Alumni Publications

ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS

The Coming of the Sun, a poem by Alec K. Laing '25 appears in the March issue of Palms.

Henry K. Norton 'OS is the author of a book entitled "Back of War," published by Doubleday, Doran.

The John Day Publishing Company has recently published a book by Stanwood Cobb '13, entitled "The New Leaven, Progressive Education and its Effect Upon the Child and Society."

The Macmillan Company have published "Greek. Thought in the New Testament" by George Holley Gilbert '78. This book will be reviewed in a later issue of the magazine.

Willard W. Eggleston '91 is the author of an article on Ezra Brainerd, late President of Middlebury College, in the March issue of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club.

Alfred Adler: Understanding Human Nature. New York, Greenberg. 1927. Pp xiii, 286. (Translated by W. B. Wolfe, '21).

Dr. Adler was one of the early disciples of Freud. Differing with Freud on the importance of sex in the neurosis, he started his own school of psychoanalysis, to which he subsequently gave the name "Individual Psychoogy."

The fundamental principles of the individual psychology are the major theses of the present work: (1) all persons suffer from some inferiority, organic or social; (2) consequently, they seek compensation, either in some form of power or in the comfort of a neurosis; (3) in our man-made civilization the female has less opportunity than the male to acquire power, and thus she deprecates her sex ("the masculine protest"). The book might well have carried the sub-title, The Causes and Consequences of Inferiority: for apparently inferiority is the central issue of human nature. The child is inferior because he is small and helpless; the woman is inferior because she lives in a masculine world; the man is inferior because the effects of his childhood persist. The important point, then, is for us to realize the diversity and subtlety with which inferiority moulds our lives and directs our behavior.

Thinking, we are told, is caused by "an uninterrupted feeling of inadequacy." Indeed, "the basis of educability lies in the striving of the child to compensate for his weaknesses. A thousand talents and capabilities arise from the stimulus of inadequacy." One can wonder, with delightful curiosity, what inferiorities caused Goethe at the age of six and a half to arrange and conduct plays on a miniature stage, what caused him to develop a mystical religion of his own at nine; what inferiorities were responsible for Macaulay's penchant for narration at the age of three, or for John Stuart Mill's learning of Greek at the same age; and to what inferiority we owe the first three musical compositions of Mozart before the age of six.

Not only is extraordinary talent the result of feelings of inadequacy; many other traits are caused by these feelings—vanity, jealousy, envy, avarice, hate, anxiety, faint-heartedness, and various barbarisms (such as nail-biting and voracious eating). "Character traits are instruments, the tricks which are used by the total personality in the acquisition of recognition and significance." A child may become lazy or bad to secure more attention; he may become good for the same reason. No matter what one's traits or character, the cause is inferiority. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,—inferiority craves relief.

Adler's contention that the most important determinants of life are generated in the earliest days of childhood is consonant with our best studies of childhood. The truth of the contention does not, however, guarantee the validity of Adler's inferences. In explaining the dream of a woman, that her husband has forgotten their wedding anniversary, Adler cites the woman's earliest childhood remembrance, the gift of a carved wooden spoon which one day in play she lost in a brook: "The dream might lead us to assume that she was now thinking of the possibility that her marriage also might float away from her." This seems the sheerest phantasy.

In his treatment of the importance of childhood the author serves us better, I believe, in calling attention to parental mistakes. Much of parental behavior increases any inferiority feeling a child may have: in demanding more than the child can do, in calling attention constantly to his errors, in ridiculing him, in not taking him seriously, and even in regarding him as an animated doll. In the compensatory trend toward acquiring power the home may err also, "in inoculating children with the false idea that they must be superior to everyone else."

