Sivut kuvina
PDF
ePub
[merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

myself at some length, in the rather vain endeavor to make her human and lovable, I appreciate fully that in these pages she is both, and some skill was required to accomplish this.

Yet somehow all these figures, even Mrs. Lincoln, and still more that strange, shadowy, elusive personage of Lincoln himself, fail to seize me, to touch me, to hold me, and I ask myself, in some perplexity, why it is. Mrs. Morrow's research has been vast. She has explored an immense amount of material, and explored it wisely and fruitfully. But the characters do not quite live. I think there is first a deficiency of the profoundest insight. The author does not probe deep enough into human motive or human passion. And even more marked is the defect of style. To make characters live in literature, you have got to have the great literary touch: nothing else will do it. The curious thing is that style and human insight are so intimately bound up together. What makes Shakespeare's characters live is the interpretation of the human soul with the supreme magic of words. When the poor, flighty, trivial, wayward Beatrice of Middleton's Changeling cries out, 'I am the deed's creature,' she makes herself immortal, or her creator makes her so. It is perhaps setting a high standard to require that the historical novelist should possess these gifts. Yet it seems to me that nothing less will really justify his intrusion into the domain of history. What professed scholar has ever done for English history what Shakespeare has?

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

An American Saga, by Carl Christian Jensen. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 1927. 8vo. viii +219 pp. $2.50.

LOVE of life is reputed to be one of the most inveterate properties of the race. Yet as one reflects on the lives of most men, the phrase must seem a singular irony. We show the love of life when, driven to some desperate corner, we fight like rats to wring some few hours more of it from unwilling fate. How often do we show it by abundant and happy living, rich in experience which we consciously enjoy as it passes and on which we afterward think with satisfaction and approval? Here is a life story in which existence is wonderful and exuberant as it flows and scarcely less exuberant in memory when it has passed; in which every episode is avidly seized and lived with a concentrated energy of mind and body, lest some drop of its precious liquor should escape down the throat untasted, or some moment that might have yielded its pungent feeling lapse in dull oblivion. And what episodes they are!

Measured in units of ordinary Christian existence, Carl Jensen has lived the lives of a thousand men. He has been a boy, born in Denmark, surrounded by grotesque peasant and sailor figures whose shapes are like the faces of

gnomes on his pages. He has run away to sea, stoked ships, made his way to New York, worked as longshoreman in days whose cruelty and brute danger are renewed as he tells of them. From speaking an illiterate and inarticulate jargon of English, he has struggled through the second childhood of the immigrant untutored in his new land to an education whose first steps made him a mathematician and electrician, and whose progress took him through a Middle-Western college and finds him an established sociologist to-day. But before attaining these dignities he adopted the profession of fanaticism for a time, and peddled an uncouth volume called Doomsday Book, not to mention ornamental religious mottoes, through farming and lumbering outlands where his intrepid appetite for life found or made fruitful soil. With these religious mottoes one of his most engaging and characteristic anecdotes is connected:

'During a hailstorm late one night we found shelter at another bachelor's cabin. Hail like hens' eggs had crushed his crop. I showed the frowning host my set of sacred mottoes. When his eye fell on one, "GOD BLESS OUR HOME," his fist fell upon it heavy and he roared: “Have you a 'GOD DAMN OUR HOME'?" He put me up for the night. In the morning he bought "THOUGH HE SLAY ME, YET WILL I TRUST IN HIM."

The period of fanaticism and Doomsday peddling melted and took flight as the sun of the sciences rose upon the immigrant's view. The study of psychology bore fruit in sociological work in the underworld of New York and in the prison camps of the South, work which has furnished pages of pity and grim astonishment to this book. Throughout his adventures, Mr. Jensen's course was never solitary. His own consciousness, his childlike delight in examining and applauding the dramas it enacted for him, owe half their force to his lively sense of the world of other men. His chapters are crowded with figures the sailors of his childhood, his friends and helpers in New York, the criminals and outcasts of his labors in social reform. Loveliest of all these figures is Margaret, the childwife whom he helped through the trapdoor opening under the table of his garret room in the first days of their secret marriage, and who accompanies him in a courageous and whimsical comradeship through his career in the MiddleWestern college.

For the mass of mankind, life sinks into habit; the senses grow dull from lack of poetic exercise and, instead of reporting the glories of the visible and palpable world, report only the expected signs for the guidance of an inert personality in its familiar acts. But there are men, favorably unbalanced by an excess of vitality, to whom the sense of existence is an appetite, and the mere beating of the pulse a godlike prerogative. Such a man is Carl Jensen. His adventures are gloriously self-conscious; he carries himself in the centre of them all; his organs of perception never

[blocks in formation]

lose their keenness, their joy as primitive wells of exploration and discovery.

