Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

old, let us part with Mr. Masters in thanking him heartily for the acquaintance of two jolly young imps of mischief.

Two other American novels are receiving attention in England. One of them is Mr. Upton Sinclair's The Spy, in which The Observer finds reminiscences of Charles Reade, and of which it remarks:

It is many years now since Charles Reade, following the example of Charles Dickens, turned to propaganda under the guise of fiction. . . . Mr. Sinclair has never written a story which had a purely artistic motive; but he has never, hitherto, not even in The Jungle, reached Reade's level, and in some of his books, such as the novels on marriage, he sank beneath any sort of serious consideration. The Spy is the more welcome. It is a restrained, careful, and sober indict

ment of the methods of the American police

and business interests in their attack on the 'Reds.' How far the indictment is accurate cannot be discussed here; but Mr. Sinclair gives some facts in his appendix for some of the chief horrors of his story.

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, the author of Main Street, is now in England, where he expects to spend a year unless the climate becomes sufficiently inhospitable to force him to seek refuge in Italy. His novel, which has recently been published by Hodder and Stoughton, is still one of the most successful books of the English season. Under the title, "The March to Main Street,' G. K. Chesterton devotes to it a long review in the New Witness, in which he contrives, with the usual display of verbal pyrotechnics, to lay the whole of Carroll Kennicott's woes at the door of the industrial system. Among other things he says:

One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in America was that of a very interesting book called Main Street, which involves many of these questions of

the modern industrial and the eternal feminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the story, of a young

married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns on the great central plains of America; and of a sort of struggle between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of her neighbors. There are a number of true and telling suggestions in the book, but the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of many readers was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, with unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a great many advanced persons would tell us that the wooden house in which she lived really was like a wooden coffin. . . . I think the lady might be more contented in her coffin, which is more com

fortably furnished than most of the coffins

where her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to this, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady and a case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. And when we have noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a situation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West. And with that we come back to the

[ocr errors]

truth with which I started this speculation: the truth that few have yet realized, but of which I, for one, am more and more convinced that industrialism is spreading because it is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green world gray.

A GREAT SPANISH AUTHOR, COUNTESS

BAZAN

COUNTESS EMILIA PARDO BAZAN, who died in Madrid a short time ago at the age of 78, was one of the most widely known of Spanish writers, her works having been translated into many languages long before Vincente BlascoIbanez began to attract attention. At a time when the learned lady was still looked upon in Spain with no dis

coverable approval, Countess Bazan achieved a reputation as novelist, historian, critic, and scholar. She is said to have written more than two thousand short stories, besides a number of historical works, books of travel, and one severe criticism of French society, which caused no little displeasure in France, coming as it did from the pen of a friend of Hugo, Daudet, Zola, and Anatole France.

As a lecturer she has never had an equal in Spain. She was the first woman to draw an interested audience at the Madrid Athenæum, and ultimately won official recognition, being appointed to the chair of modern literature in Madrid University. The students showed their disapproval of a woman's occupancy of the professorial chair by absenting themselves from all lectures. During her academic career she had but one pupil, to whom she delivered her lectures, until his death caused her academic career to end for lack of pupils.

She was of aristocratic family, and supported the Pretender, Don Carlos, with her money and her pen. Even after Alfonso XII had ascended the throne, she dared visit Don Carlos in exile.

TWO LITERARY PRIZES

THE Lady Northcliffe Prize, awarded by English and French committees for the best work of imagination published in France during the year, has been given to M. Raymond Escholier for his Dansons la Trompeuse; and the Hawthornden Prize, for a work of imaginative literature by an English author not over 41, has been awarded to Miss Romer Wilson for her The Death of Society.

Books submitted for the Lady Northcliffe Prize are first passed upon by the

French committee, which chooses three books. From these the English committee makes the final selection. The other two books this year were L'Héroïque Pastorale by Louis Vuillemin, and Le Retour d'Ariel, by Léon Thévenin.

Mrs. Margaret L. Woods, writing of M. Escholier's prize-winning book, says in the Fortnightly Review:

Dansons la Trompeuse, is one of those satisfyingly perfect little works of art about which, when one has read it, one feels no desire to say anything except that it is a beautiful little book. 'Story? God bless you! It has none to tell, sir.' It is a picture of a little patch of this peopled earth, a little set of human beings, all vividly alive because painted with that intuition, that warmth of imaginative sympathy, which alone can give the artist power to create life.

The London Mercury points out editorially that the Polignac Prize, the predecessor of the Hawthornden, was awarded to four authors who have since achieved distinction, Messrs. John Masefield, James Stephens, Ralph Hodgson, and Walter de la Mare; and suggests that the conventional gibes at prizes in literature are by no means justified.

