Mirrors of Their Times

Bianca Capello, By Clifford Bax. Aphra Behn, By V. Sackville West. Annie Besant, By Geoffrey West. The Viking Press.

U

NDER the editorship of Francis Birrell and the general title of Representative Women, a series of biographical essays upon women who have been peculiarly typical of their times is now being published. The books should make extremely interesting as well as informative reading.

"Representative" is a somewhat confusing adjective to qualify the subjects of these biographies, until one stops to remember that the person who most perfectly represents his era is always a distinctive individual, a man who, in life, is distinguished from his fellows, even immeasurably above them, but who, seen in restrospect, becomes a complete exponent of the thought of his time. A man may be such an one and still be an example of the highest type of his sex. Not so a woman. The woman who most nearly approaches the ideal woman is, inevitably, the intelligent helpmeet, the inspiring companion, the ardent lover, and the successful mother of children. And such a type can never be said to represent any one era, because such a type is of all time. So that the women who are chosen as representative of their times are scarcely representative women.

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Such enticing subjects are to be included in the Representative Women series La Duchesse du Maine, Rachel, Christina of Sweden, Jane Carlyle and others. Of the series, the volumes named at the head of this paper, and Lady Hester Stanhope, by Martin Armstrong, which we have not seen, are now ready.

The writers of the three long essays under discussion have most successfully skimmed the cream off the biographical pans. Almost any reader must be interested by them, even if he has never heard of the subjects. And V. Sackville West's book, particularly, tempts one into further reading, especially of the works of her heroine. Clifford Bax, writing on Bianca Capello, has not only skimmed the cream for his readers, but has whipped it and flavored it with rich local color. Bianca Capello lived in the Florence of Ben

venuto Cellini, and her life moves, as did his, against a background of pageantry, lust, intrigue and bloodshed. A beautiful Venetian who married beneath her in a day when such a thing was socially if not personally more disastrous than it is at present, Bianca went to Florence with her low

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Fiction

Charles as the last as an inde

"Swan Song," by John Galsworthy. Scribner's Sons. Read either book of the "Forsyte Saga" or pendent story, this masterly novel should please all readers. Reviewed August 1.

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey," by Thornton Wilder. Albert & Charles Boni. Those who have not yet read this beautifully written story have a delight in store.

"Brook Evans," by Susan Glaspell. The F. A. Stokes Company. This love story of three generations will touch and please any adult reader. It is tragic, truthful, and beautifully written. Reviewed July 25.

"Spider Boy," by Carl Van Vechten. Alfred A. Knopf. A story of Hollywood. To be reviewed later.

"Show Girl," by J. P. McEvoy. Simon & Schuster. The story of Dixie Dugan and her boy friend, the greeting card salesman, told in letters, telegrams and newspaper interviews.

Non-Fiction

"Strange Interlude," by Eugene O'Neill. Boni & Liveright. This play, in which the dramatist steals some of the novelist's best psychological thunder, is as good to read as to see. Andre Maurois, translated "Disraeli," by by Hamish Miles. D. Appleton & Co. You will enjoy this charming and vivid biography.

"The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and BrenCapitalism," by George Bernard Shaw. tano's. Almost every one will agree with G. B. S. this time; and any one with the patience to read his long book through will find it marked by his usual wit and wide interests. Reviewed July 4.

"Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing," by Samuel Hoffenstein. Boni & Liveright. If you enjoy light verse, this is the very best. "Jesus, the Son of Man," by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright. Readers of Ludwig's great biographies will be interested in this, if only to see how badly the biographer of Napoleon and Bismarck can fail. Reviewed July 25.

born husband and adopted there one of the few public careers which were open to women in her day. She became and, what is surprising, remained during his lifetime the mistress of the powerful Francesco de Medici, who was Grand Duke of Tuscany. She

was, then, on the left hand, a very important figure in 16th century Florence. She is distinctive in that, in an age when power such as hers was usually abused, she seems, according to Clifford Bax, to have been singularly devoted to the best interests of her protector and indeed of the Medici family. She was also a patroness of the renaissance arts, although Clifford Bax does not dwell much on that side of her life. In fact there are faults to be found in his book, interesting as it is. The mirror which he makes of his protagonist is a charming one, but oversmall for her times. His cream is perhaps more sweet than rich. But if his book lacks the body to interest a student of the renaissance, it still is pleasant reading marked by brilliant pictures of the time of which he writes, and highly satisfactory for the gene be led, by it, in complete books Medici" or Sym Italy." Bianca deep mark upo the basis of a I Middleton in century. Clif enlivened by r this.

