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BOOKS ABROAD

Mape, by André Maurois. Translated by Eric Sutton. London: John Lane; New York: D. Appleton and Company. $2.50.

[Daily Telegraph]

WHAT, or where, is Mape? In a fanciful introduction to these three studies of typical Mapians M. Maurois explains its meaning. Mape is the country of the imagination to which we all love to escape when the outside world becomes unfriendly; it is the city of refuge, where we hope to find all our dreams come true. It is the fairyland of children, and the home of genius no less; indeed, it is its very hospitality to both extremes that fills us with the haunting doubt that perhaps genius may be a little childish after all. M. Maurois gives three sketches of this world of make-believe, employing for his purpose that attractive combination of fact and fiction which he used so fascinatingly in Ariel, his ironic resetting of the story of Shelley's life.

The first citizen of Mape is Goethe, who is revealed to us as a raw youth, as yet unpractised in life and literature, finding in his first love, Lotte, the material for his first book, The Sorrows of Werther. Here is the creative Mapian, who takes his characters from real life, varies the actual incidents with a spice of fiction, and ends by giving dire offense to the subjects of his art of make-believe. In the second study the Mapian is, not a writer, but a reader. An erotic adolescent, steeped in Balzac, finds himself in a situation closely resembling one of Balzac's own invention. Forthwith he imagines himself the Balzacian hero, and upsets the entire balance of his life by imitating and assimilating a scene from fiction. The last and strongest of the stories shows the Mapian temperament in the person of an artistic interpreter, an actress who finds relief from her own emotions by expressing them in public. The actress is Mrs. Siddons, of whose dramatic genius M. Maurois holds but a low opinion. Her early appearances are unconvincing, and it is only her beauty that enables her to win her way. But, when the sufferings of her daughters, under the pangs of despised love, wring her heart, she finds the inspiration that her nature lacks, and in a burst of passionate tears confesses that she had never acted so well before. M. Maurois has the delicate touch of the French artist, an exquisite sensibility to form, and a shadowy irony that lends piquancy to senti

ment. That talented translator, Mr. Eric Sutton, does capable justice to the refinements of the original.

My Life As an Explorer, by Sven Hedin. London: Cassell's; New York: Boni and Liveright. $5.00.

[Observer]

MR. SVEN HEDIN's autobiography describes more than thirty astonishing years of exploration and adventure down to the end of the war, which made him a fervent partisan and camp-mate of the Germans and the Turks. Since then he has been round the world like a common tourist, and he suggests that he may be moved to set down his impressions of the United States. They would be as vivid as everything he writes, for he is as definite as a German, yet as susceptible as a Latin. It seems likely that America has left a stronger mark on him than he knows, for he tells his long tale without flagging in a manner like the accentuated staccato of typewriters and the epitomizing rapidity of the cinema. For the reader this method is excellent; it enables the author to get into a single volume of breathless movement an immense range of scene and incident. Mr. Sven Hedin's career has been an epic of vigor and peril, and he knows how to make the most of it. After all, this Swede, though he likes to call attention to all the feathers in his cap, is, in fact, the first white man who ever saw the source of the Brahmaputra and the headsprings of the Indus; he has been an Ulysses among seas of sand; and he has played with death.

For geographers who have read in massive sequence our traveler's full account of his separate journeys there is nothing new in these pages. But they will enable the general reader for the first time to follow the whole crowded pageant of a life both brave and intellectual. Mr. Sven Hedin was first seized by the dream of polar discovery. Then he gave himself to a task very different, but as dangerous- the exploration of the half-known heart of the largest and strangest of continents. He has traversed the wildernesses of Turkestan, Mongolia, and Tibet; amid the sands he has been nearly at his last gasp for water; he has crossed and recrossed the Himalayas and made far more connected and definite our knowledge of the tremendous Trans-Himalayan chain. His part in the Great War was more

anti-Muscovite than anti-British. For English readers his sympathetic sketch of his intercourse with Lord Kitchener is among the best things in a book all compact of force and color. It is like a film of the deserts of Asia in their terror and of its mountains in their ruthless sublimity. The author's own sketches and maps are so profuse and good as almost to double the effect of his energetic pages.