The value of literary prizes has always been disputed [says the writer], but, for ourselves, we believe in them. Well bestowed, they may give both encouragement and advertisement to writers when they most need them. They may, in some instances, if they are sufficiently substantial, be a direct and obvious help; and even where this is not needed, they may, by virtue of the approval they connote, stimulate creation and, by virtue of the publicity that they bring, advance by several years the general recognition of an author's merit. It is frequently argued that prizes always must go to the wrong people; that no body of judges will ever have a liking for, or anything but a distaste for, a work of genius; and that prizes wrongly bestowed are worse than none. These arguments appear to us, not merely futile but demonstrably false.

[graphic]

A

"Oh whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?"
She answered me as she flew by,

"To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky."

PPROACHING school days find teachers and students alike eager to fly as high and brandish their brooms as valiantly in chase of the cobwebs that cling to educational rafters. To them we suggest:

SHACKLED YOUTH

By Edward Yeomans

For teachers to whom disillusionment and a sense of the futility of striving make teaching dull work, this collection of scourging, illuminating articles on education comes as the promise of better things. The author himself a layman-speaks as one having authority; his words convey the challenge of the poten$1.60 tially splendid.

STORY, ESSAY and
VERSE

Edited by Charles Swain Thomas

and Harry G. Paul

Once a high-school boy or girl learns that there is actual pleasure to be got from literature, there is hope for his soul and more immediate hope for his teacher. This collection of Altantic prose and poetry is the sort that demands to be read-to the detriment of the mathematics lesson, perhaps, but to the lasting advantage of the developing book-lover. The interpretative notes and questions are intelligently and helpfully constructive.

$1.50

The ATLANTIC BOOK of MODERN PLAYS Edited by Sterling A. Leonard, of the University of Wisconsin

A book that brings life to the classroom. Who, in school or out, would not delight in Dunsany, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Galsworthy, and others with plays as absorbing? The fine and enduring in modern literature establishes true values; it makes of the classroom a laboratory for the trying of the metals of life. $1.50

YOUTH and the
NEW WORLD

Edited by Ralph P. Boas, of Central

High School, Springfield, Mass.

A collection of thoughtful essays on the most significant phases of life today. Young men and women who are tired of existing on "sugar and spice and everything nice" will welcome this more solid substance. Economic, social, religious, educational, and political problems have their own interest and are of paramount importance in education for effective citizenship.

(Special Rates to Schools)

$1.50

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.

8 Arlington Street, Boston (17), Mass.

THE LIVING AGE

NUMBER 4024

AUGUST 20, 1921

A WEEK OF THE WORLD

LATIN AMERICA

WE print in this issue four articles, relating directly or indirectly to Latin America, that throw light upon two changes in our relations with our Southern neighbors, which have occurred during, and partly in consequence of, the war. In the first place, the principal powers of South America have now reached a stage of maturity when they are beginning to formulate new foreign policies expressing their growing solidarity, not only in respect to Europe, but also in respect to the United States. In the second place, nearly all Latin-American countries are facing social problems which are analogous or identical with those of Europe

and the United States, and which create a certain community of interest between classes as well as governments in the Western Hemisphere that transcends political and even racial and linguistic boundaries. It is because these articles

seem to illuminate this new situation, that we have grouped them in our present issue.

THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE

Many of the comments have already reached this country. In a general way, it may be said that public opinion in Great Britain is unreservedly friendly, the only dispute in the matter being as to the personnel of the British commission. The Times as we have been

abundantly informed - opposes the suggestion that Lloyd George serve as one of the British representatives. It says: 'Of all statesmen in Europe, he is probably the most distrusted. It is notorious that no government and no statesman who has had dealings with him.' It was this attack which caused him puts the smallest confidence in the Times to be deprived of certain

Foreign-Office privileges. That journal, however, regards immediate acceptance of President Harding's invitation as 'of high augury for the Empire and the

world.'

The Morning Post, true to its traditionalist sympathies and its advocacy of the Anglo-Japanese alliance,

expresses some distrust as to the useful outcome of such a conference. It doubts whether the British view of England's naval obligations will ever coincide with the views of other nations, unless there PRESIDENT HARDING'S invitation to is a 'common resolve to remove not the principal powers to meet in Wash- weapons of war but the causes of war, ington next November, to discuss dis- in which case, as President Harding armament, is naturally a leading topic has no doubt foreseen, the question of of discussion in the European press. the weapons would settle itself.'

Copyright 1921, by The Living Age Co.

« VorigeDoorgaan »