Our Travel Bureau Service also will take away the worrisome details of making bookings for our friends and readers. We mail you deck plans marked for your approval and mail you tickets, baggage-tags, engage hotel spaceeverything to relieve last-minute details.

Write Your Problems to

EVA R. DIXON, Director

decent. To gather current personalities, their hobbies, and their writings into a novel really lends no verisimilitude to it, is in poor tradition, and dates the book clumsily. Both these bad habits are old ones with this author, and to an admirer of her powerful, clear, and courageous intellect and high talents they are a cause of genuine anger. But perhaps fortunately, they are not noticeable to the bulk of readers. Certainly it would have been a pity if they had been powerful enough to discourage. "A President Is Born" is far and away the most important piece of work which Fannie Hurst has done, and as a detailed and unprejudiced picture of American life it is by no means negligible. Above all, it is an absorbing book, pretty certainly re-readable (about one in fifty modern novels are), and, omitting the purists, generally recommendable.

Hair-Raising Horrors

"The House of Dr. Edwardes." by Francis Beeding. Little, Brown & Co.

Black magic is coming back into current literature. Herbert Gorman used it, half-way sincerely, in "The Place Called Dagon." John Buchan, in "Witch Wood," set it in a lovely and appropriate Scottish folk-tale, and garbled it into an obvious pot-boiler of a story. Francis Beeding (is he not another one of these mysterious unknowns who writes mystery tales in his lighter moments?) makes black cocks, goats, blasphemous masses, etc., do for a terrifying story of a diabolist, loose in a

madhouse. Beeding's tales are all first

rate.

He is an adept at making the spine creep, and he writes decently, which is more than most mystery story writers do. He has an acceptable style, a nice sense of humor, and a background of intelligence. (He will probably turn. out to be George Macaulay Trevelyan, and, oh, so grateful for this kind of praise!) The lunatics in Dr. Edwardes's house are not too convincing a little too theatrical for sober madmen. But the few sane people in the book are real, although, like all performers in mystery stories, doomed to asinine behavior, bound never to use any judgment, always to take unnecessary risks, and never by any chance to prepare in their brief intervals of peace for the war that is always lurking round the corner ready

120 East 16th Street, New York City London: 24 Regent Street Paris: 21 Rue Tronchet

as soon as the lights go off. It is no fair telling the plot of "The House of Dr. Edwardes," but it would be no fair to let enthusiastic addicts miss it. It is

works out-no, come to think of it, he never did explain the black shape that rose against the light and cast a horned shadow on the castle wall; or the thing that stirred under the doctor's foot.

Wandering Britons

"Islands of Queen Wilhelmina," by Violet Clifton, Houghton Mifflin Company.

Mrs. Clifton and her husband, "the Explorer," as she usually calls him, are an ideally mated couple of those wandering Britons whose fancy for going to perilous and peculiar places and doing difficult and dangerous things is so perennially incomprehensible to the peoples they visit, not to mention a probable majority of the inhabitants of Europe and America. This time their diversions provided, among other items, fevers, jungles, leaky boats, precipitous trails, leeches, and cannibals, one of whom explained to Mrs. Clifton (but the culinary departments of the women's magazines are scarcely likely to copy) that the human hand, properly prepared, is the most delicious tidbit of our anatomy. Java and Sumatra, and especially the lesser islands of the Dutch East Indies, constitute a gorgeous tropical region neither over-traveled nor over-written, and Mrs. Clifton writes of it with insight, sympathy, simplicity, and an effective gift of description unmarred by effort or floridity. The book is never dull, but it is not often humorous, yet here is a bit of dialogue both comic and enlightening. On their arrival in Mentawi a native helper had been engaged whose credentials the lady of the house had just been investigating. She called to her husband in the next room: "Talbot, we have a convict servant."

He: "Let's hope he's not a thief." She: "Oh, no, it's all right; he's killed somebody."

He, relieved: "Splendid!" E. P.

T

HE editor of this department will be glad to help readers with advice and suggestions in buying current books, whether noticed in these pages or not. If you wish guidance in selecting books for yourself or to give away, we shall do the best we can for you if you will write us, giving some suggestions, preferably with examples, of the taste which is to be satisfied. We shall confine ourselves to books published within the last year or so, so that you will have no trouble in buying them through your own bookshop.

Rivera and Mexican Nationalism

(Continued from page 93)

beginning to have a consciousness of a new entity-the nation. Nationalism is in its youth in Mexico. It has acquired little of the obnoxiousness which its

over-development parades so alarmingly in many countries.

The thought of Mexico's growing industrialization, however, brings misgivings. Will much of its charm go? Will it be unfavorable to the growth of art? So far industrialization has developed fastest in cold countries, while the plastic arts have received their greatest development in warm countries, in regions where the acquiring of "comforts" is not necessary, where an outdoor life is possible all the year, where there are none of the complications nor mechanisms demanded to make life comfortable within doors during the cold seasons, where simplicity of living goes with pleasurable existence, as in Greece. That elimination which is so essential to art, that fallowness of mind which freedom from the machinery of life assists, that detachment from impedimenta, is found in southern countries. On modern Mexican art, however, there is, so far, no abstraction that refuge of the distracted of our day. In Mexico one is struck by the quietism of the Indians, their statuesque silence, their deep tranquillity-the tranquillity of those whose minds are fixed upon ultimates.

I'

T is the hope of Rivera and his comrades that the machine can be made the friend, not the foe of these people; that by releasing them from poverty their creative powers can be set free; that the machine can be used to satisfy vital needs, not to produce futilities for which an artificial appetite would be created and backs broken supplying it; that suf ficiency can be elegance and simplicity exalted.

