The Writer

CHARLES DICKENS: A Biography from New Sources. By Ralph Straus. Cloth. 340 pages. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. 1928.

As we finish this biography, we are reminded of the editorial from the Boston Post which is quoted on page 370. This book is not written for the devotee of biography in modern style the reader who enjoys the present "tendency to make a hero out of every villain of the past and a villain out of every hero." We recommend it without reservation, however, to the student of model biography, and to the admirer of a true life story who believes that "there is no title better for a biography than the plain and unadorned name of the man or woman whose career is described within the covers."

The subtitle, "A Biography from New Sources," places the book immediately apart from the previous legion of Lives of Dickens. Mr. Straus, in his introduction, speaks of these earlier lives and accounts for the difficulties encountered by their authors in presenting a true portrait of Dickens.

Ever since the days when "Pickwick" had come to delight half the civilized world, there had been in existence a sort of legend about Dickens. He had come to stand for all that was most solidly respectable in this most solidly respectable country. He had come to be placed apart from the rest of hard-working humanity. And so, everything that tended to show him as an ordinary man with the ordinary man's faults must not be printed. The blue pencil must be applied to every letter which touched upon "private" matters, before it was published. . . . . By consequence you had, in place of new Lives, queer semi-biographical works written by men more eager to describe the bed in which Mr. Pickwick was supposed to have slept when he visited Rochester or the "originals" from whom Sam Weller or Skimpole or Mr. Pumplechook had been taken, than to give you the real story of Dicken's life. . . . . Yet at the same time real biographical work was being done by the bookcollectors! America in particular took a hand in the business, and began to print letters and papers that had not been blue-penciled in

the old way. And so it happens that the man who would attempt a life of Dickens today has at his disposal a mass of new material which, though it may not enable him to give a wholly new Dickens to the world, at least allows him to tell a story rather different from that commonly accepted. . . In my opinion there should be clearly marked limits in any biographical work. I have read, for instance, a great number of unpublished family letters, from which I have not thought fit to quote. On the other hand I have not hesitated to make use of such information as they contained if it helps in any way to make clearer the character of Dickens himself.

Incidentally, I have little enough to say of his books. . . . . To me Dickens is far more interesting than any of his characters.

Mr. Straus then proceeds to prove the latter sentence with an astonishing amount of information to which, as a director of Dickens's original publishers, Chapman and Hall, he had first access. From it all, he presents a complete moving picture of Dickens from the time he is first brought on the scene as "a very queer small boy," to his retirement "from these garish lights," the most widely adored writer and professional reader that the world has known. Through the genius of Mr. Straus, we come to know, not "The Inimitable," but the man Dickens, and to understand many things about him: why he "saw himself always as a character in a book or a play that he might have written" ("in a sense he may be said to have been living a Dickens novel all his days"); why throughout his life "he was to take himself and his own affairs with a solemnity not always accorded to the affairs of other people"; why he had so many difficulties with his publishers; why "for all his love of a joke and his pleasure in the good things of life, he was, fundamentally, a serious man."

Writers will find the chapters which tell of Dickens's first attempts at writing, his dealings with publishers, and his first visit to America are the high spots for them in this biography, although it provides lively reading on every page.

B. W. S.

MODERN RELIGIOUS DRAMAS. Edited by Fred Eastman. Cloth. 326 pages. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1928.

Professor Fred Eastman of the Chicago Theological Seminary, in making this collection, has interpreted the term "religious drama" very freely, thereby widening the range of material available for church and parish-house production. A "religious drama,' according to Professor Eastman, is one which "has a religious effect upon an audience," that is, one which "stirs the emotions, exalts the spirit, sheds light upon the difficult way of life, and draws people together in closer fellowship." The narrower and more usual definition would include few plays other than those on Biblical themes and with some Bible characters. Professor Eastman is quite correct in saying that most of the plays in existence of the latter kind are "pious trash." In most of these cases the intention has been better than the performance. The better among the Biblical plays having already been collected, Professor Eastman devotes his volume to "modern plays of spiritual power" and to one-act rather than long plays because they have proved better suited to church programs.

Because of this liberal interpretation of his subject, Professor Eastman finds it possible to include two plays which are very familiar to little-theatre audiences, Zona Gale's "Neighbors," and the Hall-Middlemass tragedy, "The Valiant." Though some of the amateur producers may regret the space given to plays already well-known elsewhere, the temptation to include them must have been great because they are the best plays in the volume. Other interesting inclusions are Percival Wilde's "Confessional," which gives a variety of points of view on an ethical question, Margaret Larkin's "El Cristo," a well-etched bit of dramatic irony concerning

the Penitentes, and Kenneth Sawyer Goodman's "Dust of the Road," a modern version of the "thirty pieces of silver," a play which is increasingly popular.

Most of the other inclusions are competent, but not distinguished. Two pageants are reprinted. Any deficiencies in the volume are due, not so much to the editor's selection, as to the scarcity, as yet, of good plays on ethical and spiritual problems. Modern religious drama is still young, still in its trial stage. The material is undoubtedly ready to the hand of the dramatist, but few dramatists have yet appeared.

L. W. B.

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE VERSE. Edited by Ada L. F. Snell. Cloth. 150 pages. Oxford: University Press. 1928.

