HANOVER BROWSING
as usual I find myself having difficulty in making a choice from an impressive list of books that I want to recommend. However, some will keep for another day, and I choose this month books for the most part of a fairly serious nature.
I fear that they have little connection with the spirit of Christmas, which comes in a few weeks. For that I recommend a rereading of the gospels, particularly Mark and Luke, and Cervantes Don Quixote which for such a man as Miguel de Unamuno has a religious quality in its very quixoticism. I believe that this book is my favorite novel. Try it.
1. Experiment in Autobiography, by H. G. Wells. Macmillan, 1934. ($4.00)
This book will be of special interest to all adults over thirty. It may be read with profit by even younger men, but it seems to me essential reading for men of the author's generation. Here they may read the story of a middle-class cockney's mental development, with a running commentary on events, and of important and unimportant people, of the last 68 years.
Mr. Wells is the boy who made good even beyond the dreams of a Horatio Alger. He is a born teacher and propagandist as his many books testify. His audience has, I suppose, been millions. Who has not glanced at, at least, his Outline of History? Here is a bird's-eye view of history written so that the average man may read-and understand. It is a philosophy of history with humanity marching toward a worldstate which Mr. Wells still believes in. He writes on page 642: "What is plain to me is that the modern world-state which was a mere dream in 1900 is to-day a practicable objective; it is indeed the only sane political objective for a reasonable man; it towers high over the times, challenging indeed but rationally accessible; the way is indicated and the urgency to take that way gathers force. Life is now only conflict or 'meanwhiling' until it is attained. Thirtyfour years ago the world-state loomed mistily across a gulf in dreamland. My arch of work has bridged the gulf for me, and my swinging bridge of ropes and planks and all the other ropes and wires that are flung across are plainly only the precursors of a viaduct and common highway. The socialist world-state has now become a to-morrow as real as to-day. Thither we go." Perhaps so, but it doesn't look very close in these years of intense nationalism nor is it necessarily desirable. Mr. Wells's modernism is not balanced by any sense of tradition, which I believe is a fatal flaw, and his point of view might be dubbed that of a nineteenth century optimistic humanitarian. Too optimistic; too humani tarian to be possible. He believes too naively in progress, to-day a more dubious hypothesis than in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, if held too enthusiastically and uncritically. Human nature does not change as much as Mr. Wells seems to imply, and his panacea, like most panaceas, does not seem to me convincing.
The life story of Mr. Wells is a moving one. He describes his parents, among others, with great candor. His mother was a pious woman but not overburdened with ideas. She was so definitely lower middle class, made timid by poverty, that she expected Herbert to stay in the class he was born to, and so she scraped together £50 and apprenticed him to a draper. These were bitter days for Wells. After trying unsuccessfully to learn the trade of draper he writes: "I had reached a vital crisis in my life, I felt extraordinarily desperate and, faced with binding indentures and maternal remonstrances, I behaved very much like a hunted rabbit that turns at last and bites. A hunted rabbit that turned and bit would astonish and defeat most ordinary pursuers. I had discovered what were to be for me for some years the two guiding principles of my life. 'If you wantsomething sufficiently, take it and damn theconsequences,' was the first; and the second was: 'lf life is not good enough for you,change it; never endure a way of life thatis dull and dreary, because after all theworst thing that can happen to you, if youfight and go on fighting to get out, is defeat, and that is never certain to the endwhich is death and the end of everything.'" These principles, courageously followed, led Mr. Wells to success. He gives all the essential matter in the story of his career, and what is more important, in the development of his point of view. T. H. Huxley was his teacher and he pays a sincere tribute to his memory. Wells, however, strikes me as being a pseudo-scientist, particularly in his political science.
He discusses such Fabians as G. B. Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the late Graham Wallas, with their ideas and policies; he is most illuminating about George Gissing, whom he was with when he died; Stephen Crane; Joseph Conrad, about whose writing he is frankly sceptical, giving judgment such as this: "I think Tomlinson's more loosely written By Seaand Jungle (the exact title is The Sea andthe Jungle) is more finely felt and conveys an intenser vision than most of Conrad's sea and jungle pieces,"; Lord Balfour; Arnold Bennett; the League of Nations; Frank Harris; Henry James; Lord Northcliffe; Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin; the geneology of his novels, many of which are about himself; and many other things that I cannot mention here. I should do more quoting had I the space at my disposal but I hope that I have been able to do some justice to the book so that you will read it for yourselves. Autobiographies of other people are in a sense autobiographies of ourselves. Herein lies their fascination if they are frankly and fearlessly written.
