TEN CENTS A COPY

The Saturday Revi

of LITERATURE

EDITED BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

Votume VIII

New York, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1931]

ROOSEVELT AND ROOT EAT THEIR WORDS CONTEMPORARY CARTOON, ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION

Here Was a Man

THEODORE ROOSEVELT. By Henry F. PrincLe. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. 1931. $5.

Reviewed by WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE HE story of Theodore Roosevelt properly told must be much more fhan the biography of a man. It must be a sort of myth of an

epoch. For more than any other leader we

have had since Lincoln’s day, Theodore

Roosevelt dramatized a cause. His cause

may be defined rather indefinitely as the

rising class consciousness of the common man, the average man in the middle stratum of our economic life; specifically, the farmer who owned his land, the mer- chant, the professional man, teacher, preacher, editor, lawyer, doctor, and the like, and the upper range of skilled labor. For Theodore Roosevelt never attracted

the tenant farmer, the hired man, the

casual, seasonal laborer, nor the average skilled laborer connected with mass pro- duction in textiles, steel, coal, copper, the building trades, the teamsters, the truck farmers. These always distrusted him.

His Harvard accent affronted them. His |

occasional outgivings upon what they re-

garded as highbrow topics made them |

suspicious that he was erudite and hence

out of sympathy with them. Also, Roose- | velt was a hopeless addict to the balanced |

sentence. Whereases, ifs, buts, on the other hands, man who voted his prejudices and not his intelligence that here was a leader who was not to be trusted to go the whole distance. And that crowd—what might be termed the lower middle class in Amer- ica if there is such a class—must have a leader who makes no negations, permits no limitations, denies restrictions, and scorns qualifications.

So Roosevelt’s mob was composed of men and women, educated generally through the high school, who read a daily paper and some sort of a weekly or monthly magazine occasionally, who lived at a minimum in a five-room house or apartment and at a maximum of eight or ten, who hated the very rich and feared the very poor—the one as greedy and powerful, the other as greedy and ignor- ant, both dangerotis. This Roosevelt mob ruled the roost in America during the first decade and a half of this country. Most of the time Roosevelt led it. It was his crowd. Some of the time LaFollette’s crowd marched with it. Some of the time

irritably indicated to the |

the Cleveland crowd went along. Always some of the Bryanites could be depended on one way or another, under Bryan’s leadership some times, under Rocsevelt’s leadership occasionally, to make a part of this middle class group that came into consciousness of power and so into sov- ereignty in those days.

Mr. Pringle’s biography of Roosevelt is an honest and intelligent attempty whether conscious or not, one may not say—to segregate Roosevelt, the man, from the Roosevelt crowd, the Roose- veltians, the middle class mob. Mr. Prin- gle does not, in this biography, deny the Roosevelt background. He does not ignore it. But he does not emphasize it, and em- phasis is needed to get Roosevelt in focus. The Roosevelt whom we see here moving through Mr. Pringle’s pages is by all odds the most carefully documented figure, and this is the most comprehensive story, the most illuminating, convincing, and rea-

is often painful and so, by its very con- scious effort to be fair may be indeed a bit unfair, Mr. Pringle has built up a

(Continued on page 260)

But I Entreat You

By Vircrnta Moore

UT I entreat you not to die. You would not tear my tongue from natural mooring, Nor shave my ears flush with my head, nor try To give me darkness for an eye.

Nor prick my hairs out one by one,

Nor blot my nostrils that were good for breathing,

Nor amputate by stroke these arms that have done

So much of lifting, and legs that run.

You would not (great and gentle) plunge

A dagger through my ribs, that faulty armor,

And till you found my heart loosen and lunge

And plug the hole up with a sponge.

Then cry your No to death, for you

Are more to me than tongue, ears, eyes, and hair close fastened,

Nostrils, and arms, and legs, and live heart too,

And unseen the vital residue.