Aphra Behn and especially interesting pers.

der who

certainly in the hands of V. Sackville West she becomes so, even though she lived in the age of gallantry rather than in that of chivalry, an age in which there was a good deal of shoddy and tinsel, a great deal of highfalutin behavior and not nearly so much violent action, good or bad. She appears to have been the first woman in modern history to make her living by her pen, the fo' nder of what is now a vast sisterhood, the members of which are, on the whole, a good deal like Aphra. She as a lady from Grub Street, indeed, and her prototypes, in temperament if not achievement, are in Grub Street today. She turned her clever hand to every sort of writing. plays, poetry, fiction, and if she was gifted far beyond the majority of her sisters of today, that is what makes her a fit subject for a biography. Aphra Behn was mysterious about her

arly years. Her dramatic imaginaon clothed them in glamour, touched hem up with strange color. But about er maturity she was honest and unshamed. She was quick-tempered, itty, gay, rash, lewd in speech and esture, improvident, brave and great earted. Her purse, and we regret to dd, her person were at the disposal of any friend. Her purse was meagre, er person charming. fry as she might as writer she never vercame the prejudice of the man's world in which she lived, gainst a woman comDetitor. But her conluct was merely typcal of restoration England. Her novels, which make pretty lull and foolish readng for us, except there she permits herelf to use local Eng

sh color, were popu-,

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have

sion, not only because its subject is extraordinary, strikingly a figure of her times, but also because Geoffrey West has maintained in writing about a woman who has always been the centre of a whirlpool of partisanship and prejudice, an attitude, completely dispassionate, absolutely unprejudiced. Mrs. Besant was called by Lord Haldane the greatest living statesman. She

activities in India are very interesting to read of. They are perhaps generally well-known. To us, they were entirely unfamiliar. But to us, we admit, before reading Geoffrey West's book, Annie Besant was a name, and Theosophy a word. Nowadays, with biographical sketches of hold-up women, screen stars, and other female notoriety seekers so popular, it is a pleasure to read one which deals with a woman who has been always a devout seeker after truth. Clifford Bax believes that Mrs. Besant will live in the memories of those who have known her as a "phenomenon of sheer energy, unfailing courage and noble sin-. cerity," and says of her that "to suggest that she is for Our time rather than for all time in no way detracts from her uniqueness, or from the gratitude which we today, as the direct beneficiaries of her

irls whether Aphra of not. Jehn did Won ers a great ervice. Whether she and the world a ervice is another question. She opened road which is now worn smooth. Jnhappily those who travel it are less ikely to know where they are going han do the men who walk on Grub Street. They only know, most of them, that they are on their way. V. Sackville West is, herself, a distinguished and well-oriented traveler on the road. She has tried several methods of conveyance, many with marked success. For ourselves, we have always enjoyed her writing, and never more than in this biographical essay and critical appreciation of Aphra Behn's works. They are, as was their author, entirely typical of the restoration period in England.