By all means read this book. Its 700 odd pages will repay the time you spend in so doing. An important book but not a great one. That, I believe, Mr. Wells is incapable of writing. He .tells you why in this book.
2. Mary Peters, by Mary Ellen Chase. Macmillan, 1934. ($8.50)
I cannot help feeling that Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, has done an incalculable amount of damage to those authors who choose to write in an epic manner about life on a farm. Living on the soil according to many contemporary writers seems incompatible with anything faintly resembling comedy. In this novel, for example, admirably written in a melancholy sort of manner as it is, there are as many deaths as in the First Battle of the Marne. The serene and lovely Mary Peters alone remains intact at the end of the story. Everybody she loves, or one might almost say is acquainted with, dies. The mortality rate is terrific. A Swedish sailor falls from the masthead and dies. The ship she was raised on sinks near San Francisco taking her father and her first love to death by drowning. Her brother and an old seaman working for him are killed by a falling tree. Her husband is killed in an automobile accident. Pneumonia slaughters others. Babies are born and inevitably die. The Maine death rate seems to be unusually active, or Miss Chase, once having invented a character, tires of him (or her), and rids herself of him (or her) in the various manners described. It seemed to me that the author overloaded her book with tragedy, and although she achieves thereby a kind of false realism, she misses genuine verisimilitude.
She often writes, however, with wisdom, as witness this passage spoken by Mary's mother: "There are forces in this world that no one's really to blame for, forces that take people and hurl them along before they know they're taken, forces that beat them in spite of all they can do. I'm not saying they ought not to know or that they ought to be beaten. And sometimes even when they do know, they know too late." There are many other passages equally mature, equally true.
Miss Chase knows her Maine village, and recreates well the atmosphere of forjty or fifty years ago. Her characters, particularly Ellen Kimball and her mother, and Mary and her mother, are finely drawn. She is less deft with her men. Jim Pendleton reminded me oh so slightly of some character named Nick that I read when a boy. Could it have been in The Way of an Eagle?
3, A Common Faith, by John Dewey. Yale University Press, 1934. (11.50)
This 87 page book is composed of three lectures that John Dewey, the most respected of our philosophers, gave this last college year at Yale University on the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation. What the book lacks in size it more than makes up for in stimulating ideas. It is more readable than Mr. Dewey's previous tomes. His style has been labeled pedestrian, but I find that this book carries one along swifty enough.
Professor Dewey carries on the prag- matic tradition of the late William James. He has gone beyond it in his own doctrine of instrumentalism, which I understand to mean that the mind, instead of being an abstract entity in itself somewhow related to a supernatural deity, is only an instrument for us to use to get ourselves out of predicaments we find ourselves in here on this earth. Mr. Dewey is a modernist, a firm believer in the scientific method, and he would call himself a religious man. In fact this book defines his religious convictions. They are not orthodox. He is opposed by the humanists, all idealistic philosophers, and generally by faithful members of the Christian Church.
He at once makes a distinction between the words religion and religious. A religion is composed of a special body of beliefs having some institutional organization; to be religious simply means to have a group of attitudes. All religionists agree, as do the humanists, on "the necessity for a supernatural Being and for an immortality that is beyond the power of nature." Those who are opposed, and Mr. Dewey is one, believe that science has discredited, for good and all, the supernatural and all religions based on it. Mr. Dewey's religious faith is one that is separated from the supernatural and this places him beyond the confines of any traditional religion. He does away with wishful thinking and notes that "what we ardently desire to have thus and so, we tend to believe is already so." This seems to me to be true of much modern idealism. "Religions," he goes on to say, "hold that the essential framework is settled in its significant moral features at least, and that new elements (new scientific discoveries, etc.), that are offered must be judged by conformity to this framework." Mr. Dewey believes on the other hand that "there is such a thing as faith in intelligence becoming religious in quality." Furthermore, "there are distinct religious values inherent in natural experience." The author also believes, with most educated men, that "there is but one sure road of access to truth .... the road of patient, co-operative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection." He does not believe in mysticism which asserts that truth can be seen directly in one flash of insight, divine or human. There are values and goods of human association, of art, and of knowledge, actually realized upon a natural basis and they need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness. (They need no divine authority or corporate church representing authority for their validity.) A union of ideal ends with actual conditions is capable of arousing steady emotion. Call it "God" if you will, (and Dewey does) but it is not supernatural. "The function of such a working union of the ideal and the actual is identical with the force that has been attached to the conception of God in all the religions that have a spiritual content." This is Mr. Dewey's religious attitude. He ends thus: Ours is the responsibility of conserving,transmitting, rectifying and expanding theheritage of values we have received thatthose who come after us may receive itmore solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than wehave, received it. Here are all the elementsfor a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faithhas always been implicitly the commonfaith of mankind. It remains to make itexplicit and militant. A thoughtful book, and one to be read by any one philosophically minded.
4. Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919-1925, by Harold Nicholson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934. ($4.50)
This is not a biography of Curzon, for that was done adequately and officially by Lord Ronaldshay, but is rather a history, by an expert, of the extremely complicated European political situation after the war. This book is the last of a trilogy on British diplomacy covering the years from 1870- 1924. The best of this trilogy is the middle volume Peacemaking: 1919, and this is absolutely necessary for a clear understanding of just what went on at Versailles. One may well wonder how so many blunders could have been made, though the treaty did have its good points, by men of even average intelligence. Mr. Nicholson explains why it was necessarily so.
It is another problem of diplomacy that Mr. Nicholson again attacks in this volume on Curzon. A trained diplomatist himself, and son of Lord Carnock (whose life made the first volume of the trilogy), one time English ambassador to Russia, he is, one judges, possessed by the problem of whether we should have an open or a closed diplomacy. To put the question in another way: Should a country such as England suddenly find herself pledged to a war in case a country invades, let us say France, due to a secret treaty that the people of England have never heard of? Should the common man be made a living sacrifice to closed diplomacy? Presented thus, the seriousness of the question becomes apparent.
Lack of space prevents me from analyzing the book as it deserves, but I do want to suggest his solution of the problem between what he calls democratic and professional diplomacy. He realizes that secret treaties are unfair to a people under democratic governments; he realizes, also, that diplomacy cannot be left to political appointees under a party system. His solution follows: First, as to definition. A country's policy should be under democratic control, but diplomacy should be left to experts, and should be only indirectly under democratic control. Secondly, as to education. People should be educated to take a responsible view of their sovereignty in foreign affairs. They should be warned against foreign and sectional propaganda. They should get their facts from evidence and scientific discussion rather than emotionally from such catchwords as, for example, national honor. They should avoid imprecision and unreality. They should ask themselves: "Is this precise? Does it mean anything? Does it bear any relation to actual reality?" Thirdly, as to extension of foreign service. He advises the fusion of the consular and displomatic, and would abol- ish social qualifications.
5. More Harbours of Memory,by William McFee. Doubleday, Doran. 1934. ($2.50)
It is some years ago that I began read- ing McFee, and I have read him, save for a lapse or two when No Castle in Spain came out for instance, ever since. This book is the McFee that I like. It is as if one were hearing him give a monologue of ships that he has known, of men he has sailed with, of strange ports that he has visited. The man can write, too. Years with recalcitrant engines has given his style (which is the man) an integrity that smacks of honest workmanship, painstaking devotion to detail, and freedom from the tricks of "the bright young men." When reading McFee I am prone to think of the immense genius of Conrad, of the simple dignity in the prose of James Bone, and of the poetic reality that H. M. Tomlinson is capable of. Mr. McFee is like none of these, but he partakes of the same air that these men breathed, and two of them happily still breathe. It is an air that is not foetid with stale Freudian tricks, of hard-boiled verbiage, of a neurotic stimulus to shock, or of blowing off a bass horn loud enough to wake the dead. McFee is quite a writer and you might do worse than get acquainted with him by reading this book evoked from the harbours of his memory.
6. The Cold Journey, by Grace Zaring Stone. William Morrow, 1934. ($2-50)
This is one of the best American novels that I have read in a long time, and I heartily recommend it. Based on the Deerfield Massacre, the novel gives a very interesting historical picture as well as a fictional account of the lives of several characters involved in this early American tragedy. Her Rev. Mr. Chapman is undoubtedly based on the real Rev. John Williams, who published in 1707 his TheRedeemed Captive Returning to Zion, in which he describes the sack of Deerfield on February 29, 1703-1704, in which 49 men, women, and children were slaughtered, 111 captured, and 20 more murdered on the long trek to Canada, and of their final ransom. Out of this dramatic incident in early New England history Miss Stone has written an exciting account, always with her characters and plot under control, and with a genuine historical sense.