By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

ING LOG and King Stork! We have been distressed by the minor cruelties of American writing, by Faulkner’s slick gangsters and vicious school girls, by the

| ruthless sex-seeking of night-life novels, | and all the hate and rancor in current

realism. And many have said that these hard young girls, and the muddled ideal- ists, and the spiritual anarchists, and the boobs and sensualists, and the drunkards and sentimentalists, were not worth a tragic catharsis, and have added that nine-tenths of the characters in “ad- vanced” American fiction belong in a

| psychopathic ward or could be colonized | in some new Botany Bay with immense | advantage to the state. They have com-

plained of King Log and now Eugene O’Neill has given them King Stork. In- stead of sadism among the vulgar, he gives them the morbid tragedy of large souls, instead of the quarrels of corrupt animals he gives them karma and fate.

He goes back to the eighteen sixties

uilt and_it broke through, was thwarted, was suppressed, according to

opport phot. i or.even whole- vhole-hearted desire. The dead Man- nons, Abe and David, had both loved Marie Brantéme, the servant in the house; Abe’s wife loved David; David took Marie; Abe, the elder, drove him out and ruined him; Marie was deserted; David hung himself; the very house in which the brothers lived was torn down in a jealous fury; and the passions of this family, first suppressed and then explod- ing, passed into the family character, where they made a doom which is the subject of this play. The tensity of this earlier situation accentuated every psy- | chological trait of a family already strong- | ly marked by Puritan tenacity and ani- | mal passion, and this tensity became a | trait so heritable that every one’ of the

descendants, Marie’s illegitimate child

like the rest, shared it in common with | an abnormal family resemblance. Lovers | and enemies were fused into the Man-

for his setting but that is camouflage. | non type.

The after-war period of this new “Elec- tra” is more-iike the nineteen twent.es

younger generation are trying to escape

| from everything they dislike in memory, | and are failing..Love.for.its.own sake is

at a premium, and stoicism is no longer a virtue. In short,.it-is 1920.

But the dramatist assumes what younger writers busy with the new cos-

| mopolitanism of Chicago and New York | sonable picture of Roosevelt that has been | | made since his death. With fairness that

have ignored, the continuing virility of the old American strain, and its capacity

| for tragic elevation in the last.stages of | the struggle between protestant. moralism _ and the will to live and love. He has theory of Roosevelt, the man. He has built | | second. actin adrama-of.which Haw- | thorne wrote the first, because the-heroic

gone back to the eighteen.sixties.for the

and romantic quality-of —his—stery—re- quires the perspective of time;.but.O’Neill,

he chooses to write. Let “Mourning Becomes Electra”* be

ly, when played, to _gobbleup-all-their little frogs of optimism which.go-hopping about the shores of the American pond.

| For what we have here is a story far

ey than any Hawthorne conceived

. “The Scarlet Letter” was a tale of a sin against conscience, where great-lov~ ers failing to.reconcile their beliefs with. their acts were forced inte penarice as the only resolution of the conflict..But the Mannons, New England shipbuilders, great people in their great house,.sinned. against their own nature..Scarlet.in.them became a duller crimson..Love—was—a

* MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA. By Eucene O’Netmzt. New York: Horace Liveright. 1931. $2.50.

And this doom, which is reasonable | only if you suppose that.the affair of ‘sve and jealousy described above was a crisis of already determined character, became | a psychological nightmare. Every Man-

non in the play takes a double r role, and every Mannon wears a mask-like face

| which hides a constant. inner ‘conflict. | General Ezra, expected back from the | war when the curtain rises, looks always like a_ statue on a memorial monument

| and yet rages with a purely sensual pase sion for a wife.that-he.wishes.to.have as mistress. Lavinia, his daughter, is jealous er mother and in love with her father.

Orin, his son, is jealous of him and in

| love with his mother. Christine, the | mother, is in love with her son, and | when he is forced away from her into the war by a jealous father, takes on the mariner, Captain Brant, who is no other

This ce} Week

“GREEN MEMORY.” Reviewed by Henry Watcott Boynton. “WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES?” Reviewed by Henry Tracy.