This volume "represents, with few exceptions, the writing done within the last ten years in two courses at Mount Holyoke" under the direction of Prof. Ada Snell of the Department of English.

The impress of the instruction is evident in the quality of the verse, which shows a technical skill and flexibility in the use of varying rhythms such as older poets might envy. The themes are as varied as the authors, who imitate neither one another nor the past. In fact, the subjects are so definitely individual that it is clear Miss Snell has kept "hands off" and rendered that greatest service of a teacher allowed her students to use their own minds instead of forcing hers upon them.

The charm of the volume is the charm of youth, of spontaneity, and underlying sheer delight in handling words. Fortunately, the "graveyard school" of poetry, so favored by youthful poets, is either non-existent at Mount Holyoke or has been tactfully discouraged. Again and again, the work shows promise for the future, as well as actual performance.

L. W. B.

Flashes from Articles in Magazines

"There are, of course, no novels purely of character or merely of conflict; there are only novels which are predominantly the one or the other. Nobody is likely to dispute this distinction, or to insist that it is absolute; and, trusting to this, I can now go on to my next generalization, which is that the imaginative world of the dramatic novel is in Time, the imaginative world of the character novel in Space." THE WORLD OF THE NOVEL. Edwin Muir. The Atlantic Monthly for November.

"It was not necessary to waste any time rediscovering that verse for children must first of all be rhythmic, with the sort of rhythm natural to body movement, hopping, marching, swinging, pounding rhythms such as are common to nursery verse everywhere. Also, there should be good singable vowel tunes, with repetitive and incremental consonances. The material should be objective, with an objectiveness native to the child's range, competent to serve as pegs upon which to hang the emotional reactions characteristic of child life. POETRY IN THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. Mary Austin. The Bookman for November.

"For the next ten years the two types of movie are going to be engaged in a purely economic struggle. The silent film may preserve a popular place for itself; but if it does not, it will become the plaything of amateurs, thousands of whom are now making films, and begin its development exactly at the point where the commercial producers left off -that is, at the point of becoming an independent art." THE MOVIES COMMIT SUICIDE. Gilbert Seldes. Harper's for November.

"The most discerning literary critic of our day is dead. I have carefully weighed this estimate, and see, on reflection, no reason to qualify it unless by the elimination of literary.' Since M. Paul Bourget's early 'Etudes de Psychologie Littéraire, since Henry James's 'French Poets and Novelists,' and his later Notes on Novelists,' I know of nothing in modern French or English literary criticism possessing the range, the substance, the quality of being at what Matthew Arnold called 'the centre,' to the same degree as William Brownell's three or four volumes." WILLIAM C. BROWNELL. Edith Wharton. Scribner's for November.

"We require the novel to furnish a world of refuge where we may seek emotional satisfaction without exposing ourselves to the consequences of real emotions, where we may find intelligible people and a destiny made to the measure of man. It would seem, then, that in order to fulfill its function, the novel should contain two elements. It must present a recognizable picture of life, a story in which we can believe- at least while reading it;

otherwise we shall be bored and shall not be able to escape from ourselves." DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. André Maurois. The Forum for November.

"In the New York telephone book today, Mrs. Adeline Roberts is listed as a full-fledged autograph broker. She is the only woman in the country who makes a business of buying and selling famous signatures, and she has only three men competitors." WOMEN IN BUSINESS. Ladies' Home Journal for November.

"For 'after-twelve' youth, May Lamberton Becker has written an indispensable literary chart for 'Adventures in Reading' published by Stokes. I would that every child and every mother might boast a copy. In her chapter on What Makes a Good Novel' she has reduced the fundamentals of literary criticism to the simplicity of a primer, so that even a child may understand the principles on which it rests. Simplification such as this is not far short of genius." A BOOK FOR EVERY CHILD. Emily Newell Blair. Good Housekeeping for November.

"Mencken has, in other words, possessed and administered in his critical writing so individual and vital a personality that contemporaries have been unable to pigeon-hole him or gauge to their satisfaction the precise sphere of his influence and the validity of his opinions." MENCKEN. By Cameron Rogers. Outlook and Independent for November, 21st, 1928.

"And the 'talkies'? They won't affect the business of the legitimate drama any further than the movies have, already. In fact, I'm inclined to think they'll send a lot of people back into the theatre, where the movies did take them away. The movies had, or could have had, did they completely achieve it, a new field. The talkies are simply imitation theatre, canned theatre. And there are still people in the world-millions of them — who yet prefer the real to imitation, fresh to canned. No, attendance at regular theatres will not suffer, in the long run, from this new competition." THE REWARDS OF THE PLAY-PRODUCER. By Crosby Gaige. Theatre Magazine for November.

"The desire for 'raw' life is a fad. Perhaps it will pass, like other fads. Perhaps if we wait awhile longer there will appear novels and plays written to give us worthwhile modern raw life instinct with the pristine force which characterizes the high moments of men and women. But meanwhile the writers of rank stuff exploit the modern woman's legitimate hunger for something new. And it is the roving ladies of the busy tongue who, by dabbling in bleakly brutal novels and plays, make that poisoning exploitation successful." LIFE IN THE RAW. By Catherine Beach Ely. North American Review for November.

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