Prose Preferences.

Prose Preferences. Selected and edited by Sidney Cox, assistant professor of English, Dartmouth College, and Edmund Freeman, associate professor of English, State University of Montana. Harper and Brothers.

Ordinarily one thinks of such a collection as this as a rather impersonal affair and, especially if it is a collection of prose pieces, as a book (composed with an eye to marshaled classrooms) of essays whose "points" may be ticked off on the fingers or which "illustrate" this, that or the other literary movement, period, or form. But the only conventionally academic thing about "Prose Preferences" is the titles of the compilers. And my chief criticism of the book as a text book' is that it is too strongly marked by the personal preferences of the compilers to be used to its best advantage outside of their own classrooms. But, in fact, it is not an ordinary text book and was not, I believe, so intended. This is not to say that it may not be used with profit in a great many classes— I hope and am sure that it will be—but in purpose, substance, and in format, even, it is quite outside the ordinary run of academic compilation.

It is hard to convey a unified impression, in a review, of a book whose contents exhibit such diversity; perhaps a hajty glance at the contents will be the surest way of revealing the range of interest the book covers. There are short stories by: Katherine Mansfield, L. P. Jacks, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Wilbur Daniel Steele among others. There are A Boy in Missouri by Mark Twain, and A Boyin Idaho by James Stevens for autobiography. (And I should have liked as a companion piece A Boy in Ohio culled from Sherwood Anderson's Story-Teller's Story—not really, I just put this in to show that I am qualified to review an anthology.) There is a keen critical piece by J. S. Collis about Shaw. There are light essays (once, perhaps still, called "informal") by A. A. Milne and Logan Pearsall Smith. There is the famous preface to The Nigger ofthe Narcissus and, equally valuable for the beginning or the arrived writer, the Letters onLiterary Art reprinted from the George SandFlaubert correspondence. Turgenev, Anatole France and Havelock Ellis are represented; W. H. Hudson and Thoreau for naturalists. The other-sort-of naturalist, James Joyce, more or less shoulders the mellow, urbane, and fastidious Percy Lubbock. On the one hand we have Santayana and Walter Pater, on the other Masefield, D. H. Lawrence and Waldo Frank. There is a selection from the Book of Job. In one of the two or three pieces of his prose that have seen print Robert Frost in a page gives us the impact of Amy Lowell's poetry on this generation as I have not felt it given elsewhere. And there is the bit I liked best in the book, I think now as I leaf it through,—Liam O'Flaherty's sketch called Milking Time. In less than four pages the author has caught all the physical earthiness of a simple episode, quite without effort and with a masterly transference of the episode's deeper significance. (I think I am going to use it in my next class.)

This cursory listing will, I hope, convey some impression of the range and catholicity of interest of the compilers. More than this, one feels behind these apparently casual selections a distinct impression of the personalities of Mr. Cox and Mr. Freeman. Such an impression one scarcely expects from an anthology (but it is one which we have a right to expect from any good book) and it is such an integral impression which, as I said above, it is hard to convey in a review. One gets this flavor of personality in the brief notes the authors have prefaced to each selection (not in substance nor in typographical form are these by any means an ordinary set of introductory remarks). One gets it in the brief preface. Perhaps I cannot do better in an attempt to convey the sense of earnest,, unconventional, tolerant, and adventurous personality that lies behind the book than quote the last two paragraphs of this preface:

"Our book is 'representative' of one thing only: the positive pleasure of two teachers in some, of the prose they have happened to read recently, and have read with good effect in classes in writing. It isn't modern, nor is it classic. But each selection is pertinent and each exemplifies good writing.

"We hope to disenchant through enchanting. We hope to clarify through assisting the student to perceive the mixedness of life. We hope to actuate the . sense of humor through fun, whim, and perception of irony. We hope to empower through the discipline of delving and choosing. And we hope to generate faith through recognition, resignation, and delight. We hope too much. But never mind."

"Studies of the Dream as a Technical Device in Latin Epic and Drama" by Professor John Barker Stearns 'l6, a dissertation presented to the faculty of Princeton University in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, has recently been published.

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