Various

“ In chapter I the author states that the purpose of education, based not only on the needs of society but also on the needs of the adolescent, are, according to Dr Hall, ‘to train character, to suggest, to awaken, to graft interest, to give range and loftiness of sentiment of view, to broaden knowledge, and to bring everything into touch with life.’ During this age every effort possible should be made to ‘fill and develop mind, heart, soul, and body,’ especially with a view to vocational training. Such training demands vitalized and humanized materials of education and methods of instruction. ”

“ The authors say in the foreword that Italy’s glorious past stands in the way of comprehension of her present, that she is still for the average Englishman and American the land of the renaissance and the Risorgimento, or the country of the picturesque brigand and lazzarone, while in fact the modern Italian is not a romanticist but a positivist, not an excitable, emotional individual but a reflective one. The great change that has come over the people, especially during the last twenty years, has surprised even the nation itself into knowing itself for the first time. ”

“ Any lover of fine fiction must rejoice in the surfaces of Floyd Dell’s first novel much as a cabinet-maker does when he rubs his fingers along a planed board or an old gardener when he turns a cool, firm, ruddy apple over and over in his hand. ”

“ In the emotional pitch of his argument Mr Keynes has wisely chosen a middle course. He has resisted, if he ever felt it, the temptation to boom which usually besets the expression of righteous indignation; he knows that severe judgments are all the severer for being rapped out with tight lips, not thundered.... In the ardour of his desire to bring the world back to hard facts, he speaks as if the tragedy had been prepared by the play of economic factors alone. ”

“ The title story depicts a delightful, apparently carefree personality, a gentleman, university bred, who has no set vocation in life, is a dilettante in almost everything it is possible to be, and who spends most of his time and energy making unfortunate or gloomy people happy: in other words, blowing bubbles. In spite of his weak heart he contrives to get into the war, is permanently crippled, yet sitting in his invalid’s chair in a picturesque garden on the Isle of Wight, blows brighter, gayer, more luminous bubbles than ever before, and gives one person, at least, a lasting happiness. ”

“ A loveless marriage to an extravagant woman emphasizes the necessity for money. The means he employs for getting it are not of the highest. To business he adds politics and the ambition for power. Then in the capacity of his secretary, comes Effie, the woman of beauty and charm and a talent for self-sacrifice. She loves Sam and resolves to sacrifice herself for him by putting the beauty, that has never found a place there, into his life. During a week at Marbeck inn together, she changes his outlook and as he sinks in the social scale he rises spiritually. ”

“ The reactions of this spirit of romance on law and order form the substance of the story. By one man and one woman it is understood. Peter himself does not understand but is it, and when it brings him in contact with Annette Cornish, beautiful young wife of an elderly man, there is fire. Others are simply stimulated, bewildered, shaken out of their repose for the nonce. Annette and pretty Elsie Cook succumb completely to its spell. Annette, disciplined and broken-in by order from childhood, fears it and is broken by it. ”

“ Mr Bertrand Russell’s book is likely to remain the most damning criticism of Bolshevism, whether that strange delusion be considered as a faith or as a political institution. Although Mr Russell seems to us to be no more practical than a Russian Bolshevik, he is beyond doubt a brilliant philosopher, and often one cannot help finding fineness in his thought, even when he seems to us least to understand the ways of the ordinary man. ”

“ Dr DuBois is an artist, and his book must be reckoned among those that add not only to the wisdom but to the exaltation and glory of man. Because he is an artist, because he tells this story of his own people so simply and so charmingly, he establishes that kinship which is the essence of everything human. ”

“ After her husband’s financial failure, Frances Copley betakes herself away from Grosvenor square and London high society and buries herself in Tall villa, a maternal inheritance and a preposterous piece of architecture, while her husband goes to seek a new fortune in South America. There the ghost of an ancient relative, a suicide from disappointed love, makes itself known to her and moved by pity she resolves to consecrate her life to his redemption. ”

“ After he has spent eighteen years of voluntary exile in China—self imposed because he fears to compromise the girl he loves—and two years of hermitlike seclusion on the moor with a fascinating and erudite young Chinese student, a German bomb from a zeppelin shocks him into a dazed knowledge of the European war. Wide awake, action hungry, he scorns his former achievements as a mathematical genius and brilliant Chinese scholar, plunges into political activities, gets “hitched on to” the war, and becomes the man of the hour. ”

“ The shadow’s turn into bitterness and a hardening of the heart when on a memorable June day, given over to memory and a reliving of his past life, it comes to him that he could offer his unloved wife a measure of spiritual companionship, as the only remaining second best thing that he had so far withheld. ”

“ So not only is Sir Hugh Elcombe—with his splendid record as a British officer in several hard campaigns, including the great war just ended—made a pitiful object by his fear of an ‘exposure’ by Weirmarsh, but Sir Hugh’s beautiful stepdaughter, Enid Orlebar, who seems to be a perfect example of the high-class modern English girl is also under his baleful shadow. She is loved by the middle-aged cosmopolite who is intended to be the hero of the book. He is a talented author of mystery romances which bring him an income of several thousand pounds sterling a year. ”

“ To say that it is without interest would be to say what is not true; to say that it is thoughtlessly written would be a hasty comment on an author whose work everywhere evidences the pale cast of thought. ”