The protest of the author against intelligence tests is doubtlessly due to his feeling that such tests develop these two unfortunate attitudes, that of inferiority and that of superiority. But his statements regarding the tests are neither tenable nor logical. On page 117 he says: "Up to the present time these tests have been unsuccessful. " On page 130, as data in the argu- ment that females are not truly inferior to males, he refers to the results of intelligence tests; and on page 132 he employs more positive words, "as a matter of FACT certain intelligence tests PROVED etc." Tests, to be sure, are not universal panaceas. But the increasing use of scholastic aptitude or "intelligence" tests is a definite and undeniable testimony to their usefulness, both in school and in industry.

The further extension of tests, to measure character and personality traits, seems at present one of the most hopeful endeavors in the field of psychology. The work of the Allports, Cady, Downey, May and Hartshorn, Raubenheimer, and Voelker seems to offer much more reliable and valid information than can ever be expected from the subjective methods of Adler. Adler's hypotheses should be welcomed, not as authoritative dicta, but as problems for scientific investigation.

In summing up Adler's contribution to human understanding, I think it must be admitted that inferiority and the quest for power are significant realities which we need to understand to understand life. But there are other significant realities. To the reviewer the author seems excellently to describe himself when he refers to "people who attempt to pigeon-hole every activity and every event according to some principle which they have assumed valid for every situation." It is easy to assume, to hypothecate; it is more difficult to give substantial and enduring evidence.

Freud looks at life and says it is sex; Adler looks at life and says it is a quest for power. Both Freud and Adler seem like the six blind men of Indostan who were trying to find out what an elephant is like: one felt the animal's side and said the elephant was like a wall; another felt the tusk and said the elephant was like a spear; a third felt the trunk and thought the elephant like a snake; the fourth encompassed the animal's leg and described, him as like a tree; the fifth, who touched the ear, thought the animal much like a fan; and the sixth, who happened upon the animal's tail, concluded that the elephant "is very like a rope."

"And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong!" CHARLES LEONARD STONE.

Century Readings in the American Short Story, edited and annotated by Fred Lewis Pattee '88. New York, The Century Company.

Century Reading in the American ShortStory is, until we come to Part IV—Representative Contemporary Writers—about as good a collection of American short stories as one could ask for. It is, to put it briefly, a definitive collection. No one is better qualified than Professor Pattee to make a selection that illustrates the gradual coming of age of America's most important contribution to literary types. For years Professor Pattee has been adding notably to the recorded history of the short story and at the same time doing yeoman work in demonstrating to academic circles that American literature did not collapse with the deaths of Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell. Few critics of American literature have been in principle more hospitable to modernity without letting themselves be swept off their feet by every fresh contemporary wind that blows. Professor Pattee, for instance, kept his head some years ago during the whirlwind of enthusiasm about O. Henry. In this respect, to paraphrase Chesterton, he put up at the same hotel as Mr. H. L. Mencken, although the two rarely sat down at meals together. They were right, it seems, about O.Henry. Where is O. Henry now?

There are several stories in Professor Pattee's collection that it is good to have in readily accessible form: William Austin's "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," for example—a contribution to native folk-lore that, despite Amy Lowell's revival, is still too little known—and Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron Mills." Certain other stories, such as "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence," drive home the truth of Mrs. Gerould's statement, quoted elsewhere in the book: "Stories that once were classics could not achieve that position now." Henry James, Frank R. Stockton, George W. Cable, Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Murfree, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, and all the other great names of the "Middle Period" and the "Eighteen Nineties" are adequately represented. It is regrettable that copyright difficulties make it necessary for anthologists of American prose to illustrate Mark Twain chiefly by "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Almost any chapter lifted at random from one of five or six of Mark Twain's best-known books would be better Mark Twain and better story than The Jumping Frog, or, if one is a stickler for form, Mark Twain has indisputable short stories that answer all structural demands. It seems incredible today that The Frog could once have travelled in triumph from coast to coast and over several oceans, and yet one recalls Brander Matthews' story of the breakast party at Oxford and the young Englishman who, when the name of Daniel Webster came into the conversation, looked puzzled for a moment and then remembered. "Daniel Webster, " he repeated, "Daniel Webster—oh, yes, that's the name of the frog in that funny fellow, Mark Twain's, story." We are grateful to Professor Pattee for his additional inclusion of "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut."