“WYATT EARP.” Reviewed by STANLEY VESTAL.

“NATIVE STOCK.” Reviewed by Witt1AM MacDona cp.

“HYPNOTIC POETRY.”

Reviewed by C. E. ANpREws. “JOB: The Story of a Simple Man.” Reviewed by Louis UNTERMEYER.

“SPARKS FLY UPWARD.” Reviewed by Lee Wirson Dopp. “SATURDAY NIGHT.” Reviewed by GrorcE DANGERFIELD.

“THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI.” Reviewed by KENNETH McKenzie.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE By CHRISTOPHER Mor.ey.

Next Week

CHILDREN’S BOOK NUMBER.

THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE

NovemMsBer 7, 1931

than the illegitimate son of Marie Bran- téme and David Mannon. Orin, Brant, and Ezra are replicas in appearance. “Vinnie” ie her mother over again, but soured and repressed. In this family there are two characters, one raging for love and life but held back and holding back, one freely moving toward desire (are they Abe and Marie Brantéme?), but these are mingled and blended until each in- dividual is drawn and torn by conflicting temperaments.

~ And for three plays, each an act in a

! trilogy which is inconclusive except as a

whole, O’Neill debates the question as to

\_ whether happiness is right} Christine de-

sires it and takes Brant as her lover. Ezra desires it, and humbles himself before Christine. She poisons him, and Vinnie, taking Electra’s part and already jealous because of Brant, turns Orin (her Orestes) against his mother, drives him into mur- dering Brant, and Christine into suicide. Orin desires happiness and will marry the gentle Hazel; but Vinnie fears that he will reveal the family secrets, and when the price of his renunciation is set at the anes- thetizing guilt of an incestuous relation- ship with herself, she helps him to self murder. Vinnie is still determined to es- cape into love and life, but in the com- plexity of her guilt finds that she cannot marry her simple lover Peter without poi- soning his nature and his happiness. She goes back into the house of Mannon, the shutters are closed, and she puts on mourning for life.

“Thus O'Neill offers three solutions for a life entanglement. First, a ruthless break through into satisfaction, which here is

| blocked by situations arising from the | Mannon character. Second, a drowning of | conscience in guilt so complete that char-

acter disintegrates. This the weak Orin finds possible, and the strong Vinnie im- possible. Third, a return te stoicism, either

the stoicism of death, or the stoicism of

renunciation, each sterile. The last cur- tain falls on this solution.

“Mourning Becomes Electra” is not melodrama, although two murders, two suicides, an adultery, and three incestuous relationships, might make Gorbuduc hide his head and the Duchess of Malfi shud- der! It is not melodrama because, granted the Mannon character, what follows is logical though lurid. Neither is it realism. These Mannons and the village depen- dents who serve as chorus are written up in the low tone and speak in the familiar language of the realistic drama, but all are symbols, and the tragic figures have the shadowy greatness of romantic heroes and heroines capable of anything. The faces of Captain Peter and his sister, Ha- zel, who are so unfortunate as to love, and be loved, by the Mannons, are not masked because there is nothing to hide. Seth, the gardener, the family confidante, has put on a mask of drunken senility to cover what he knows and what the Mannons have made of him. He and his boozy chan- teys provide a clowning in the style of King Lear. But the Mannons and the Mannon wives are Byronic figures, each like the spectral troop in Beckford’s “Va- thek” hiding a burning heart, and masking the character which is the fatal family gift.

And one is forced to the rather aston- ishing conclusion for this day and genera- tion that to the ultra-modern Mr. O'Neill,

j who in “Strange Interlude” introduced the

} populace to Freud, the American Puritan,

with his conflicts between duty and de- sire, is still romantic. Like Hawthorne he veils and adumbrates his characters into shadowy and terrible greatness, like Haw- thorne he sees no solution to the conflict and so wrecks his characters upon it as upon the rock of fate. Is this due to some racial compulsion, which we, in our light skepticism have overlooked, or has he wearied of the trivial interludes of modern love affairs and gone back to soul-search- ing Puritanism for a theme, precisely as the writers of movie scenarios yearn back to a long-vanished Wild West in search of a virile story?

