Genteel Lady

FICTION

The Story.* "A Lady Leaves Home--And Goes to Work--She Discovers Mr. Fox--and Anthony Jones--She Sees the Sunlight on the Snow--She Feels the Shadow-- And Hears More about Mamma-- She Sets Sail--To Italy--She Sees Something of London--and Less of Jones--Witches and Devils Torment Her--She Keeps a Good Man Dangling, but--Hymen Vincit Omnia-- "Time Stays; We Go!"

To this remarkable scenario (the chapter headings) very little needs to be added.

The lady is Lanice Bardeen; her home, a New England college town; her "Work," painting and writing under the genteel urban sponsorship of her Cousin Pauline, a sparse-bosomed virgin "intensely moved" by Abolition, parlor feminism and the Great Minds of the day. Lanice has "evinced genius" in articles for Godey's Ladies' Book, and Cousin Pauline burns to enroll her among the Great Minds--profound Mr. Emerson, droll Dr. Holmes, dowdy Mrs. Stowe (Harriet Beecher), majestic Professor Longfellow.

This laudable end is in some measure achieved during Lanice's literary connection with the publishing house of Redcliffe & Fox. But Cousin Pauline's instrumentality ends where it began. The major factors and the quotient--to touch lightly upon fragile matters--are these:

Though only a shy, mouselike toe peeps now and again from beneath Lanice's decorously billowing hoopskirts, within, untrammeled by its stays, waits a supple birch-sliver body. Lanice's mother, a vivid little chestnut-blonde, ran from her professor-husband with a precocious invalid student, to Italy.

Lanice's face is disturbingly like that of an Oriental princess in a miniature on ivory long carried by a demented seafaring relative, one of the Captains Poggy.

Captain Anthony Jones, having lived long in Arabia with an extensive harem, is as innocent of Western scruples as he is full of fiery fascination. His is the poetic aplomb that can borrow from another inamorata's father the jet trotters necessary and fitting for his sleigh ride to seduce Lanice at a snug suburban inn.

Besides gruff Laureate Tennyson and sombre George Eliot, Lanice in England interviews chambermaids and a bed freshly and mockingly impressed by a man's figure, in God-Begot House, Winchester, the morning that Anthony Jones embarks for Arabia.

Communion with shapes of mist and Welsh witches, her familiars by dim inheritance, greatly, but not entirely alleviates the twinges of mockery.

Her permanent peace rests with Sears Ripley, a devoted, sensitive widower, who brings it to pass by being not only patient and understanding but sufficiently muscular to carry her up to bed when, heavy with their first child, she is on the point of wishing she were a mooncalf again instead of a daughter and mother of her persistent species.

The Significance. Need anything further be said to suggest that there has now been published a charming, witty and philosophical comedy of manners in the full regalia, atmosphere and personnel of Boston, 1850, and in the full flood of life anywhere, at any time? If so, let a specimen of the descriptive prose be here entered: "The March wind staggered about the Concord house, striking at doors, shaking shutters. By its sound you knew that it smelt of melting earth and sticky buds. Inside was a dingy, not unpleasant taint of coke burning in the Franklin grate, and a lingering fragrance of dinner . . . ticking clocks, the reptilian hiss of fire, and without, the scampering wind. . . ."

The Author was born to her subject, the daughter of a Worcester, Mass., judge. Like Novelist Anne Parrish (The Perennial Bachelor), she thumbed Godey Books in her nursery. She traveled in Europe and roamed as far as the University of Wisconsin for her education. During the War she farmeretted in Virginia. But Boston reclaimed her as a literary lady in the Houghton, Mifflin Co., where warm friends now thank fortune that her maiden novel is no hail-and-farewell. She married Albert Hoskins of Philadelphia last January, but with no Lancian translation of hymen vincit omnia. On the contrary, Husband Hoskins will set her free for the literary career that she has, by this gay token, so successfully begun.

