than passing notice.

In the first place, from cover to cover Mr. Shaw insists that he is fooling. Every one of these little pieces is carefully labeled lest the reader might err and take them seriously. The author seems to be in a fever of apprehension lest he be considered less funny than he thinks he is. This is the fatal defect in Mr. Shaw's clowning.

The writer recalls a heroic figure of Negro minstrel days, who presented himself upon an

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You, too, will be wooed - and won by artistic Rhoda, supernally beautiful Rhoda, and lovable, ardent Dr. Ben in

THE DOCTOR'S WOOING

By Charles Phillips

(Professor of English, University of Notre Dame.)

"The Doctor's Wooing" strikes a level far above that of most romantic fiction. It shows the
utmost clearness and smoothness of narrative and style. The story is more than a facile
triangle story. It is interesting, appealing, and pleasant.—N. Y. Times.

"The Doctor's Wooing" is the finest piece of romantic writing produced in this country
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The story carries an exciting rush of incident. Mr. Phillips in this clean, quickly moving
story writes clearly with an occasional touch of poesy, with a warm appreciation of music
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Literary Digest Book Review.

Price $2.25 Net

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Chivalry and The Gibbet

by George Curtis and Josephine Denver Curtis-of the well-known family long
identified with Boston and Harvard University.

The Devin-Adair Comnany, Publishers, 437 Fifth Avenue, New York

empty stage, carrying an enormous bass drum. With its monotonous accompaniment he sang with utter seriousness an interminable number of verses of patter. It was not the enormous size of the man or the drum or the triviality of the song that made this performance a perfect piece of clowning. What made it absolute art and blended with it a vague element of pathos was the huge face above the bass drum, peering into the theatre in an agony of suspense lest he be taken less seriously than he wished to be.

This humble artist knew the trick of clowning in its perfection. It is this subtle quality that Mr. Shaw lacks. In this volume he presents the spectacle of a highly sophisticated and somewhat cynical mind going through a series of selfconscious antics greatly to its own amusement but a little in fear lest it may be taken seriously after all.

Of course, all these dramatic bits are full of flashes of sardonic wit and almost cruel satire. These alone make the volume memorable. Had Mr. Shaw rested here, there would be no quarrel with him, but he attempted more. He attempted the fine art of clowning, and he fails, as so many other brilliant minds have failed, to achieve his end, because he fails to realize that the difference between an ordinary slapstick performer and a real artist in the realm of buffoonery is a subtle element of wistfulness lest he fail to be utterly serious.

Mr. Shaw whacks lustily with the bladder and shouts to the world how funny he is. He is funny in spots, but the performance never rises to the heights of real tomfoolery, which means the art of clowning.

MACGREGOR JENKINS

Joanna Godden Married and Other Stories, by Sheila Kaye-Smith. New York: Harper & Bros. 1926. 12mo. viii+462 pp. $2.00.

UPON the publication of Sussex Gorse in 1916, Sheila Kaye-Smith assured herself a public, discriminating and expectant. Careless readers, subsisting upon situation and incident, soon wearied of the slow, saga-like story of Reuben Backfield and his sons, of his relentless, cruel struggle for the land of his fathers; but those to whom this book, written by a woman barely thirty, was an event recall with delightful remembrance the gorse waving like black plumes on the summit of the unconquered hill, the still Sussex fields and marshes as young Robert Backfield, walking there with his sweetheart, discovered them in early evening, the sight of Pete Backfield, the last to escape from his father, journeying in his black suit across the ploughed land to join the Methodists. They recall, too, the pains and care evidenced in every chapter, the perfect unity of the whole, the sense of leisure wanting in so much good work. Some enthusiasts asserted that Hardy himself had done nothing better; and all waited with confidence and eagerness for the next book.

Nothing comparable to Sussex Gorse came until 1921, when Joanna Godden was published. But in that the high promises of the former were fulfilled. The splendid use of detail, the consistency in a characterization essentially contradictory, the reflection at once of the realism and romance in the life of the Sussex marsh farmer, the fine handling of dramatic situations, difficult because of their very naturalness, the perfection of dialogue, and finally the inevitableness of the conclusion in which Joanna refuses to marry the father of her unborn child for the sufficient but seldom considered reason that her love for him is dead-all these made a memorable novel and nurtured more hopes.

And now, after two less admirable books, The End of the House of Alard and The George and Crown, comes Joanna Godden Married, which the publishers unhesitatingly term a sequel. One may question whether Joanna Godden permitted a sequel, whether Joanna's big and gallant decision did not finely and fairly complete her characterization. Recalling the perfect satisfaction with which one reread the last chapter, the assured sense that all had ended well, one is tempted to suggest that a sequel to such a close comes dangerously near to the sequelizing of katharsis! Yet here is the sequel, to be judged, not according to its expediency, but according to its worth.

In it unquestionably is the same Joanna, pretentious, imaginative, simple, crude, overbearing, energetic, passionate, uncompromisingly honest as regards herself. Here are her black dress and feathers, her silver teapot, the roses and Nottingham lace, once at Ansdore, now at Crown Dips. Here is her furious, jealous love for her little sister Ellen. Here, too, is the same good workmanship, though the length of the story allows less opportunity for the greater artistic detail of the first book.

One questions, also, whether in this sequel there is, as a matter of fact, 'further development' in Joanna. The sequel seems rather to solve her problem in settling her happily with Jim Carpenter, a nicely drawn sailor whom she nurses after an accident and who has energy to match her own. And for those who felt an undeniably bigger and spiritual solution in the close of the first book there is at least an artistic disappointment in spite of the minor satisfaction and relief in the happy ending.

There are, in addition to 'Joanna Godden Married,' eight short stories, the best of which are contemporary with the first Joanna. One will not soon forget the tragic simplicity of 'Mrs. Adis,' with its brilliant handling of point of view, so satisfying to the short-story technician, or the charm of the Reginald Dalrymples, wayfarers, in "The Mockbeggar,' or the lovely humanity of the little chicken girls in 'Good Wits Jump.' But where is 'Old Gadgett,' the dusty Sussex shepherd, who, with his set of sheep's teeth and his 'dunnamany a year,' intrigued us all five years ago in Harper's? In his place are other stories

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