And indeed there are clear indications that Mr. O’Neill is riding his romance too hard in “Mourning Becomes Electra.” The old rigors, the old conflicts that inspired Hawthorne are no longer enough, they have no “kick” in them for O’Neill unless

they are lifted from imagination into nightmare and lead to situations so sen- sational that it is horror rather than im- aginative sympathy which they inspire. All, all the Mannons must be made inces- tuous in wish, because the last step in the suppression of desire by a code is a spiri- tual morbidity where the tortured soul can be satisfied only by what is forbidden

| in every man’s taboo. All, all in their im-

aginations long for some “happy island” of the South Seas (and Lavinia goes to

| seek it) where they can lapse into primi-

tivism with their beloveds and doff their karmas with their garments. The Puritan tradition of greed and suppression, duty and accomplishment, is driven into a bale- ful Purgatory with no way out but a re- turn to savagery, or a final extinction of all that makes it human. This is the kind of alternative that Byron used to offer a shuddering Europe. It was excess then, it is excess now. The dramatist has tor- tured his situation until it becomes an abnormality, and his tragedy suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

I submit that by every literary and his- torical test this is decadence, the sensa- tionalism of decadence, the reversals of decadence by which the recessive abnor- malities of character become the main- springs of the plot.\It is what Melville at- tempted-in-his Violent reaction from the happy simplicities of “Typee,” but lost himself in a maze of words. I offer this as a definition rather than as a criticism, for there have been masterpieces of deca- dent literature (such as Poe’s tales of the grotesque), although their place is on the fumy downward slope of Parnassus. But whence comes this tension which, when the tragic imagination of Americans reaches a certain pitch, sends our best minds taut and trembling into the depths of the macabre? Hawthorne, Poe, Mel- ville, Bierce, and in our time, Faulkner, Green, O’Neill! If it is the karma of Puri- tanism, why should that so deeply and so morbidly affect us now? It it is a reaction to the surface optimism of a materialistic country, why should the classic Ameri- cans in America’s most settled period have been driven ‘also? 4

It is, I presume, the result of a triple struggle which has lasted longer than the United States:—an unexampled acquisi- tive energy bred of protestantism and pio- neering; an unexampled idealistic opti- mism, the strain which Emerson and Whitman have lifted into literature; and a violence of reaction against either or both of these native impulses which car- ries the sensitive and dissatisfied spirit (even a Mark Twain) into a search for something horrid enough to smite this

| complacent country into attention—a jaw

bone of a corpse, or a spectre from the Merrymount that has been sacrificed to make Chicago and New York, or the spec- tacle of the Puritan himself (as here) mangled between the jaws of conscience and lurid desires.

They have all taken refuge in romance, these rebels, and that has been their weakness. Hawthorne was cloudy, Poe hysterical, Melville confused; and O’Neill, with all his power of summoning fig- ures of depth and magnitude, weakens into morbidity. Exasperated (like the others) by bourgeois complacency, and aghast at the possibilities his heated imagination discovers in the Puritan con- flict, O’Neill in this play stacks his cards, adds incest to adultery, murder to mental breakdown, and flings the whole pack at his stodgy audiences, determined to make them sit up and see what he sees in their family lives. In the same fashion he un- derlined and interpolated in “Strange In- terlude” until he had planted Freud in the dullest intelligence. It is Byron’s, it is Poe’s frantic longing to be understood, It is a phase, I think, of decadence, and

| a real limitation upon the art of one of | the very few modern dramatists in Eng-

lish who can lay claim to the high ground of tragedy. Mr. O’Neill is like his own Emperor

| Jones. The bogies of his mind pursue him.