Philippassions

HEAT--Isa Glenn--Knopf ($2.50). This hot jungle of a book contains an innocent West Pointer, a brainy girl from the States and a Dolores whose scented mantilla appears at first to be the real Castilian thing. The scene is perfumed Manila, "charged with alien, bewildering passions" (cf. jacket). The West Pointer is not inflamed by the virtue of his countrywoman's doctrine of drainage and spelling for the natives, but Dolores, an honest-to-goodness Spanish senorita, and in trouble--well, that is different. When the clay feet of Dolores peep from beneath her wicked skirts, the West Pointer in due form "goes native," rather shockingly.

NON-FICTION

Russell's Pedagogy

EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE-- Bertrand Russell--Boni, Liveright ($2.50). This is a book for which a thoughtful public's appetite has been sharply whetted. When Mr. Russell, Britain's celebrated philosopher and mathematician, entered the field of psychology, it became apparent that he is no idle perfectionist but a thinker who refuses to shirk the humanistic implications of his theories. "What will he have to say about education?" was the question, underscored by the arrival of the Russells' two children.

The answer is a painstaking book in three parts, the first part being definitive of a Russellian pedagogy, the second "Education of Character" (from one-year-old to adolescence), the third "Intellectual Education" (nursery, school and university).

Parts II and III contain specific suggestions for rearing individualistic children possessed of the four qualities set forth as desirable in Part I--Vitality, Courage, Sensitiveness and Intelligence. It is shown that virtue does not depend upon the will, and that the driving force of good teaching is and must remain the child's desire to learn; that, to the good teacher, society's units are more immediately important than society. With a calm didacticism not unbecoming in a man of Mr. Russell's eminence, examples of traditional teachings-- especially in history and the Bible --are exposed as subversive of accurate moral judgment. The Russell children are constantly cited for evidence in chapters on Fear, Truthfulness, Punishment and Affection, in which last Mr. Russell pares fat slices of exaggeration from the Freudian doctrines on parent-and-child love. The outline for Sexual Education is similarly sane, its prominent point being that this instruction should be given, without a catch in the voice or undue solemnity, before puberty, when the subject becomes "so electric that a boy or girl cannot listen in a scientific spirit."

The general principles laid down for intellectual training come with particular force from a writer whose thinking cap has the earth's circumference and civilization's altitude. His considerations embrace systems and writers from China to Dayton, Tenn., and from Aristotle to Midwestern professors. A prime tenet is this: "It is a bad thing for intelligence, and ultimately for character, to let instruction be influenced by moral considerations." Knowledge is regarded from the utilitarian point of view, but utility is broadly conceived : "I should allow a large place to pure curiosity."

Inevitably, numerous undisputed points are labored; inevitably the conclusion is a cry for the millennium. But that is because Bertrand Russell thinks and says things for himself, whether others have preceded him or not. The Hon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, F.R.S., son of the late Viscount Amberley and heir presumptive to Earl Russell, was a fellow and lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he had taken a first class in both the mathematical tripos and moral sciences), until his outspoken "conscientious" pacifism was rebuked by the Government to the extent of a -L-100 fine. Cambridge then dismissed him. His reputation and forte are in mathematical philosophy. He has studied Bolshevism on its native tundra. Aged 54, a most mellow person, he is one of the few living writers considered sufficiently eminent by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for inclusion in their tomes. In 1894 he married Alys, daughter of R. Pearsall Smith of Philadelphia, who divorced him in 1921, leaving him free to marry Dora Winifred Black in the same year. The two children are both Dora Russell's.

Misfiring Maurois

MAPE, THE WORLD OF ILLUSION-- Andre Maurois--Appleton ($2.50). Enchanting as the world of illusion may be, it becomes tedious when created or interpreted by colorless characters. The author of Ariel (that rare book) has here expended his remarkable power of lucid biographical romancing upon two fruitless subjects out of the three chosen. The power remains admirable, but the reading palls. The young Goethe's windy sentimentality for Charlotte Buff is shown translating itself into that sweet and sticky opus, The Sorrows of the Young Werther. Other chapters demonstrate the dull phenomenon of Mrs. Siddons, a British beauty with the spirit of a bourgeois curate, rising to histrionic heights on emotional wings supplied by the death of her asthmatic daughter--shallow and caddish Painter Thomas Lawrence being lugged in to emphasize the inferiority of the Siddons-Kemble strain. The one study that comes off concerns a brilliant young French historian who mastered life, and then frittered it away, by emulating a character in Balzac--a rebuffed suitor who paused on the threshold, returned to the assault.