The Worship of Nature, b Sir James George Frazer, O. M. Vol. I. London and New York: The Macmillan Company.

[Manchester Guardian]

SIR JAMES FRAZER'S Gifford Lectures will take a high place among contributions to the study of natural theology by lecturers on that foundation. In a masterly introductory chapter he demonstrates the conformity of the study of primitive religion, or, as he calls it in a happy phrase, the embryology of natural religion, to the general scheme of knowledge. He argues that both the materialist conception of the universe of modern science and the spiritualist conception are at one in seeking for an ultimate unity. The same gradual process of simplification and unification that is to be seen in science marks the history of religion from animism through polytheism to monotheism. The statement of his broad philosophical position is timely in the interests of a study of which the ultimate issues seem at present to be in some danger of neglect.

Natural theology among primitive peoples and the peoples of the early civilizations falls, in the author's view, into two divisions. On one hand is the worship of nature, on the other the worship of the dead. By the worship of nature he understands the worship of natural phenomena conceived as endowed with the will and power to benefit or injure mankind. This is in full accord with the familiar animistic beliefs of primitive man. In the case of the higher forms of religion it is largely a matter of inference and interpretation.

In this first volume of his lectures Sir James Frazer passes under review the evidence relating to the worship of the sky, the earth, and the sun. Of those sections that deal with primitive peoples the most interesting and perhaps most important is that which discusses sky-worship in Africa. The conception of a supreme deity—a sky god -in Africa has sometimes been attributed to Christian influence; but the uniform character of the belief and its wide distribution, as demonstrated in this survey, would alone weigh against that view, apart from other considerations that are here fully set forth.

David, by D. H. Lawrence. London: Martin Secker. 158.

[Observer]

In this play on Saul and the young David - it ends with Jonathan's warning and David's flight

- Mr. Lawrence has controlled and disciplined his style and his thought. If he has not added to the beauty of one of the world's greatest stories, he had given it a setting, an imaginative framework, which is worthy of the supreme original. He has avoided all artifices of the embellisher; and while his play is in prose, the prose is the prose of a poet, nervous, energetic, and unencumbered. The main character in the piece is Saul, whom we see at the beginning proud of his victory over the Amalekite, carelessly granting Agag an ignominious mercy. The theme of this play is the fall of Saul from the favor of the Lord and his supplanting by young David. Mr. Lawrence follows the Biblical narrative very closely, and is extremely successful in his use of the recorded speeches of his characters. His Samuel is grim, a driven force; his Saul bewildered, not understanding the powers that make and unmake him; his Jonathan, a gentle, disturbed youth, and David a boy conscious, yet not fully aware, of his great destiny. He is a boy who does not fear to go on in the dark, because he knows that the Spirit that instructs and orders him is greater than the irony of fate or the obstinacy of facts. The other people in the play have hopes and fears, ambitions, selfishnesses, and desires; but Samuel and David believe in the guidance of a star.

Mr. Lawrence is, perhaps, least successful in his treatment of the friendship between David and Jonathan. David should be simpler in his expression of love; and though in one passage Mr. Lawrence makes him philosophize beautifully, his speeches are rather out of keeping with his character. The character of Saul is finely presented, and his speeches have a noble rhetoric, as in the complaint when he is listening to David.

We hope this one volume will not exhaust Mr. Lawrence's interest in the story; it would make an admirable prelude to one or two more plays on the life of King David.

BOOKS MENTIONED

AUSTIN, BERTRAM, and LLOYD, W. FRANCIS. The Secret of High Wages. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926. $1.25.

OUR OWN BOOKSHELF

The Plough and the Stars, by Sean O'Casey. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $1.50.