A very different Englishwoman is Mrs. Annie Besant. Geoffrey West's book about her is perhaps the most interesting of the three under discus

"GREYHOUNDS"

Woodcut by Harriet Sundstrom

com

has been, during her long life, a pioneer in the fields of society and religion. And her experience as social reformer and spiritual pilgrim is the experience, magnified and dignified by the greatness of her personality, of thousands of men and women who have lived since eighteen-fifty. Annie Besant worked through the material to the spiritual; from atheism to exaggerated mysticism. She was associated with every social and political reform of the Victorian era at the times when even those now monly accepted and in practice were violently unpopular. From that she turned to Theosophy and became the leading spirit of that movement. It is a tribute to Geoffrey West's fairminded humanity that not only the side of her life which was concerned with social reform and which any one can accept with sympathy, but also the theosophical side, with its suggestion of mystic-shriner absurdities, is presented, in his book, in an entirely sympathetic manner. Mrs. Besant's

and

herculean labors sacrifices, owe to her. It is the exaggerated claims of her enthusiastic admirers which make some attempt to

restore proportion occasionally necessary." sary." Such an attempt he has very ably made. His book is valuable.

The Representative Women series begins well and promises well. The writers seem to have been selected for their open-mindedness and for their ability to project the knowledge which they have acquired of their subjects in an entertaining and readable but by no means superficial way. The subjects are as fascinating as they are diverse. We hope that some women of earlier periods, such as The Empress Theodora, Christine de Pisan and the Countess Matilda may be included before the series is completed.

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they had never seen before. He was neither coarse, overbearing nor greedy; he possessed the manners and breeding of a gentleman. Consequently, they could not understand him. ticularly was he a mystery to Senorita Josepha Guerrero, accustomed as she was to the effeminate ways and eloquent tongues of her Latin admirers, and most particularly to Thomas Espinosa, to whom she was practically engaged. D'Arcy combined a capacity for action with a gift of forethought, neither of which they possessed. The tale tells of how this young adventurer, light hearted but firm of hand, weathered the stormy years of '49-51, finally to emerge, not only with a fortune in gold, but possessed of the heart of his ladylove as well.

Mr. Kyne breezes along from episode to episode with his usual zest, intermingling tragedy with comedy, sentiment with good humor. The contrast he draws between the nature of the early Spanish settler, indolent, ease loving, devoid of ambition, innately courteous, and that of the gold seeker with his energy, efficiency and hard materialism, is really well done, indeed the best part of the book. And if he sometimes limns in his characters with the delicate strokes of a whitewash brush; and if his ingenuity is somewhat taxed to devise reasons for keeping apart for four hundred pages two young people who obviously love each otherwhy, the story possesses sufficient interest to hold the reader through it all, and what more can one ask on a hot summer day?

"Good verse," I murmured. "I'll read on." I did read on for two days and a night.

I do not mean to say I was always wholly enthralled. There were times, not many, so few as to be memorable, when I cursed that so fine a thing should be, it seemed to me, needlessly marred. But that, too, was a tribute. One does not curse the mistakes of little men.

Stephen Benét has set out to present in verse, now rhymed, now metrical, now cadenced, all America in the Civil War. He has succeeded and the magnitude of his undertaking is the measure of his success. His method is to give pictures, generally brief and generally intensely sharp, arranged somewhat at random and showing characteristic scenes of the homes, the men, the women, and the fighting North and South. In these pictures certain characters recur. We see from time to time an earnest Connecticut boy, we follow him into the army, as a battle fugitive, as the lover, bright and lawless, of a girl in the Tennessee Woods. We see gay Sally Dupré from Georgia, with a proud, firm heart, a light foot and the stain of the dancing master on her mother's name. We see her lover, Clay Wingate, and the arrogant, graceful Georgia bloods who go with him to fight in the Black Horse Troop. That story, too, is followed to its end. In between the scenes of these two separate basic tales we have othersJohn Brown's siege, his trial, Lincoln under the trees at the Soldiers' Home near Washington, Spade, the slave, running for freedom, a mountaineer, a rat mouthed spy, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, the Army of the Potomac, accounts of the progress of the war-and this whole kaleidescope of changing patterns is stopped from time to time and

punctuated by the poet's own choragai comment.

The full effect of these great series of ever changing yet recurrent scenes of ever changing yet recurrent metrical designs, backed by knowledge, wide and deep, of the hearts, the habits, the intimate belongings of man, by the power over words and the feeling for every sharp detail of beauty, the whole effect is that of massiveness with lightness, of passion with patience and good sense. Its scope, its grasp, its swing give it a measure of the epic's quality. Its sense of tragedy, at once lofty, even serene, yet poignant, holds echoes of Greek drama. But that is not to describe it. Nor is there any single phrase which can. Perhaps one should call it the poet's Stone Mountain of the Civil War.