The Yale Unit

THE FIRST YALE UNIT: A STORY OF NAVAL AVIATION (1916-19)-- Ralph D. Paine*--Riverside Press. During the preparedness summer of 1916, a Sophomore at Yale named Trubee Davison convinced his parents that naval aviation needed more preparation than the Government was providing. He rented flying-boats, invited eight friends to spend the summer with him--and the first "Yale Unit" was organized.

In 1917, two weeks before war was declared, the "Unit," expanded to 29 members, was "ordered" from college by the Navy Department to its self-appointed training school, with seaplanes and mechanics provided by private subscription. There were no uniforms, no drills, no salutes. There were the "Lieut," the naval officer in charge; the "Colonel," combination chaperon and supply officer, a civilian; except for these two, everybody called everybody by his first name. The team work of a football field took the place of military discipline; but the boys flew, repaired, overhauled and flew again their few machines, until by September there were 28 trained flyers ready for war. Then Trubee Davison, their leader, crashed and broke his back, but from his bed, and later from his wheel chair, he still held the "Unit" spirit together, even when the members scattered to distant duties.

They were sent to England, to France, to Italy, to South America, to Washington, to the U. S. training stations. The "Unit" furnished commanding officers for three air stations; also the nucleus of the Northern Bombing Group. Submarines were bombed, airplanes shot down by "Unit" members; Dave Ingalls became naval ace, with four planes and a balloon to his credit; Di Gates, Commander of an air-station, was recommended for the Congressional medal of honor for heroism. Three* of the "Unit" were killed--two in action. Destroyers were named for these two. Wherever there was naval aviation, there was a "Yale Unit" man. Admiral Sims said: "The great aircraft force which was ultimately assembled in Europe had its beginning in a small group of undergraduates at Yale University."

The history of the "Yale Unit" is not an official history. The "Yale Unit" was not an official title. Author Paine has avoided the dryness of an official chronology and the sloppiness of a "tribute." In the first volume he tells the story of the training days of the "Unit," and in the second volume he follows the fortunes of the individual members after they separated for active service. The books are intensely personal, abounding in photographs and parts of letters, but the author has skilfully woven in the historical background. The two volumes thus constitute a valuable history of naval aviation in the Great War, an invaluable human document of the reaction of healthy young college men to the stimulus of high adventure.

ALERT READERS

--are not permitting the season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as:

Brilliant

The Mauve Decade--Thomas Beer ($3). The pink people of 1890-1900 trying to be purple.

Midas, or the United States and the Future--C. H. Bretherton ($1). "All North America above Mexico under one flag," etc. etc.

Education and the Good Life --Bertrand Russell ($2.50). Reviewed in this issue.

The Cabala--Thornton Niven Wilder ($2.50). A filigree myth from modern Rome.

Rich Writing

Hangman's House-- Donn Byrne ($2.50). A rich romance for Irishmen and their friends.

The Magnificent Idler--Cameron Rogers ($2.50). A simple, fluent, warm biography of Walt Whitman.

Lolly Willowes--Sylvia Townsend Warner ($2). Lady most delicately into witch.

The Splendid Shilling--Idwal Jones ($2). A Welsh gypsy boy hunting fortune and heartsease in the California goldfields.

O Genteel Lady! -- Esther Forbes ($2). Reviewed in this issue.

The facilities of TIME'S book department are at its readers' disposal. To order the above, or any other books, inclose a check or cash with a note to the Book Editor making plain to whom you wish your purchases sent.

-- O GENTEEL LADY ! -- Esther Forbes -- Houghton, Mifflin ($2).^

*Deceased. Yale '94. he was war-correspondent for the Philadelphia Press in Cuba and China; later served the New York Herald and Outing. In his study at Durham, N. H., he penned many a boys book and sea story. *Albert Dillon Sturtevant, Curtis Seaman Read, Kenneth MacLeish.