Truly, great courage is evident in the Mexico of today-the courage of resolute youth-facing difficult problems. If the high hopes of men like Rivera can be realized, then, rooted in the self-trust

wood fiber and rubber and an enormous number of different kinds of brick and stone and plaster, and a thousand other products of mechanical invention and chemical research have been put to use as building materials, each new material crying aloud, it would seem, for a new treatment suitable to it, each new invention a new opportunity for the artistit is a strange fact that our love for texture and materials has forced us to make all of this newness merely fraudulent imitations of the old. So rubber is marbleized, wood-fiber boards are nailed on a wall in stone ashlar patterns, and there is 'stone' cast in molds, 'stone' baked in ovens, 'stone' put on with a trowel, and we even sometimes torture the loveliness of wood shingles into the exaggerated curves of a futile imitation of thatch."

Nor is this all. When we have turned our rubber into marble, when we have filled our suburbs with haciendas and our parks with villas, we nail up new street signs.

Gone is the old practice of naming thoroughfares exclusively for Presidents, generals, battles, trees, and birds. Today we write into our directories the same romantic note that dominates our building plans. Main Street is still Main Street, but the new road out beyond the Fair Grounds on the edge of town is Santa Barbara Avenue. Even in an old city like New York there suddenly appear new streets like Santa Maria Place, Montefiore Road, Bon Air Park, Lorenzo Avenue, San Marco Place, Ponce de Leon Road, Bella Vista Road, and Vista Terrace-substitutes, all these and many more, for the stay-at-homes who cannot go to Florida each winter. As for the whole-heartedly romantic booms like American Venice on Long Islandhere every signpost comes from Baedeker: Granada Avenue, Canal Grande, Alhambra Road, Laguna San Marco, Piave Terrace, and Canal Lugano.

"Home, James. Corner of Piave Terrace and Alhambra Road. Send the gondola for Mrs. Jones."

by Spanish culture, sustained by knowledge of their marvelous aboriginal art, nourished by public appreciation, favored by climate, liberated by a benevolent industrialism, the genius of this people may produce a new and beautiful flower in the garden of civilization.

for many years we did not stop to think a great deal of the æsthetics of the things we built, as the older sections of our newer cities testify. We built for service, not for art; and if beauty came as an after-thought we achieved it with a few more eaves, an extra porch, a bit

of stained glass in the bathroom, or a bevy of bay-windows.

Now, in a day when we have more time and a surer grasp upon our destiny, we look to our real estate for something more than mere utility. The vogue for foreign travel has familiarized us with the inexpensive luxuries of Europe. The vogue for Sabatini and Ibañez has helped to bring us Spain. The vogue for the movies has brought us new ideas of what constitutes a happy and successful home. It is to the movies, probably, that we owe in large degree the popularity of the iron grille, the bronze torchère, the boxwood trees on the front doorstep, and the recrudescence of the bell-pull.

Here we are, pursuing romance, giving our booms Italian names, naming our streets to sound like Venice, building our verandas to look like cloisters, tinting our steel to look like walnut, laying our bricks to look like tile, mixing our paints to look like colors thoroughly faded by the time of Isabella, going to Verona for our loggias, and refuting the charge that we like only what is "useful" by building ourselves whole hosts of things that plainly serve no purpose: Italian wells that pump no water, Moorish grilles for second-story windows, and Spanish balconies for houses with no rooms upstairs.

We do this with one reservation: there will be no surrender on the bathtubs. We are building for charm plus comfort, not for charm alone. There will be no surrender on the oil-burning furnaces, on the rustless fly-screens, on the hot-water heating, on the electric dish-washers, on the electric clothesscrubbers, or on the electric icemachines. But if all these things can be satisfactorily incased in an exterior that looks as if it had been lifted bodily from the Côte d'Azur, so much the better.

Somewhere on an old Kearns farm that has now become an Española Terrace Gardens the ideal American residence will rise some day. It will borrow its porch from Pisa, its roof from Naples, its chimneys from Granada, its garage from Barcelona, and its birdhouses from the steeples of Cadiz. And in the pleasant Florentine living-room that looks out through Venetian blinds across the Castilian patio to the Brazilian sun-dial, done in Ravenna mosaics on Etruscan marble, above the Sicilian fireplace will be the adage: Be it ever so Latin, there's no place like home.

THE OUTLOOK, January 25, 1928. Volume 148, Number 4. Published weekly by The Outlook Company at 120 East 16th Street, New York, N. Y. Subscription price $5.00 a year. Single copies 15 cents each. Foreign subscription to countries in the postal Union, $6.56. Entered as second-class matter, July 21, 1893, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., and December 1, 1926, at the Post Office at Dunellen, N. J., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1928, by The Outlook Company.

H

ENRY F. PRINGLE'S article on Curtis D. Wilbur, which heads this issue, will explain to many people Mr. Wilbur's background and make-up. It is not, so far as we can ascertain, unduly hard on the Secretary-and it is not printed in any spirit of partisanship. We must ask Mr. Wilbur to remember that the Secretary of the Navy is a public official. His acts and decisions affect the public welfare. The public has a right to know exactly what sort of men rule official Washington-and particularly, just now, the Navy Department.

L

EST you should be away when your next issue of The Outlook arrives, we wish to say here that it will contain an authoritative account of Tammany Hall and Al Smith's connection with it -written by Walter Lippmann—which you will not want to miss.

A succeeding issue will deal with the American Catholic Church as it appears today to one of its most intelligent members.

Since Governor Smith's letter to the Jackson Day diners, it begins to look as if we ought to know all there is to know about these subjects!

Francis Profees Bellamy