There are moments, as I said, which do not help the scheme. The attempt to outline the major strategy of the war was, in the nature of poetry, doomed to failure. And poet and man of stature that Benét unquestionably is, his music cannot quite command the full diapason needed for the greatest of his moments.

But in all short of that he is a music master; and he is also what a poet for this work must be, a man of good heart and courage, sardonic and tender, sensitive and rugged, a man of salty gusto and of high desires.

American authors have patted each others' backs till our reciprocal praise confers about as much distinction as the honorific titles of a Negro Benefi Society. I cannot, therefore, hope to be believed. So I end by quoting on of a hundred equal passages and leave it to you what sort of man ha written it.

Snow down, snow down, you white feather bird,

Snow down, you winter storm, Where good girls sleep with a gospe word

To keep their honor warm.

I will not ask for the wheel and threa To spin the labor plain,

Or the scissors hidden under the bed To cut the bearing pain.

The good girls sleep in their modesty The bad girls sleep in their shame, But I must sleep in the hollow tree Till my child can have a name.

(Please Turn to Page 760)

Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance s Long Lance Cosmopolitan

The first-hand story of an Indian boyhood among the Blackfeet of the Northwest, before the coming of the white men. The author, a chief of his tribe, is also a college graduate and a writer of distinction. He gives us pictures of the wandering life of the Indians of the plains, of buffalo hunts and ceremonial dances and warfare with hostile tribes which are intensely interesting. The account of his first meeting with white men is not flattering to the vanity of the latter race. The smell of cows. of the white men's food, made the Indians sick. The story of the ghost horse, the accounts of the weird and inexplicable feats of the medicine men, the tale of Almighty Voice's last fight are only a few of the many things in this book which you won't want to miss. One of the Indian customs seems particularly worthy of adoption-that of painting the face. "When we got up in the morning we painted our faces the way we felt. If we felt angry, peaceful, religious, in love, or whatever the mood was, we painted our faces accordingly, so that all who should come in contact with us would know how we felt at a glance. It saved a lot of useless talking." Can white men boast of any convention more useful than that?

a

Patrick Wynnton's The Lady Zia Doubleday Doran

It was her fatal beauty that caused all the trouble. She was the wife of Ruskoff, leader of the Grey Battalions, secret patriotic organization in Calendhaute, which was a sort of postwar Graustark. Penhaven, a traveling Englishman, becomes involved in their schemes, falls in love with Zia, incurs, first the friendship, then the jealousy, of Ruskoff, gets into a peck of trouble, and out again by the skin of his teethwith the Lady Zia on his arm. A good romantic yarn in the Zenda tradition.

Natalie Sumner Lincoln's The Secret of Mohawk Pond Appleton

Why Peggy's uncle made it a condition of her inheriting his money that she spend a month and a day in his isolated country house, we never found out. When she reaches the house she is greeted by a manservant, shown to the dining-room, and before her is placed a tureen-which contains a cocked pistol. Ha, we said at this point. This is going to be good. But it wasn't. Lots of exciting happenings, secret chambers and shootings and drownings but they don't mean anything because there isn't any reason for them except that Miss Lincoln wanted to put them in. No, we didn't like this one much.

Henry Milner Rideout's

him.

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Here is a book for boys that is well and carefully written. Mark's father

goes on a fishing trip in the woods and doesn't come back. Mark goes to find With the aid of the sheriff and Lola, the Indian, he does so, and assists in rounding up a band of counterfeiters. The characters are real; the author has the ability to make you see and feel the woods; and it is one of the few stories of this kind we have read in which the hero is neither a prig nor a professional strong man.

for the quite justifiable-murder of one of these wealthy clubmen, while away the hours before their execution by telling stories, the narrator of the best story to receive the pardon which the Governor has offered to one of them. All three are novelists, and after reading their stories we find it difficult to see why they shouldn't be executed. Of course, it would be hard to tell a good story if you expected to be executed in a couple of hours. And two of them are fairly exciting, though to be really exciting a story must convince you-and these don't, at any time.