He has insight and a quite terrific power of masking and unmasking his characters. But the warped mind, the unbalanced im- agination, and characters sick from their own complexities, attract him as if he were an interne in a hospital. And then

his innate romanticism clothes them in morbid terrors and gives them strange baleful worlds to play in, which are too like our own to be laughed at, yet too strained, too tense, too highly specialized, to be altogether convincing.

If our American society is truly deca- dent; if its energy is merely the noise of a pack on a trail leading nowhere, and its true story to be found only in its sick and defeated souls, then O’Neill is its prophet. If it is not decadent (and I for one, who have been as free as any to attack the lunacy of contemporary ideals, do not for an instant believe it to be decadent), if, like so many other societies as they ap- proach maturity, it is working out with

sweat and infinite variety the karma of |

Puritanism, the karma of progress, the karma of the machine, then it is O’Neill who is decadent, a fine talent wandering in a nightmare, where truth and sensa- tional exaggeration are strangely mixed,

EUGENE 0O’NEIL FROM A CARTOON BY EVA HERMANN FOR “ON PARADE” (COWARD-MC CANN)

ih which drt becomes lurid with all the devices of melodrama, and where life is subjected to the arbitrary rules of literary psychology made compulsive by a bril- liant dialogue that becomes more articu- late with every turn of the screw. His skill, his sincerity, and his lift above the triviality of current drama and fiction, stir the emotions, but they are not purged; his very excess curdles them. Indeed the super-sensational, super-sentimental, su- per-everything feature movie, and the high-tension, romantic decadence of the O’Neill tragedies have many points of re- semblance. They are both phases of the last stages of nineteenth century Ameri- can romance.

This criticism was written after read- ing but before seeing “Mourning Be- comes Electra.” Since writing it, I have seen the play, and have been deeply impressed by its relentless flow of ac- tion, its brilliant and imaginative dia- logue, and the beautiful simplicity with which the mills of circumstance grind down the Mannon soul to the fine dust of passive resistance. After five hours at “Mourning Becomes Electra” one feels that there is no more skilful playwright at work today than Eugene O’Neill. The subtlety with which his tragic relation- ships change and renew, son taking the réle of father, daughter assuming the soul as well as the visible shape of mother, is worthy of the highest praise. It is a notable play, if not a great trag- edy. And powers of drama not fully grasped by the reader appear in the ac- tual playing. The duel of women, first mother against daughter, then daughter against brother’s sweetheart, makes a curve of tensity through the three plays which lifts and holds the imagination of the audience until one can conceive of an auditor entirely insensitive to in- tellectual subtlety who would be stirred by this drama as the groundlings were stirred by “Hamlet.”

And yet to sit through a performance of “Mourning Becomes Electra” is to realize, in spite of an attention never for a moment relaxed, how purely in- tellectual are the materials of the play.

All watchers are tense and excited: none of them seems to be moved in an emo- tional sense except by the broadly hu- man Captain Brant. There are no thrills of sympathy, none of that spiritual ex- altation that waits upon tragedy. And the reason is to be found, I think, in what I have said above. The great char- acters are all selfish. Nothing outside of their own will stirs them. The high- tension hate which makes the drama move is sprung not from fate or inevit-

| able human circumstance but of those

complexities of incestuous desire which make the Mannon family a thing apart. Without those special passions the family could never have brought about such catastrophes. The Greeks who wrote the Electra tragedies would have drawn back, I think, from such a dependence upon special circumstance. They would have known as well as we, although without our psychological terms to de- scribe them, the perversions of love in

| every strong family, but they would not

have rested a tragic development upon an abnormal instance. They were sound- er dramatists than Eugene O’Neill. No one can question his consummate skill as a playwright.

What Would You Do?

THE BOOK OF DILEMMAS. By Legon- arp Hatcu. New York: Simon & Schus- ter. 1931. $1.50.

Reviewed by Rosert Kerrn Leavitt

R. HATCH’S amusing volume

is another in the procession of

participating exercise books

which have been so significent a factor in the publishing business ever since the “Cross Word Puzzle” and “Ask Me Another” books. It is, however, rather more on the party amusement side than most of its predecessors.