When we come to the contemporary section we wonder a little at some of the exclusionsespecially in view of one or two of the inclusions. To be sure, Professor Pattee disarms criticism by his remarks in his Preface, yet even so, we wonder. Where are Booth Tarkington and Ring Lardner? Where is Ernest Hemingway? Where is any representative of the "Midland" group? Where are half a dozen others ?

But after all an anthology is a matter of individual taste, and on the whole we have little serious quarrel with Professor Pattee's taste. As we look over the book we are struck afresh by the part that the short story has played in the drama of our national letters. We are struck by the palpable vitality of the form, by its capacity to change or modify itself to meet changing conditions. Only yesterday it was developing in the direction of plot; today it is expanding away from plot and drawing closer to the novel than it has been at any time since the short story's very earliest days. Who shall say that the present vigorous activity of the American novel, an activity far in excess of any that is observable in the English novel, does not derive largely from the activity in times past of the short story? Certainly the short story has helped to build up a vast reading public for fiction in this country, and has afforded writers of fiction a chance to experiment at a greatly reduced risk.

What is needed now is an extended study of the short story as an index to American social backgrounds, an index to the developing and changing customs, modes, and attitudes of the American people. Such a study requires scholarship of the rarest sort; it requires not only minute and extensive factual knowledge but synthesizing and transforming imagination as well. It is to be hoped that Professor Pattee will undertake the task.

KENNETH A. ROBINSON.

Rufus Choate: The Wizard of the Law. By Claude M. Fuess. New York, Minton, Balch

& Company, 1928. Pp. 278. This is the first readable account of the life of our great and extraordinary alumnus which has ever been written; and the only one to appear since any fair perspective upon his career could be attained. The biographer has succeeded in catching and holding much of the spirit of pre-Civil War Massachusetts which was Choate's lifelong environment; and also a good deal of the strange charm, almost completely un-Yankee in its nature, which set Choate so far apart from any of his contemporaries "He was an Oriental Yankee, a quaint blend of the Arab and the Puritan." The result is a book of fascinating interest—not a dry page in it—which no one,least of all a Dartmouth man and a lawyer, will lay down unfinished. It does not pretend to be a definitive and searching biography, and it is doubtful if one will ever be written, for, after all, Choate was not a public figure of the first rank; but it presents in glowing colors the figure of the great orator, who had the: power of swaying audiences, and above all, that kind of audience we call a jury, as perhaps no other mortal has ever possessed it. The tremendous admiration which the young Choate felt for Webster, and their close and friendly association through life, closing with Choate's wonderful eulogy on Webster in the "White Church" are brought out with deft and affectionate touches. If the author, like most biographers, inclines to overlaudation, at least he does not hide the streaks of clay in the idol's feet; he simply lets the reader discover them. May this comment close with two quotations.

"The Dartmouth of the twentieth century, with its huge gymnasium and stadium, its noble Daniel Webster Hall, its beautiful new library, and its impressive physical equipment, has not yet produced a Webster or a Choate."

"It is, after all, something to have been a useful and patriotic statesman, and inspiring orator, and perhaps the greatest of American advocates. A unique and romantic phenomenon in our history, he emerged inexplicably from prosaic surroundings, wielded for a brief space a magician's wand, and then vanished, as if some meteor had flashed across the heavens, leaving a marvelous afterglow."

J. P. R

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

Professor Sidney Cox is the author of "Teaching of English—Avowals and Ventures" published by Harper. This book will be reviewed in a later issue of the magazine.

Professor William A. Robinson is the auth or of an article entitled "Sixty Years of Canadian Confederation." This article is reprinted from the Political Science Quarterly, volume 43, no. 1.