editor of the Times offers the following comment:

'One and all they swing the club, rather than take it up. There is no suspicion of a hit in wooden club shots or iron shots; there is no trace of "stab" in any putt. Every stroke is part of a well-timed swing. It is most marked in Mr. Jones and Mr. Ouimet, but it is shown clearly by all, and one is left with the impression of a well-balanced, homogeneous company of players, where the wild or uncontrolled shot is a rarity.

'It is certain that they have acquired the fundamental principles of the game, as introduced many years ago by those pioneers who left Carnoustie and took their game to America. It is as certain that our young golfers will never realize their full possibilities until they follow the same plan. The lessons to be learned from Mr. Jones and Mr. Ouimet are, in particular, that accuracy as well as length can be obtained only by pivoting in other words, by the correct employment of the hips; and that the result without effort can be obtained by a long, slow, even swing that quickens only when close to the ball.

world—the political capital of France -and has lectured there, under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation, on the subject of 'Soul and Spirit.' 'In a masterly improvisation,' says the Nouvelles Littéraires, 'and with the most complete command, not only of our language, but of our ways of thinking, Count Keyserling outlined a vast picture of the spiritual situation of our period; by a series of happy formulas he traced the various stages which have led us to the point at which we find ourselves, and forcefully defined the duties that confront us; finally, in a conclusion that carried his whole audience with him, he defined the particular rôle that France must play in the "newly emerging world" "newly emerging world" - a rôle that, because of her heritage, must be nothing short of cardinal.' And thus another link was added to the chain of Franco-German reconciliation.

LE ROI S'AMUSE

THE motives impelling American débutantes of both sexes to be presented at the Court of St. James are not far to seek. The complacency of royalty during this ordeal is less easy to account for. Possibly a recent news item in the Westminster Gazette may serve to clear the matter up somewhat. Apropos of a vaudeville performance being given under the King's patronage, we are informed by a high official that the genial George has a remarkable and truly British sense of fun. "The King,' we are assured, 'thoroughly enjoys real knockabout comedy turns, even when they involve rough-and-tumble business between the comedians. He has the genuine British liking for a man who sits on his hat or has his chair taken from under him. He enjoys acrobatic turns only when there is a large spice of comedy in them.'

The Art of Thought, by Graham Wallas. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926. 9s.

[The Manchester Guardian]

MR. WALLAS's hand has not lost its cunning. His gifts of apt and ready illustration, often from the most unlikely sources, of whimsical and yet incisive humor, employed in the service of a mind as busy and inquiring as that of a child, combine as attractively as ever with that attitude of calm and settled but rather pessimistic benevolence which is the accepted prerogative of age. He is still, in short, himself; and those who recognized and greeted an original method and a genuine individuality in Human Nature in Politics and The Great Society need only to be told this to know that in The Art of Thought we have a book not to be missed, stimulating, provocative, often annoying-a book, no doubt, of questions rather than answers, but of questions set by a master in the art.

It is what is called 'thinking for oneself' that Mr. Wallas has chosen for his subject, and his aim is to discuss various means by which this may be increased and encouraged in the citizens of our modern democracies. He analyzes the growth of a thought into the four stages preparation, incubation, illumination, verification; and he is himself mainly interested in the second and third of these, which are clearly less open to conscious and voluntary regulation than the first and fourth. On the basis of this analysis he treats the problem in succession from a number of different angles, but relying always mainly for help on recent psychological work. He has no sympathy with 'mechanist' psychological theories, of which he hopes that psychology is now ridding itself, and on the other hand he has little belief in what we ordinarily call philosophy, though his instances of creative thinkers are often chosen from the philosophers of the past. His hopes rest on what he calls, after Professor Nunn, a 'hormic conception' of the human organism. He pursues this conception through a number of familiar topics, on which he has always something original and suggestive to say: the relation of thought to emotion, the place of habit, the importance of 'fringethoughts,' the meaning of energy of thought, national peculiarities in thought, dissociation, and religious mysticism, and so on. Finally, he winds up with three chapters on education which may be said to have a dual theme-first, the

possibilities of psychology as a factor in education, and, secondly, the problem of the supernormal child in the State-organized educational system.