“The Book of Dilemmas” presents a series of situations briefly outlined, in which the reader is asked to place him- self and decide upon a course of action. You assume yourself to be, for example, a young and promising clergyman, re- tyrning from Europe aboard a ship which carries not only some of your most strait- laced parishioners, but an angel-faced young lady with whom you have become acquainted. As you are going below one day, this delectable creature asks you to leave in her stateroom a small brief- case. On the way you stumble, the brief- case crashes asunder and cascades into the very laps of your parishioners a choice collection of pornographic post- cards.

Before you can explain, the young lady appears, and by a look implores your silence.

Should you accept the situation, in- volving the notoriety of being classed as a whited sepulchre disgracing your clerical garb, and also involving sure trouble with your parishioners? Or should you make the attempt to pin the blame where it belongs—on the seem- ingly nice young lady who has so rep- rehensible a taste in art?

Your task as a reader is to decide upon the proper course of action in this and some twenty-seven other cases. Perhaps a quarter of them are titillatingly im- proper, for the volume is intended to be used either by the solo player, by a two- some, or by a large party. The astute publishers cannily furnish you with blank pages in which to inscribe the results of wrestling with your own conscience and the dicta of your friends. Further, the book follows the formula for successful works of its type in giving you the near- est thing possible to a rating scale with which to compare your own performance. After every dilemma there are printed the solutions of four acknowledged au- thorities in manners of genteel conduct, Messrs. Franklin P. Adams, Bruce Bar- ton, Heywood Broun, and Christopher Morley. Their judgments are not the least entertaining feature of the book, especially in the not infrequent cases where one or another of them is forced to perform a masterpiece of equivoca- tion.

On the whole, the book is well adapted to its primary purpose, which is catering to the entertainment of people who like, not reading, but doing things with books.

A three-act play by Signor Mussolini, entitled “Napoleon,” is to be produced in Paris in November. It deals with Na- poleon’s return from Elba.

Novem!

WHAT LIVE Dout

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forms i lantic | Dutch, re 8 minorit

NovemsBer 7, 1931

THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Pax Mundi

WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES? By H. G. Weis. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931.

Reviewed by Henry TRAcy

ERE is something which has to be read. A review will not dis- miss it. To make reading pos-

sible and prompt and wide-

spread, we have it in a paper binding. It is safe to say that this expresses the wish of the author. He writes under a vivid sense of world stresses. More so than is common with this ardent and prolific propagandist? I think so. At least more completely in focus.

Condensed and directed at a particu- lar point in time—the exact present—the logic of the book is coercive. This is no inspirational treatise on what to do with our personal lives in order to escape boredom. A number of pertinent facts are cited, calling attention to the way our world impinges on its individuals— not merely one class or type, but all persons of all ranks and persuasions— and constrains them, variously dwarfing, obstructing, defeating them, so that their lives miscarry. They are obvious facts. Who denies them? But the peculiar genius of Mr. Wells consists in his abil- ity to take commonplace, indisputable and therefore universally tolerated facts, and make them into a pretty cogent chain of reasoning. This he did (so we say) in middle life, for a diversion. Re- spectable Edwardians were annoyed by certain implications they found in his books, but the cure was easy: not read him! Strangely enough their cure did not work. The disease called H. G. Wells persisted. And now, just when this du- bious and perhaps contagious case should have been passing, with gout and cane, into harmless desuetude, comes this dis- turbing little book, in cheerfullest yel- low paper cover and a very selling title.

Only a fool would attempt an acade- mic review of it. If anything can blast the mental inertia of the common man, here is the dynamite. Homo sapiens europeus, the common or garden va- riety of man, with H. G. Wells as self- confessed incarnation of him—this man, tired of waiting for somebody with genius or higher intellectual gifts to come along and provide it for him, de- cides to form a new ideology of things, and one that will work. And he does it. There is the gist of this slim but com- pact manifesto. As for its point and pur- pose, it is that of “The Open Conspir- acy” brought down to date and stripped for action.