Miss Stone's Indians are neither the "noble savages" of Chateaubriand's imagination, nor the Deerfoots of the boy's books, but are rough and unwashed savages, who were the allies of the French in the war against England for early Colonial supremacy. The contrast between the Rev. Mr. Chapman, the austere and slightly sadistical Puritan minister of Redfield (Deerfield), who the people imagined as they did John Cotton that "they couldn't imagine God allowing him to err," and the kindly, heroic, and humane Jesuit missionary Father Julien, the "Papist," as wellmade. Willa Cather could scarcely have done a better job, and I confess that the Quebec of Miss Stone, though not as poetically delineated as in Miss Cather's Quebec in Shadows on the Rock, seemed to me to be a truer picture. The hatred that Poynter, a stolid backwoodsman and a religious zealot, nurses for Le Moyne, the French captain, who becomes the lover of the charming Mrs. Lygon, reaches a strong climax at the end of the book. In spite of sudden death and disaster the book has no depressing effect. Love, death, hardship, pain, religion, and adultery all play a part in the weaving of this delicate woof of early frontier life. This is a book to keep on one's shelves beside the half-dozen really good novels of the year.
My last book for this month will be a brief review of what must be considered an important and timely book.
7. Security Speculation, by John T. Flynn. Harcourt Brace, 1934. ($3.00)
Readers of God's Gold: John D. Rockefeller and His Times, will remember Mr. Flynn. With Security Speculation he must be accounted one of our best financial writers, who though he has a slight bias against our financiers, serves no interest but what he conceives to be the truth. This, I suspect, is rarer than we think, during this era of highly paid press agents and propagandists. This book, which analyzes thoroughly the working of the New York Stock Exchange, should be of paramount interest to anyone who buys stocks, or who speculates in the market. According to the president of the Exchange one reason for the wild rise of stock prices before 1929 was that all the people in the United States were speculating. Mr. Flynn tells us that not more than one per cent, and probably one-half of one per cent is nearer the mark, actually went in for security speculation. Mr. Flynn's inference is that the crash came not because all were speculating but that the security business (Wall Street), be- cause of greed, o'er leaped itself. Most speculation, Mr. Flynn finds, is confined to a few active issues of common stock. This is "initiated and whipped up" (for profit making purposes) by members of the New York Stock Exchange, and any buyer who is not in the business professionally, or on the "inside," is due for. a licking. The economic effects of this is bad. People who want to make something for nothing are, in the long run, losers. People who want only a paltry 8 or 100% on their money deserve what they get. However, many who lost their money were honest investors who put their trust in great names, either of houses or of persons, and it is for these that Mr. Flynn writes. The proverbial "widows and orphans" were in many instances adroitly mulcted. So the Securities Exchange Act was passed to protect the investor. Mr. Flynn discusses this act at some length. He would ban not only "short selling" but also "margin trading." He would also see "that corporation charters and the capital structures of corporations shall be simple, swept clean of the numerous racketeering accessories, such as numerous classes of stock, par shares, subsidiaries, holding companies, dummy directors, inter-locking directorates (particularly pernicious we have just seen in the munitions industry and I must here recommend Engelbrecht and Hanighen's Merchants of Death), banker control, inadequate legal supervision, etc." To be concise, Mr. Flynn wants the amateur investor warned before he crosses swords with the professional. Here, with graphs, succinct argument, and keen analysis, he tells you how to prepare for the battle. If one can profit from the lessons of the past most all investors need a bit of instruction.
DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE EDITORIAL BOARD: Sidney C. Hayward '26, Editor-, Albert W. Frey '20, BusinessManager; Eric P. Kelly '06, AssociateEditor; Harold G. Rugg '06, Literary Editor; John M. Comstock '77, Alumni Editor; Charles E. Widmayer '30, Sports Editor; Milburn McCarty IV '35, UndergraduateEditor. Natt W. Emerson '00, Harold P. Hinman '10, John R. Burleigh '14, AdvisoryBoard, elected by the Dartmouth SecretariesAssociation. OFFICES: Parkhurst Hall, Hanover, New Hampshire.
