ADVENTURES IN WORLD LITERATURE.

Edited by Rewey Belle Inglis and Professor William K. Stewart, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1936. p. 1268. $2.50.

"At a time when the development of world understanding is one of our great educational problems it is essential that our young people should have access to as many of the cultural sources of other nations as possible. Linguistic blockades should be broken down. Literary formulas which have marked Comparative Literature courses for advanced college upper classmen should give way, in a book for younger students, to a presentation of literature as a human document through which one comes to sense the spirit of other peoples. To us as a nation whose life has been drawn from so many old world strains it is doubly necessary that our youth should appreciate these varied and colorful literary backgrounds."

Thus, in the preface, the editors explain the purpose of this collection of excerpts from the literatures of modern and ancient Europe and the Orient. In a project of such ambitious proportions it is manifestly impossible to do more than provide brief glimpses into these "realms of gold." Nevertheless, the editors have been able to accomplish more than would be expected. They have been able to include, for instance, a full play of Molierc, one of Ibsen's most important plays, and the Antigone of Sophocles; long short stories by Zola and Dostoevsky; a goodly portion of the Frederike episode from Goethe's Poetry and Truth from, My Life. The selections, so far as I have sampled them and so far as I am competent to judge are excellent—giving infinite riches in a (comparatively) little room.

The editorial apparatus—introductory surveys, sketches of the authors, and reading lists for each section—is also excellent. The surveys of the various literatures, for example, are admirably balanced and compressed; the critical judgments are acute and sane, delivered with a fine sense of perspective. Take this comment on French Romanticism, for instance: "In so far as it stands for the exaltation of the emotions above reason and of the individual above society, it is not wholly suited to the French mind." Or this comment at the end of the section on German Literature: "At the present time, owing to political conditions, some of the leading writers are living abroad. But one may safely say that a literature which for centuries has so faithfully mirrored the soul of the people will surely sooner or later resume its time-honored function."

In this time of turbulent chauvinism no better collection than this could be put in the hands of young people to remind them of the truth of Goethe's statement that national hatred is always strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture, and of the fact that culture is not the possession of one nation or race but of the community of mankind.

The Dartmouth Chapter of GammaAlpha by Professor Fred W. Perkins appears in the March issue of the GammaAlpha Record.

Professor K. A. Robinson has a poem, American Laughter in The Best Poems of1936 selected by Thomas Moult and published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Mr. Charles H. Voelker has an article in the March issue of the Gamma AlphaRecord entitled The Dartmouth CollegeSpeech Clinic.

The Gamma Alpha Record of March 1937 contains an article The DartmouthDepartment of Research in PhysiologicalOptics by Professor Kenneth N. Ogle.

Professor Harold J. Tobin is the author of The Small States and the League which has been reprinted from the Autumn issue of The Hungarian Quarterly.

Modern Building Its Nature, Problemsand Forms by Walter Curt Behrendt, visiting lecturer in City Planning, has been published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. This book has received very favorable reviews in the New YorkTimes and elsewhere and will be reviewed in the next issue of this MAGAZINE.