Those who thought that Herbert George Wells had done his bit and re- tired, were mistaken. “The Outline of History,” “The Science of Life,” “Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind” merely lay in his path. So we find, early in this new work, where he recapitulates the crucial nodes in the evolution of his doctrine. This present volume is its cap and condensation. What makes it so (quite apart from his own admissions) is the fact that it contains dynamics. It in- cites to intelligent action; is no manual of political non-resistance; proposes to revise the conduct of world affairs by revising our conduct of the world mind. Here is a manual of moral self-educa- tion, and one infinitely more to the point than if its drift were scattered through the pages of “Joan and Peter.” The author of one hundred and eight books or pam- phlets should know, by now, what he has to say, and should be able to con- dense it. He should and he does. Here is the proof. And what has the man to say? Nothing new, really. He has to say that we are due for the beginnings of an alignment among intelligent people the world over, for a world civilization “that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.” And he has to show that such a notion is not Utopian. His ground is, belief in the power of an intelligent minority; this power gradually spreading, through re- forms in education. He looks to the “At- lantic States” of Scandinavian, German, Dutch, French, English and other Euro- pean peoples to unite with an American minority (not yet in power) for con-

structive research, foreshadowing a gradual taking over economic and politi- cal control when the world is ripe for it.

Now if such ideas are distressful to any reader he may do as did the Ed- wardians, and turn his eyes another way. But it may surprise a few to know that this treatise is expressly anti-Marx- ian. It disposes effectively of such shibbo- leths as “proletarian,” denies the validity of “class war,” and punctures the notion of a discreet and immiscible interest called “Labor.” It holds out hope for the discovery of social intelligence among bankers. It describes the Russian Five Year Plan as an autocratic and capitalis- tic measure.

Apart from its serious intent, it would be a pity to miss the many pungent and pithy phrasings one finds scattered all through these pages; or the good satire. But, after all, there is one thing in it I should count it criminal to neglect, and that is, a priceless parable (I have it red-lettered in my notes, and the page is 126). It is called the story of the pig on Provinder Island. It is a “parable,” in God’s truth, but the lines laid down in the

tight corners, dragging bad men out of trouble by the ears, tracking road-agents patiently through waterless desert, afoot and hungry and dogged by faithless depu- ties in league with the very men he was after. We meet gamblers, Fairy Belles, Texas cow-outfits hell-bent to hurrah the Jayhawk cow-towns at the end of steel, and most thrilling of all, we follow the

| long sanguinary duel between organized, | protected crime in league with Arizona ' sheriffs and the fighting Earps, which

ended in the cowardly killing of “Morg” Earp, and Wyatt’s revenge. It is the old

| American racket all over again.

In this book a thousand disputed facts are cleared up, and the facts convincing-

ly presented. So far as one may judge a

book which brings so much that is fresh and unexpected, the author has made a rare contribution to authentic Western history, and has presented a thoroughly interesting, gripping, clear, and credible story. The book is eminently readable, without the usual attempts to excite the reader with rhetorical tricks and sensa- tional handling. So well has the author caught the spirit of his subject that the

Gospels are changed; the thing is hilari- ously funny. This reviewer had begun reading “What Are We to Do With Our Lives?” at twelve, midnight. It was two- thirty when he came to the parable of the pig. It released him—and since re- lease for humanity is the keynote of the book, he was right to call it a day, and a good one.

Henry Tracy is a biologist and author of many books in belles lettres, among them “English as Experience.”

The American Racket

WYATT EARP, Frontier Marshal. By Sruart N. Lake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1931. $4.

