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Maybe it's Honolulu this year-
or Japan-perhaps it's the snow-
capped Alps-or the lure of South
Africa that calls. California-
Florida-the South of Italy or
the French Riviera washed in
mellow sunshine. If it's "East
of Suez," let us tell you about
it. And if it's hunting-fish-
ing or a hotel in our Mid-
South, by stream or mountain,
ask us for our list. Write for
fascinating literature on our own
or any country in the world.

EVA R. DIXON, Director

Outlook Travel Bureau

120 East 16th Street

New York City

to sink the humiliated woman in the triumphant ruler, is constantly thwarted by the power of beauty personified in Agnes von Flaven, courtesan and political intriguante, and by the inevitable homage which all mankind pays to that power. The characterizations are solid and truthful. The men-knights, knaves, statesmen are strongly marked and living figures. The descriptive passages are vivid and emotionally sensitive. Feuchtwanger demands the reader's interest for his heroine and holds it centered in her; but he never betrays his theme by allowing her any very firm hold on the reader's sympathies. When her efforts are most royal and her disappointments most poignant, he holds an unexpected mirror up, and the sight of the Maultasch (bag-mouth) in all her physical repulsiveness shocks away all sympathy. The working out of the theme has been somewhat complicated by the further necessity of making the reader accept the beautiful von Flaven as the natural object of universal adoration, without permitting his interest to be warmly engaged by her. In doing this Feuchtwanger has not been entirely successful; but it may be that his intention has been to follow the passive rather than the active way, to serve beauty by abhorring its opposite. And, since he writes of those isolated countries where the coronation of beauty which was the exquisite flowering of the Middle Ages seems to have been warped and twisted into a matter of throwing stones at ugliness, it may be that he has done just what he set out to do.

"If I Should Ever Travel" "Pleasant Days in Spain," by Nancy Cox McCormack. J. H. Sears & Co.

Unusually promising at a first glance is Mrs. McCormack's attractive volume of Spanish travel and impressions, "Pleasant Days in Spain." The narrative, easy and informal, based upon letters to friends and still retaining the epistolary form, contains much material of interest tossed together in a rather helter-skelter fashion. The letters are gay, vivid, and highly individual, and must have been delightful to those to whom they were originally addressed, but they are not such as to bear without loss the cold ordeal of print. When the writer's personality is familiar, there is so much unwritten that the recipient of a letter can be trusted to supply the interpretative uplift of a self-mocking eyebrow, perhaps; perhaps the softening effect of a remembered smile; or some habitual drollery of manner or inflection to make a bit of queer English or commonplace slang really funny. Lacking

such aid, impossible to the ordinary reader, it must be admitted that the careless cock-sure sprightliness of Mrs. McCormack's style is not always happy in effect. This defect in the literary art of the book is emphasized by contrast with the high pictorial quality of its illustrations. Mrs. McCormack, a sculptor whose excellent bust of Primo de Rivera is the subject of one of them, was fortunate enough to obtain from Señor Lopez Mesquita, one of the leading modern Spanish artists, permission to use seven of his pictures not before reproduced. They appear in half-tone, and represent Spanish types ranging from King Alfonso and a famous bullfighter to sad old peasant women and a laughing gypsy, and are of arresting E. P. power and distinction.

"In Praise of France," by Stephen Gwynn. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Mr. Gwynn's praise mounts to the point of becoming a lyric pæan to the glories which are France. To the maiden voyager the book will suggest an introduction to noble architecture, pleas ant countrysides, or vintage wines; to an old lover of France it is full of mellow reminiscences of all three.

This is not a guide-book in the ordinary sense, but rather a charming elongated essay-an interpretation of France as informal as the way in which the fisherman's nets are spread and "hung to dry even on the railings about the church," at Marseilles.

The author's three great concerns seem to be churches, trout, and wine. With the philosophy of the true fisherman, he says:

"Had my luck been better in the two hours I fished, I should know less about Gisors."

Superb mediæval cathedrals, chateaus of the French countryside, vintage time in Bordeaux, the pleasures of the table in Brillat-Savarin's country, and the specially trained truffle-hunting pigs of Périgueux are described with the skill of a literary raconteur. Unquestionably Stephen Gwynn's pen is mightier than the fishing-rod with which he angled his M. M. way through France.

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 80, so that you will have no trouble in buying them through your own bookshop.

THE OUTLOOK, January 18, 1928. Volume 148, Number 3. 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.

CER

ERTAINLY there is no predicting what this amazing man will do next. Since the Mexican documents were proved to be forgeries by his own experts-called by him to examine the papers, not before publication, but after! -he has come forth with a signed editorial in which he says: "I believe patriotically that the logic of events gives every evidence that the essential facts contained in the documents were not fabricated, and that the facts—the political facts, the international facts—are the things which are of vital importance to the American people and to the loyal representatives of the interests of the American people."

In other words, Mr. Hearst calls publishing spurious documents vital to the American people because he feels they are vital to him for the purpose of selling more papers.

THE truth is, of course, that Mr.

Hearst is no enigma. He is merely a sensational publisher who makes his living by printing sensational stories, whether they are true or not. Every successful editor has in him something of this flair for the sensational, tempered by maturity and a regard for the truth. But Mr. Hearst is just the Cub Reporter Who Never Grew Up.

Mr. Bent's picture of him in this issue is one which Outlook readers will find very interesting.

Ο

To people who are weary of yellow

journalism, but who still remain interested in the human race, Bayard Dodge's "Modernism Goes East"—also printed herewith-will, we think, be found most stimulating; particularly the statement that the chief effect of Western thought in Oriental minds is a growing indifference to organized religion.

That seems to be the first effect of science everywhere. Religious authority is undermined. If it were not that spiritual truth usually derives new life from being thus set free, this would be something to worry about. As it is, Mr. Dodge's article seems most reassuring to liberals and intelligent people everywhere.

Francis Profes Bellamy