NON-FICTION

Doctor to Platitudes

ADVENTURES ON THE BORDERLAND OF ETHICS--Richard C. Cabot, M. D. --Harper ($2). Professor Cabot of Social Ethics at Harvard, as sincere a servant as ever stood before the Lord and his fellows, some years ago gave a thoughtful public something to chew on in What Men Live By (1914). He now proposes the study of Ethics (a word more inclusive and less suspect than Morals) by toilers in various vine-yards--Theology, Medicine, Business, Education, Social Work.

His suggestion for theological seminaries is this: let young gospelers spend a year learning, as young medics learn, in hospitals, asylums and almshouses, to practice the application of their beliefs upon the sick and troubled.* For medical schools: courses in professional ethics. Besides the lessons learned from the silent examples of fine doctors, let there be instruction in the inconsistencies of the Hippocratic oath, in the unwritten laws on fees, contract practice, birth control, state medicine, abortion, advertising, competition.

Business is no uncharted field for Dr. Cabot. It was he who encouraged Sidney Howard (now playwright) to work up and write The Labor Spy; he who helped institute the case system at Dean Donham's Harvard School of Business Administration. He recommends: enforcement of industrial codes by voluntary arbitration boards, the codes to embody the "maximum ethics" of Christianity.

In education Dr. Cabot has the experience of his wife, Ella Lyman Cabot, to draw upon as well as his own. He thinks Ethics can be taught as well as "taught about." He regards new instruction in morality at South Dakota schools as "a fine beginning." He describes Boston's efforts, which include Bible reading, singing of hymns and patriotic songs, scout groups, badges and slogans--and believes in them all. His prime recommendation, however, is short daily periods for discussing Ethics by the case system. He bravely admits that he cannot hold with "the pedagogic fashion of our time . . . against the attempt to influence anybody in any direction." In short he believes, as his final paper on Ethics for social workers shows, in human amelioration under prevailing political, social and economic systems. He is one whose greatest pleasure, short of playing in a stringed quartet, lies in discovering, exhibiting and nourishing warm flesh on the grey bones of platitudes.

--Some seminaries already require this.

Prodigious Chit

THE SINGING CROW--Nathalia Crane--A. & C. Boni ($2). A dreadful eventuality has not yet come to pass--the growing up of Miss Nathalia Crane. Her songs are still those of a little Brooklyn girl for whom hydrants must be gnomes and subway trains coffin worms. Nor has anyone yet dismally and satisfactorily explained the marvelous process by which a slender chit--she is only 13 now-- became possessed of the divine afflatus, plus a vocabulary that would give nightmares to a lexicographer.

The title poem of her new volume is a narrative, in couplets of prodigious tune and cacophony, of a crow whose beak was shot away by an Indian arrow. So marvelously could he then sing that universal applause shook the marshlands. The scrub oaks roared, the cattails clicked, The bumblebees lay down and kicked. A council of crows sat to hear the amazing music and departed mystified, all but a nunlike raven, who found the beakless Caruso and adored him.

They destiny drew in together, two in jet, A dealing in silhouette -- and planned their future life, including nests, eggs -- And midget ravens with requests.

Newspaper headlines, ferryboat rides, a visit to her photographer's studio, the radio craze, furnish young Miss Crane with themes for her quaint, circumloquacious cadenzas. She puts pinions on tortoises and sapphires in the eyes of moles. She writes a "Ballad of Valley Forge," and a fine ballad it is, to the tune of "The Eagles They Fly High in Mobile, in Mobile" (or "Drink Her Down"). And sometimes she contemplates the purely inane, just for fun-- The ritual and the microtome

Went down to the primal pit; They sat on the edge and nobbled there Over the pristine It.

Teasdale

DARK OF THE MOON--Sara Teas-dale--Macmillan ($1.50). The sea, it is said, is the great civilizer. Sara Teasdale (Mrs. Ernst B. Filsinger) of St. Louis, Mo., has walked and lain long beside it, learning over and over the sea's "immemorial yearning" until it has become her own. Rest from restless beauty is her desire. Her best poems are fragile meshes of silence and loneliness, written on beaches, cliffs and sea-hills, at the days rare moments and the year's empty seasons. Then, she says, I shall gather myself into myself again.