Reviewed by STANLEY VESTAL XCEPTING only Billy the Kid

name of any frontiersman with- in living memory around which so many legends and myths have been piled as the name Earp. The exploits of that famous family of gun-fighters, and especially the exploits of Wyatt, most celebrated of the brothers, have provided no end of themes for discussion, have whiled away the tedium of countless readers of Western stuff, and have made the fortunes of whole flocks and sects of writers who dealt in more or less fiction- ized versions of those thrilling encoun- ters. So thick was the veil of legend, so dim the mountain of fact, that readers had a hard time making sure whether the Earp boys were murderous despera- does or heroic officers of the law. But now the clouds are swept away, the facts stand clear. Wyatt Earp has spoken. His career as hunter, pioneer, buffalo- hunter, gambler, cowman, and marshal carries the reader into many of the most celebrated cow-camps and mining-camps of the old West—Dodge and Wichita, Deadwood, and Elsworth, and the rest —all the way from Tombstone, Arizona to Nome, Alaska, and back. We see him in constant action, facing mobs and drunken killers, shooting his way out of

Drawn for the SaturpAy Review by Guy Pene du Bois

frequent passages taken verbatim from the man of action, Wyatt Earp, cause no interruption or distraction from the main narrative style. Mr. Lake writes as straight as Wyatt Earp shot. A sound performance, which will please all those readers of Western books who are now as exacting in matters of style as they have always been in matters of fact and detail.

As to these, the merits of the book are legion. We have Wyatt Earp’s long ex- planation and discussion of the fine points and technique of gun-play, illustrated by examples from the practice of the most proficient masters of the art; we have a detailed account of the methods of hide-

| hunters on the buffalo range, more com-

plete than any I know; we have shown to us the inside politics of cattle-rustling

and Sitting Bull, there is no | and gambling and territorial politics in

Arizona as they affected the work of peace officers. John Charles Fremont comes in for some very adverse criti- cism; and more than one mythical gun- man, such as “Doc” Holliday, is brought to life, photograph and all.

If one has any regret, it is that the pro- fanity throughout the book should have been so uniformly washed out and euphe- mized. Of course, that is all in the tra- dition of the frontier, an absurdity of our culture which tolerated murder and man- slaughter as necessary, but boggled at a naughty word in print. But perhaps even the language of Long John Silver would prove uninspiring, if we were permitted to listen in for long. Yet some spicy speech seems demanded for a book that would present the daring deeds of West- ern heroes at a time “when there was no law west of Kansas City, and west of Fort Scott, no God.”

Stanley Vestal (Walter Stanley Camp- bell), professor of English at the Uni- versity of Oklahoma, has carried on ex- tensive research into the history of the West and the Indians of the region. He is the author among other books of “Kit Carson, the Happy Warrior of the Old West.”

Six Worthies

NATIVE STOCK. THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT SEEN IN SIX LIVES. By Artur Pounp. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1931. $2.50. Reviewed by Witt1am MacDona.p

F the six personages whom Mr. Pound chooses as illustrations of the rise of the American spirit, none, in any reasonable likelihood, would be selected to grace any American Hall of Fame, yet all of them, in widely diverse ways, won in their time something more than ordinary distinction. Of the William Pepperrells whose careers Mr. Pound recounts, Sir William is remembered as the leader of the colonial forces that contributed heavily to the capture of Louisburg from the French; but Pepperrell, al- though properly honored with a baron- etcy and lightly compared by some to Marlborough, was, as Mr. Pound says, “no hero, but merely the commander of an extraordinarily courageous and lucky little army which had achieved the next to impossible, and in so doing had weighted the scales of empire.” John Bradstreet deserved well of the colonies for his services in the last French and Indian war, and through his capture of Fort Frontenac paved the way for the fall of New France two years later. Ephraim Williams, killed in the “bloody morning scout” near Lake George, left his estate for a school which shortly became Williams College; but Robert Rogers, scout, frontiersman, and heart- less Indian fighter, long celebrated in story for his mythical feat of sliding on snowshoes down the five-hundred-foot face of Roger’s Rock, on Lake George, fell into devious ways later as Indian agent and political schemer at Machinac, went over to the British in 1776, and died in poverty in London in 1795.