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IN one sense at least this third play of Mr. O'Casey's deserves the epithet 'Shakespearean' that has been conferred upon it: like the Shakespeare of the chronicle plays, Mr. O'Casey is concerned not with telling a 'dramatic' story in the ordinary sense in which a strongly climactic series of related incidents is intended but with passing before us a series of more or less disconnected episodes in a period pregnant with historical meaning. Even less than Shakespeare does the Irish playwright undertake to represent events of impressive and imposing significance; indeed, he seems to reckon for his peculiar type of dramatic effect on the halftragic, half-farcical triviality and inconsequence of the events he utilizes. It is a 'backstairs' view, almost literally, that we get of the incidents of Easter Week in Dublin in 1916, and if it were not for the vigor with which Mr. O'Casey apprehends personality, and the curiously poetical realism with which he writes dialogue, The Plough and the Stars would seem scarcely to have a reason for being. As it is, one cannot read the play without being half-reluctantly engaged by the rank popular conversation of these tenement Dubliners, by the unemphatic humor of the barroom and looting scenes, and by the grim but credible tragedy of the last act - where O'Casey seems almost to have Shakespeare's 'told by an idiot' in mind. In a season of clever and empty plays this seems like a genuinely literary event.

The Question Mark, by M. Jaeger. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $2.00.

ANY author who writes a book about the future has the critic at an unfair advantage. One never quite likes to say that the book is absurd, because future generations may justify the author. But in spite of all scruples, let us hasten to say that The Question Mark is at least fantastic. Miss Jaeger catapults her feeble little hero into the twenty-second century, where he spends a large part of the reader's time flying about in a tiny airplane. The picture the author draws of the socialistic state in which he finds himself deserves, along with the rest of the book, to go down in the voluminous annals of insignificant absurdity. It might be a trifle unfair to say that

Miss Jaeger is no more of an artist than the author of The Girl Aviators in Their Phantom Airship, but one can say with perfect justice that she is not able to claim even the somewhat frequent and dubious praise of being one of the most promising young Englishwomen of letters.

Odtaa, by John Masefield. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $2.50.

MR. MASEFIELD's latest novel transports the reader, as did Anthoy Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda, into a fictitious country where incredibly complicated politics and geography are the order of the day along with passionate loves and hatreds. We follow the breathlessly thrilling story of a young Englishman who loses his way in the heart of a South American forest in an attempt to save the life of the beautiful Spanish Carlotta. Though there are many passages in the book thrilling enough to make the hair rise in excitement and suspense on the hard head of the most phlegmatic reader, usually immune to thrills, the poor construction of the novel does much to counteract its merits. A good adventure story should not have to rely on 'Appendices and Notes' to explain the baffling points of its plot. Why did not Mr. Masefield, a master of narrative verse, confine himself to the medium in which he has attained distinction, instead of producing an adventure story that falls short of the author's highest capabilities?

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English Poems, by Edmund Blunden. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50. MR. BLUNDEN - who won the Hawthornden Prize a few years ago with his volume, The Shepherd is a poet in the pastoral tradition, and it is an open question whether a modern poet, no matter how personal his note, can write in that tradition without getting disastrously out of key with the major mood of his time. Too many of the poems in this book seem at first glance to have been turned up in the work of some eighteenth or early-nineteenth century lyrist; yet on a closer reading one sees that for all their superficial appearance of archaism they are poems that could have been written only by a sensitive citizen of the twentieth century, and this overtone of something more complex, if it keeps them from being 'perfect' on their own terms, makes it easier for a contemporary to read them with satisfaction.

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THE LIVING AGE. Published weekly. Publication office, RUMFORD BUILDING, CONCORD, N. H.
Editorial and General Offices, 8 Arlington Street, Boston 17, Mass.
Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office at Concord, N. H., under the Act of Congress, March 3, 1870.
15c a copy, $5.00 a year; foreign postage $1.50.

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