Hanover Browsing
DANIEL WEBSTER, Dartmouth, Class of 1801, died in Marshfield, Massachusetts, one hundred years ago, on October 24, 1852.
The best known biographies are those by Everett, Raymond, Lanman, Curtis, Harvey, Lodge, Hapgood, McMaster, Fisher, Ogg, and Fuess.
McMaster's life is readable, and was published on the fiftieth anniversary of Webster's death in 1902.
S. G. Fisher's The True Daniel Webster, Lippincott, 1911, is noted for its illustrations.
In the "American Crisis Biographies" is F. A. Ogg's Daniel Webster published by Jacobs in 1914. To match this you may enjoy Henry Cabot Lodge's life in the 'American Statesman Series" published by Houghton-Mifflin of Boston.
George Ticknor Curtis, one of Webster's literary executors, wrote an excellent twovolume life which Appleton published in 1869.
Peter Harvey wrote his Reminiscencesand Anecdotes of Daniel Webster in 1877, and Little, Brown & Company, of Boston published it. This contains first-hand information.
Basing his studies on all available material, Claude Moore Fuess wrote what must be considered the definitive life, Daniel Webster, in two volumes in 1930. This was also published by Little, Brown of Boston.
Summer reading has been varied and somewhat desultory: detective fiction read at night in bed, and Gide's four volumes of Journals in the daytime.
For the detective story fan I can recommend Margery Allingham's The Tigerin the Smoke, about an escaped murderer in London; most of Peter Cheyney's of which I now have 24 volumes; John Rhode's Death at the Dance and Death inWellington Road; and Margot Bennett's The Widow of Bath.
Gide's Journals run from 1889 to 1949, thus covering a period of 60 years, including both world wars. The total result, perhaps, is a little disappointing. Gide reveals himself as a cold intellect, not entirely devoid of feeling but remote from life as most people know it. Still it is a great book, and I mean to re-read parts of it again. Then for contrast I have read the Journal of Delacroix, the painter, issued here by the Phaidon Press, distributed by Oxford. This is a fascinating book about painting and life in France during the nineteenth century.
MacKinley Helm visited our new neighbor Keith Warner this summer. Getting to know him prompted me to look up two of his books: one a study of Marin the painter, and the other Modern MexicanPainters. Both kept me interested; both taught me quite a good deal about modern painting, a subject about which most of us are terribly ignorant, and often intolerant. Mr. Helm is now writing a book on Orozco which will interest Dartmouth men as a good deal of the book will treat of the famous Dartmouth fresco by this late Mexican genius.
Anyone interested in bookplates will enjoy Louise Seymour Jones' beautifully printed book The Human Side of Bookplates, published by Ward Ritchie in California. One of our Dartmouth bookplates is reproduced. She writes an intimate, charming, and simple prose.
Book collectors will want as a model of bibliography Thomas W. Streeter's Americana-Beginnings, issued in an edition of 325 copies from Morristown, N. J., in 1952. Most of the items described will make any bibliophile's mouth water, especially if interested in Americana.
If you ever want to train a dog you will find invaluable, I feel sure, Blanche Saunders' Training You to Train Your Dog (Doubleday).
A beautiful and haunting book, lonely as a cloud and melancholy as a plateau in Tibet, is Dino Buzzati's The TartarSteppe, translated from the Italian by Stuart C. Hood and issued by Farrar, Straus & Young. Highly recommended.