“ From obscurity he rises to political power and is only stayed from achieving the highest rung by disease and death. He burns himself out prematurely. While still quite young and out of his mastering passion of grasping everything he wants, he forces a beautiful young working girl to marry him. Lizzy in her selflessness, her poise and sincerity, her obedience to duty, is his opposite. She endures starvation with him but when he asks her to follow him into high life she refuses. ”

“ Between the struggle of capital and labor there can be no compromise. Labor must win but neither can win through violence. The presence of certain psychological elements, not impossible of achievement, are necessary to solve the problem: co-operative good-will on the part of labor, renunciation and confidence on the part of capital, and on both a viewpoint of human relationships taught by the prophet of Nazareth. ”

“ It is a story of the transition period of the eighties and nineties between an agricultural and an industrial civilization. There was a time in that period, says Mr Anderson, when art and beauty should have awakened. Instead, the giant, Industry, awoke. The hero of the book, however, is not an Ohioan. He is a poor white who wanders up from Missouri, an indolent, dreaming boy, shaken out of his lethargy by a New England woman who tries to train his mind to definite channels. The result is the development of an inventive strain which the awakening giant, Industry, takes and uses to its own ends. ”

“ Keller thinks that our age, more than any other, needs an unflinching statement of the individualistic position, of laissez-faire. “At a time when the world is menaced with the curtailment of civil liberty and the paralysis of individual initiative through weird and grotesque developments of socialism ... the man who takes to heart the truths of this little book cannot be led by the nose even into that pseudo-open-mindedness that toys with bolshevism and anarchism.” ”

“ When, at the moment of the most hopeless desolation, he has prepared a suicide’s noose for himself, the cry of a little child for “a bit o’ love,” and the brave fight with his sorrow of a brother in affliction, recall him to the world and his stronger self. ”

“ She does not avoid trying to take more soul out than she has really put in. At the same time, she has a rich theme and she knows her theme. She has a real Englishman in hand and she knows him; and she has a vitality almost as good as the vitality of art. Hers is not the detachment of art or the sincerity of artistic self-expression. It is the drive of emotion, the sincerity of a personal confession told in provisional terms. ”

“ Long years of wandering over the earth had preserved the love but dimmed the religion. The love becomes Martin’s chain. It also becomes his conscience when Maggie’s trust confronts him with his past life. ”

“ Here she finds herself on the edge of the labor movement, but she is never quite drawn into it. She remains outside the conflict. The call to action comes to her when the life of her dark brother, the playmate of her childhood, is endangered, and to save him from the fury of a lynching mob, enraged to the point of blood lust at thought of a negro who has laid his hand on a white woman’s arm, she again crosses the color line and falsely declares herself of negro birth. ”

“ Winning over cranky old Joshua Barton, her next door neighbor, is perhaps her greatest achievement, and thru it an ancient wrong is righted which brings happiness to many people. And Dr Denton, who has loved her always, surely loves her no less now that she has outgrown her earlier selfishness.
“It is cloying upon the intellect and opiate to the senses. ‘Christine of the young heart’ is sweet; it is doubly dangerous because it is well constructed and well written, even though it be a typical novel of sentimentality.” ”

“ He must act, must become a worker, must undertake a handicraft. He chooses cobbling, settles in a typical New England coast town, and gradually works himself into the confidence of his fellow townsmen and into local influence. His journal records his experiences, is full of philosophical criticism of American life and character in general, of the flaws in our democracy, of our attitude to the war before our entry into it and of the imminence of a regenerated world after the war. Our actual participation in the war fills him with satisfaction and pride and the hope of future greatness. ”

“ Men of taste, men with an ear for the classic note in prose, must always read Landor. That some have failed in this elementary duty is the burden of a delightful essay by Mr John Bailey prefixed to a little collection of Landor’s prose and verse,—a fine quotation for every day in the year, beginning with the famous epitaph on himself, and proceeding with symphonic development to the Latin epitaph on a young scholar. ”

“ The Lord Grey who passed the reform bill of 1832 has always been an enigma to later generations. His political career was like a drama in which the hero holds the stage in the first act and has a brief and effective scene in the second act, but then is seen no more till the fifth act. ”

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20–17391 Spiritualism is an obsession, says the author, by which a person relinquishes his will-power into other and unknown hands—always a very dangerous thing to do. He believes that any attempt to unlock the door which separates this life from the next is “an unseemly intrusion upon the sanctity, the august majesty, of which we are conscious in the presence of our dead. Spiritualism vulgarizes that which is holy, while adding to our knowledge no single word of real help or worth.” ”

“ His argument is, in fact, the old argument that one great trust controlling a whole industry can work more efficiently and economically than a number of small and overlapping concerns. Here he develops his second argument. We have to consider the psychology of the miners. Rightly or wrongly, they are now reluctant to work for the purpose of creating private profit. No system of profit-sharing will content them; they insist on the dignity of being regarded directly as servants of the community; they have lost all faith in the divine right of employers. ”

“ In this latest book we may watch the conflict between the light that comes from the everlasting flame and the darkness that is the ever-present shadow.... There are many poems in ‘Flame and shadow’ to delight those who cannot share her philosophy. There are songs of the faithful beauty of Aldebaran and Altair, and songs of the open sea and the mountains. It is necessary to mention, also, the songs of places, of St Louis, of New York, and Santa Barbara, and the songs of people and of their secret thoughts, ‘rushing without sound’ from the hidden places of their minds. ”