Revolution

THE NEWER SPIRIT-V. F. Calverton -Boni, Liveright ($2.50). This author applies to contemporary letters a new theory of criticism. The approach is sociological, the method scientific. "Revolutions in aesthetics," he says, "are due to revolutions in ideas, but every revolution in ideas is due to a revolution in the social structure." It was the invention of the steam-engine that made people interested in the tragedies of factory girls, the amours of merchants, when only those of monarchs had before satisfied them. His attack is directed chiefly against those critics who subscribe to Stuart P. Sherman's affecting doctrine that "beauty has a heart full of service." Analysis serves, he says. He hails Sherwood Anderson, "the voice of the proletariat," denounces H. L. Mencken, "vaudeville critic," assails "the Great Man illusion," asserts that geniuses can be made in the laboratory by sensitizing the perceptions of infants. Critic Calverton's own contribution to aesthetics is a style as rigid as a schoolmaster's ferule.