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Hubert Work, M. D. (Continued from Page 726)

Besides, the President's father was a doctor and the new occupant of the White House had a great respect for his profession. So Work arrived in Washington as the era of corruption started. He was first assistant to Will Hayes in the Post Office Department, and later a fellow cabinet member with Daugherty and Fall. But although, as Claude Bowers exclaimed at Houston, "the Black Horse Cavalry of Plunder and Pillage" galloped from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, Work was never with them. Instead, he plodded on alone; doing his work with entire honesty and very creditably. Like Hoover, the breath of scandal never touched him. And when Hayes, still a respected elder of the Presbyterian Church, heard the call of the movies and resigned as Postmaster General, Work succeeded him in the Harding Cabinet. Then in March of 1923 Secretary Fall departed from Washington with the storm of Teapot Dome about to break. Harding, happily to die before it came, transferred Work to the Interior Department.

The Interior Department is not one of the Cabinet posts most eagerly sought; indeed, the department is often the step-child of an administration. The Secretary has no battleships to maneuver in front of him. His offices do not bristle with Major-Generals and snappy young Lieutenants. He is less of a headline figure than any other Cabinet officer except, possibly, the average Secretary of Commerce. But Dr. Work, perhaps because he is a neurologist and had always found the human equation interesting, discovered that there was much to fascinate him. He became overlord of the Indians, of the Esquimo in the Arctic Circle, of the Hawaiians in the South Seas. Pioneers still go out, occasionally, to settle government lands and when they do their applications for homesteads pass through the Department of the Interior. The department cares for millions of visitors to the national parks. It runs a railway in Alaska and supervises the distribution of pensions. It controls public lands with their untold wealth in oil and minerals and is responsible for their conservation. The Western farmer who makes fertile the desert does so with the assistance of irrigation projects developed by the Secretary of the Interior.

Dr. Work demonstrated, during the five years that he commanded the

department, that he is by no means so politically minded that he bows before every public demand. Despite frantic protests, he was able to effect large economies of operation. He aroused bitter opposition by his policy of restricting new irrigation systems to sections where they were actually needed and where they would be of definite agricultural value. Having lived for years in Colorado, Dr. Work was familiar with irrigation methods. He could not be influenced by unsound arguments and he stubbornly opposed worthless developments, even when the funds had been appropriated by ConOther members of the Harding Cabinet may, in the public mind, have been fit candidates for actual hanging. It is a compliment to Dr. Work's character and honesty, perhaps, that he has several times been hanged in effigy. Next to reclamation, Work was interested in the Indians and he endeavored, from year to year, to obtain larger appropriations for their benefit. As a physician he used his influence to reorganize the medical service upon which their health depended.

gress.

There must have been a definite bond between Herbert Hoover and Hubert Work during the days when they sat together in the Cabinet. Both worshiped at the shrine of efficiency. Both attempted to make their departments more useful, more logical in their organization and less expensive to the taxpayers. Each was, at least to the casual acquaintance, a little dull, a little self-conscious and rather shy. They were drawn together,perhaps, by the fact that each lacked so completely the qualities of personal magnetism, the ability to mix freely and easily with his fellows. Dr. Work acknowledged, of course, that Hoover was his superior. No dreams of the Presidency disturbed his own sleep. And so, having been assured that Coolidge was determined to retire, he threw the weight of his influence to the cause of this quiet coworker who dared to hope for the Republican nomination. Another tenet of the Washington Credo, almost universally held until the convention at Kansas City assembled, was that Hoover could not possibly win. Work was one of the few who declined to accept this viewpoint, and so he played no small part in making the impossible happen. It was then that he dared to hope, for himself, the post of national

chairman. A modest man, he conceived this to be the crowning glory of his political career.