Mr. Wallas says that he was once rebuked by an American pupil for attempting to teach 'psychology in the vernacular.' The phrase is a happy description of his method, to which we do not share the American's objection. Mr. Wallas is not a professed psychologist, and he is not writing psychology. He is writing chiefly for students, hoping to help them in the use of their minds, and for those who have the care of students, a class which in a modern democracy may be said to include all active citizens. To all these his book should be valuable; but it should be read especially by those who are interested, professionally or otherwise, in secondary education. The concluding sketch, confessedly somewhat Utopian, of a secondary school, under public management, for the one per cent of highly gifted children, has a charm and suggestiveness that are rare in educational literature.

Fairy Gold, by Compton Mackenzie. London: Cassell's, 1926. 7s. 6d.

AGAINST a wonderful background of a Cornish island, Mr. Mackenzie has used the old plot of thwarted lovers to write one of the most delightful of stories. All the familiar ingredients are there, the soldier lover, the beautiful heroine, the irate parent, the rich suitor who through his profiteer father has fixed the heroine's hand as the price of saving the family fortunes, - but so cunningly has Mr. Mackenzie mixed them that one seems to be reading all this for the time first, and even secures an authentic thrill when hidden treasure is discovered and the lovers are safely united, to the discomfiture and humiliation of the profiteer. Fairy Gold is an apt title, for the story moves in lights and shades of mysterious beauty, recalling irresistibly the nights of Verona, where fairies keep their watch over true love. There is a splendid sincerity about it all that gives the old plot a peculiar strength and makes these romantic lovers completely credible, especially as with cunning art Mr. Mackenzie sets them among types that come straight from life: the only too real dugout colonel, the old gardener, and the old boatman, the C3 garrison, the cheeky but completely delightful imp Venetia, and the fat, suave,

money-loving profiteer - all sketches of extreme cleverness, amid which Vivien, child of the sea, moves like something out of an old tale, mysterious, passionate, and wonderful. The whole story is a triumph written with a brilliant reticence and appreciation of values that give it a sense of permanence shared by few of its competitors.

Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900, by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon. Three volumes. Cambridge: The University Press.

[Prince Mirsky in the London Mercury] MISS SPURGEON's book, which was originally printed for private circulation to members of the Chaucer Society, is a valuable contribution, not only to the study of Chaucer, but to the history of literary criticism. It is an anthology of, I think, a quite novel type, and gives ample matter for meditation on this, latterly so greatly overgrown, branch of literature. The general impression is, perhaps, and Miss Spurgeon is herself of the opinion, that considerable progress has been made in the last century. But, after all, was the progress as real as it seems, and was not W. P. Ker almost right when he hinted that we have gone no further than Dryden? The book, anyhow, is delightful and often quite amusing reading. Miss Spurgeon in her introduction is rather hard on those of the earlier critics who did not give Chaucer his due. She even advances the dangerous opinion that Matthew Arnold was the last remnant of the 'uncritical' age when he denied Chaucer the 'high seriousness' of Dante. Was De Quincey so very much more 'critical' when he thought Chaucer worth five hundred of Homer'? Or Blake when he said, 'Nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer'? Or Ruskin when he singled out Chaucer, together with Moses, David, Hesiod, Vergil, Dante, and Saint John, as 'one of the men who have taught the purest theological truth'? Personally I liked this last quotation better than any other in the book. To be sure, the nineteenth was, at times, an imaginative rather than a critical century!

Tōjūrō's Love, and Four Other Plays, by Kikuchi Kwan. Translated from the Japanese by Glenn W. Shaw. Tokyo: The Hokuseido.

[Times Literary Supplement]

THE author of these plays is reputed to be the foremost of the younger Japanese writers. Most

of his work consists of novels and short stories, but he has shown a growing inclination toward the drama. It is not easy to decide his merits as a dramatist on the strength of the present volume. The five plays it contains have themes that are common enough to the traditional drama of Japan, but the dramatist's method suggests a more than passing acquaintance with Western models. To what extent this impression is owing to the translator, whose English is highly idiomatic and sometimes a little slangy, we do not know. Certainly the dialogue has a kind of European naturalness which, if it existed at all, in the Japanese theatre would be something of a rarity.