The foreboding and self-questioning of the modern world find no echo in Mr. Jensen's book. Born a Dane he was, but of melancholy he gives us no suggestion. His volume appears in an age when the literary valuation of life is low. It is an experience of singular force, contradicting

by pure infection of vitality the lacklustre in-
tellectual spirits which, with too good reason,
are often the best that the contemporary world
affords, to read this autobiography of a man
whose thirst for existence is not quenched, and
whose life is rooted in the affirmation that con-
sciousness itself is good.
THEODORE MORRISON

The books selected for review in the Atlantic are chosen from lists furnished through the courteous coöperation of such trained judges as the following: American Library Association Booklist, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, and the public-library staffs of Boston, Springfield (Massachusetts), Newark, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Pratt Institute Free Library of Brooklyn. The following books have received definite commendation from members of the Board:

Non-Fiction

Fire under the Andes, by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant
Prose portraits of fourteen Americans in the Sargent manner

The Truth about Publishing, by Stanley Unwin

ALFRED A. KNOPF $4.00

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO. $1.75

A readable exposition of publishing for authors as well as the public

J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co. $4.50

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America, by Richardson Wright
What the Jacks-of-all-trades contributed to our early American history

Emerson and Others, by Van Wyck Brooks

Intellectual interpretations of seven writers by a psychological critic

The Outline of Sanity, by G. K. Chesterton

A Chestertonian protest against the invading standardization

The Road to the Temple, by Susan Glaspell

E. P. DUTTON & Co. $3.00

DODD, MEAD & Co. $2.50

FREDERICK A. STOKES CO. $3.00

The romantic life of George Cram Cook as only his wife could describe it

In China, 1920-21, by Abel Bonnard

E. P. DUTTON & Co. $5.00

This Frenchman's volume of travel forms a rich background to the news

Understanding America, by Langdon Mitchell

A man of letters surveys the American scene

Ten Years of War and Peace, by Archibald C. Coolidge

GEORGE H. DORAN CO. $3.00

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS $3.00

A knowing examination of international problems by an experienced historian

[blocks in formation]

The philosopher reviews his career and explains how we too should fit ourselves for the 'new' world

JOHN DAY $4.00

Fiction

Ironical Tales, by Laurence Housman

The world of the senses in satirical tales and essays

Love Is Enough, by Francis Brett Young

GEORGE H. DORAN CO. $2.50

ALFRED A. KNOPF. 2 vols. $5.00

The generous study of an Englishwoman in a novel of the recent past

Yes, we DO reduce the price of Distinguished New Books

[graphic]

-IF

T has been charged lately in many public prints that the Literary Guild

the price on all books-certainly not on bad books-the Guild reduces the price about one-half on one distinguished book each month for those who are wise enough to subscribe for a year.

Somebody selects your books for you: perhaps the reviewer on your daily newspaper; or the clerk in your bookstore; perhaps some friend you meet on the street. This person says it's a good book and you go out and buy it. Sometimes it's a good book to you and sometimes it isn't.

If you are an intelligent reader of magazines and newspapers you have surely bought books recommended by a member of the editorial board of the Literary Guild. Now you can have the combined judgment of all of them.

Each month they choose one important outstanding book. That book is made for its subscribers by the Literary Guild, in a special edition at least as well made as that put out by the publisher.

And it reaches you the same day the book is published-not a month later or three months ater-but on the day of publication.

And you are saved the bother of going out and getting the book. It reaches you in your living oom. The postman brings it to your door, postage prepaid.

And you know you have got a book that you will want to keep permanently.

THE LITERARY GUILD

OF AMERICA

EDITORIAL BOARD

Seven Privileges

to Members

Discrimination

1. Your books are
chosen for you by an
Editorial Board of dis-
tinguished critics.

2.

Width of Choice -The books are chosen from original manuscripts -not from books already published. Special Guild Edition.

[ocr errors]

4.

Convenience-
Once a month the
postman will hand you
a book. All postage
will be prepaid.

5. You do not receive
Promptness-
your copy three or four
months late. It will
reach you the same day
that the bookseller re-
ceives his copy at the
regular price.
6. Reduced Price.

The Present Low

7. Price Experiment

al-Whether or not we
can keep it so low de-
pends upon conditions.
Send the coupon at once
and make sure of the
low price for yourself.

FREE

Sixteen lively pages of essays, diagrams, illustrations, cartoons, telling why books cost less through the Guild. The contributors to "Wings" are the Editors of the Guild.

Partial Contents of "Wings"

1. "The Wall between Writer and Reader," by Carl Van Doren. 2. "The University with One Student," by Glenn Frank.

3. "Literature in Small Towns," by Zona Gale.

4. "Social Value of the Literary Guild," by Joseph Wood Krutch. 5. "The Reading Years," by Elinor Wylie.

6. Cartoon, by Hendrik Willem van Loon.

7. Why the Low Price?

The June book is about to be distributed. To make sure of this distinguished work at the low price, send the coupon at once.

[graphic][graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

The Literary Guild of America, Inc. 55 Fifth Avenue, New York

| Send me free Wings-with the story of your assured saving to me in the price of | contemporary new books.

[graphic]
[graphic]
[blocks in formation]
« EdellinenJatka »