A Shelf of Recent Books

BURTON RASCOE

THE long awaited Autobiography of Mark Twain (Harper), which the great humourist specified should not be published until fifteen years after his death, has at last appeared, and curiosity is gratified as to the reason for the time limit put on its posthumous publication. It was not withheld, as many supposed, because of an elaborate pessimistic credo. There is one scathing diatribe called 'The Character of Man; but it is well known that Twain did not think well of the human race; and, although this denunciation is eloquent and categorical, it but reinforces similar observations he had frequently made in his other hooks. And those who looked for some sensational disclosures about his private life will he disappointed; for he pays a long and beautiful tribute to his wife and is so much the adoring father to his children that a considerable portion of the two volumes is taken up with quotations from the quaint and interesting biography of himself written by his daughter Susan. The real reason for delaying publication was that it contains some excoriations of personages eminent in his day. Gen. Wood aroused his animus by ordering the slaughter of 600 Moro men, women, and children who had taken refuge in the crater of a volcano—a stupid and disgraceful act for which there Mas no military justification—and Twain, always a veritable Quixote atilt with the windmill of human injustice, gives a scathing account of the episode. He told the Russian revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, that "the McKinleys and the Roosevelts and the multi-millionaire disciples of Jay Gould—that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died—have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are Morthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of—not to say so vain of—is now nothing but a shell, a sham, an hypocrisy." His amiable conceit is expressed in such frank passages as this: "I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years Without any effort and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time." And his personal vanity is displayed by his resentment against the critics and reporters who for twentyfive years described his appearance by saying that he looked like Petroleum V. Nasby. "I knew Nasby well, and he Mas a good fellow, but in all my life I have not felt malignantly enough about any more than three persons to charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart that the critics should go on making this mistake, year after year, When there is no foundation for it." The autobiography is formless and was dictated from time to time in various places of residence without any respect for chronology. It is more properly a diary of his later years with some biographical notes interspersed than an autobiography; but like everything that Twain wrote, it has throbbing vitality. And because it gives us first hand information about one of the giants of our native literature, it is a publication of the first importance.

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK'S The Little Trench Girl (Houghton, Mifflin) is so remarkable a study of the social psychology of two nations, so exquisite an example of perfect craftsmanship and so fascinating a story that I am tempted to overcome the limitations of space allotted here for an adequate presentation of the novel's merits by renouncing the usual obligations of a critic and saying simply that if you miss reading this book you will deprive yourself of a great deal of pleasure indeed, and very probably go on in ignorance of the fundamental difference between the French and English concepts of love and marriage and the relationship betMeen parents and children. Mrs. Wharton once tried to explain them in French Ways and Their Meaning with the hope that Americans would discard their own ways and substitute those of the French which better met her approval; but Miss Sedgwick makes it plain, as did an American novelist in Mr. Cushing and Mile, de Chostel (nowunhappily neglected), that these ways are the products of a long culture and cannot be changed at will. The story concerns the fortunes of a French woman, twdee divorced, and her daughter. The mother has ruined her daughter's chance to contract a suitable marriage in France by taking a lover, and sends her to live with friends in England hoping that there the child's fate will be more auspicious. The daughter does not know the real reason for being sent to England. A young Englishman who falls in love with the daughter discovers the reason and so, eventually, does the daughter. There begins the emotional problem, which Miss Sedgwick lias worked out with great skill, grace, insight and sympathy. In its field it is an absolutely first rate novel.

HARVEY O'HIGGINS' Julie Cane (Harper) is a didactic novel, therapeutic in intention, and as such it is both entertaining and helpful in somewhat the same fashion as the widely-read but too little heeded inspirational chats of Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. O'Higgins' message, addressed to girls, is: Conserve your forces; take care of your body; don't learn things by rote but think out things for yourself; cultivate pride and self-assurance and you m-i 11 be able to cope with any emotional situation; save yourself from marrying the wrong sort of man; and, having married the right one, things will turn out well for you in life. Mr. O'Higgins' understanding of the psychology of his characters is more intellectual than emotional; he can diagnose their "cases" more easily than he can make the people come to life; in a word he knows all about his characters but doesn't know them. Hence his people are types, not individuals, and he makes them move arbitrarily through a sequence of arbitrarily contrived events, which are so clock-like that they are not entirely convincing. However, Mr. O'Higgins himself is intelligent; he is free from sentimentality and superstitions; and he writes a clear and forceful prose. There is much sound advice in the novel, given in a manner which is more palatable than preachy—for people who are capable of profiting by advice. His comments upon the characteristics of his types are delightfully pungent and wellworded.

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IN Balisand (Knopf) Joseph Hergesheimer has furned his attention to post-Revolutionary Virginia and has made a study of an archetype of the cavalier aristocracy. He has documented his story with patient minuteness and has cast over his details a shimmering romantic glamour. Richard Bale of Balisand is at once a picturesque and pathetic figure, the creation and the victim of a code which ordains that a gentleman shall make an ass of himself whenever the occasion arises when he must show wherein he differs from the lowlier born. Bale, who is a man of action with nothing to do, spends his time living up to the code of gentility, which puts another test upon a gentleman and that is that he prove himself an experienced drinker. While Bale broods on the deferred duel, Mr. Hergesheimer sketches in as neat a depiction of Virginia manners and politics during the era of transition from Washingtonian aristocracy to Jeffersonian democracy as we are likely to see in literature. Bad blood between Bale and his neighbor is finally ended in a duel in which both men are killed, Bale killing his antagonist in a fashion not sanctioned by the code but by passion. Balisand is one of Mr. Hergesheimer's best performances, although the character study is confined to one man.

IMAGINARY LIVES (Liveright) is a series of biographical sketches translated from the French of Marcel Schwob, in which the delicate French ironist has accounted for the careers of his characters by lighting upon some apparently trivial detail. Schwob has the capacity to make small traits of character, as revealed in unconscious actions, take on a tremendous significance. The book is rich in overtones of tragic fatality and emotional suggestiveness.

BECAUSE Michael Arlen mingles sentimentality and cynicism in about equal neutralizing proportions and because he writes in a sophisticated manner about sophisticated people and smart places, his new novel The Green Hat will strengthen his position among the authors whom it is fashionable to read. He is clever, more than slightly arrogant, and he knows his French watering places and his tinsel London. The lady of the green hat is the heartless siren of tradition set down in modern London where she wrecks the lives of two men and assumes, in a fine act of honour, the responsibility for the suicide of a hypocrite. Arlen is by George Moore out of the Yellow Book, experienced in Oxford and Chelsea, and matured in the London supper clubs. He has wit and a fresh descriptive brilliance, with a brashly satirical estimate of people.

THESE Eventful Years (Encyelopedia Britannica Co.) is a survey of modern life by fifty-eight journalists, scientists, economists, business men, archaeologists, statisticians, generals, admirals, critics of the fine arts, and philosophers. It differs from the usual survey of this sort in that it is not a mere tabulation, but an expression of opinion. It thus escapes the dry-as-dust treatment of college professors and is fascinating and impressive reading. H. G. Wells, who looks into the future for the survey, sees it darker than is customary to his optimism; and the general impression resulting from a reading of the books left me in a pessimistic mood. The romantic and refreshing sections have to do with the progress in chemistry, physics, biology, radioactivity and pathology. The book is described accurately on the jacket as "challenging."