The first of the plays in the volume, which is easily the best of them, is apparently one of the most popular on the Japanese stage to-day. It is a dramatization of one of the author's own prose tales, dealing with an imaginary incident in the life of Sakata Tōjūrō, a famous actor of the early years of the Genroku Period, who tried to introduce naturalism into the art of acting. In the play we are shown Tōjūrō's consternation at having to play the part of a 'paramour' in a new piece. Although a great rake and fully experienced in the ways of loose women, he has never yet made love to another man's wife. In order to acquire the knowledge necessary to the playing of his part he pretends to be enamored of Okaji, the wife of the manager of the theatre. Deceived by his histrionic experiment, she first pities and then requites his seeming passion. Tōjūrō gives a highly realistic and successful performance of his part, and Okaji, realizing the deception, commits suicide. The action of the play is very smooth; there is hardly an unnecessary word in the three scenes. No unusual depth of insight is revealed, but the dramatist clearly possesses an unusual power of characterization and a keen eye for the dramatic situation. One is intrigued by the references to Japanese morals and ideals in the plays, but it is difficult to get into contact with their artistic motive. That the dramatist is continually being reproached for both an absence of conviction and financial success is, perhaps, an illustration of the tact with which he pursues what is in Japan a fairly unpopular calling.

Twenty-Five: Being a Young Man's Candid Recollections of His Elders and Betters, by Beverley Nichols. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926. $2.50.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS is the sort of terribly clever young Englishman who says, 'Twenty-five seems to me the latest age at which anybody should write an autobiography.' Evidently he does not believe it is the earliest, for his previous works are entitled, Prelude, Patchwork, and Self. The first of these a novel in which he faithfully reproduced all his boy friends at Oxford-made quite a stir and enjoyed quite a sale among the abovementioned boy friends. His latest volume tells us, in an inimitable style that is all its own, how the author came to the States on one of those numberless British-propaganda invasions to which we were subject during the late war. He then moves to Oxford, where he was President of the Union, and in that capacity entertained Winston Churchill and Horatio Bottomley. He has also visited the Balkans, where he talked to the Queen of Greece and Compton Mackenzie. He seems to have come to a temporary stop in London, where he sees a lot of charming people who write. Every line of the book is excessively British and tiresomely knowing. We are, for instance, assured that neither Rudolph Valentino nor Nicholas Murray Butler is an intellectual giant. As might be expected of one who labors over so trite a matter, we are also informed that Noel Coward and Michael Arlen are splendid fellows, not so much on account of the marvelous stuff they have written, as because they were both condemned to whole weeks of hard work before they at last won through to success. Unless the faintly patronizing air, from which even so well-intentioned a Britisher as Mr. Nichols cannot quite escape, grates on delicate American sensibilities, the book should enjoy a good sale, for it presents many of the flashier figures of the day in the sophisticated luxury to which they are accustomed.

Mape, the World of Illusion, by André Maurois. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926. $2.50.

MAPE is the name that a little girl once made up for that country of the imagination to which most children, some grown-ups, and all artists, now and then repair. Goethe, or rather Werther, lived

in it the whole time, and the first sketch in this book tells of the young poet's ridiculous affair with Fräulein Charlotte Buff. It is related with all the unctuousness of a Frenchman gloating over the failure of a German Don Juan. The second sketch, occupying the second third of the volume, is more in the nature of a story, the point of which is summed up in Oscar Wilde's epigram, 'Life imitates Art much more than Art imitates Life.' It tells of a young man who tries to measure up in real life to one of Balzac's characters. The third Mapian is neither a reader nor a writer, but an actress - the renowned Mrs. Siddons, of whose dramatic ability Mr. Maurois has no very high opinion. Here he is in more of an E. Barrington historical romance mood and less in the Stracheyesque vein of Ariel. The latest Maurois book, not yet translated into Eng'lish, is a novel, and we are inclined to place Mape halfway between the author's biographical writings and his new imaginative work. One can hardly call his war books pure fiction, but here we see further evidences, beyond anything that he has yet revealed, of humor, insight, and above all of imagination, that may foretell still more brilliant triumphs to come.

A History of English Literature. Vol. I: The Middle Ages and the Renascence, by Emile Legouis. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $3.75.

ONE could count on the fingers of one hand the histories of literature that have themselves been first-rate books, but one would certainly have to include and not on one's thumb! - Taine's history of English literature as perhaps the greatest of all. M. Legouis is one of several living Frenchmen who have inherited Taine's interest in that literature, and have gone beyond him, in many cases, in knowledge. Few English scholars know the period covered by this volume better than M. Legouis knows it, and this, together with his detachment as a foreigner, gives him a claim on every student's attention. His book is a little dull, if the truth must be told, and perhaps as much because of the inclusion of historical, bibliographical, and biographical material as for any other reason. But every student of English literature will be interested in his accounts of such first-rate figures as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.